Quotes by Women Activists

Risking one's life can be strangely liberating. That's what the sea counsels me.

I am not a morose person, but I would rather not be here. I don't have any reverence for life, only for the entities themselves. I would rather see a blank space where I am. This will sound like fruitcake stuff again but at least I wouldn't be harming anything

I am an uncompromising pacifist.... I have no sense of nationalism, only a cosmic consciousness of belonging to the human family.

Rosika Schwimmer

Bangladesh is a majority Muslim country, with a significant, if shrinking Hindu minority—about 25-30% at the time of Partition in 1947, and less than 9% in 2003. The textbooks in Bangladesh are not based on an anti-Indian bias as are state sponsored textbooks in Pakistan. The social studies curriculum in Pakistan is premised on creating a national identity that is distinct from India, whereas Bangladeshi textbooks reflect a more pan-South Asian perspective, though Bengal-centric.

Since our leaders are behaving like children, we will have to take the responsibility they should have taken long ago.

Just so long as all our literature is pervaded with the thought that women are inferior, so long will our sex be held in a low estimate.

Lillie Devereux Blake

The automobile reaches to the heart of the American self-image in the way the horse once did in the West.

Jessica Mathews

I appeal: Learn with me the lessons of history and of grace, so my children will not be afraid to say the word 'AIDS' when I am gone. Then, their children and yours may not need to whisper it at all.

Mary Fisher (activist)

The only thing that's really worthwhile is change. It's coming.

Septima Poinsette Clark

We did freak out the honkies. We were feared throughout the Dakotas. I could never figure out why this should have been so. We were always the victims. We never maimed or killed. It was we who died or got crippled.

Mary Brave Bird

Marriages might be made in Heaven, but too often they are consummated right here on earth.

Alice Dunbar Nelson

Perhaps some day men will raise a tablet reading in letters of gold: 'All honor to women, the first disenfranchised class in history who, unaided by any political party, won enfranchisement by its own effort... and achieved the victory without the shedding of a drop of human blood. All honor to women of the world!

Harriot Stanton Blatch

[Describes visiting a factory-farm shed where she saw a large male boar,] his huge head hanging low towards the barren floor. As I came level with him he raised his head and dragged himself slowly towards me on lame legs. With deliberation he looked straight at me, staring directly into my eyes. It seemed to me that I saw in those sad, intelligent, penetrating eyes a plea, a question to which I had no answer: "Why are you doing this to me?"

Juliet Gellatley

But the homosexual and abortion lobbies are evil twins with the same agenda. Both want the freedom to commit illicit sex without physical or moral consequences.

On being a black woman:

You learn not to depend on anything.... You get into a habit of surviving.

Not all wars have casualties.... Some struggles between old and new ideas, some battles between ways of seeing have only victors. Not all dying is the physical self.

Toni Cade Bambara

Men's sexuality is mean and violent, and men so powerful that they can reach WITHIN women to fvck/construct us from the inside out. Satan-like, men possess women, making their wicked fantasies and desires women's own. A woman who has sex with a man, therefore, does so against her will, even if she does not feel forced.

There are some things, once they are done, that we can never question, because if we did, we wouldn't be able to go on. And we have to go on, every single day.

Caragh M. O'Brien

When we perpetually allow the practice of genocide and holocaust and consent to the denial of such actions to linger for decades as in the case of the Assyrian, Armenian and Pontic Greek Genocides, we are in essence consenting to denial as a compromise. Denial is not compromise.

Rosie Malek-Yonan

Priscilla and I, and nine others, had been charged with
'disturbing the peace,' among other charges, because we tried to order food at Woolworth. If not for segregation, and the fact that we were all Negroes, we would have been served without incident. At our trial on March 17, 1960,
Judge John Rudd ruled that our lawyers should
'get off that race question.'

Patricia Stephens Due

I don't feel like I can change the world. I don't even try. I only want to change this small life that I see standing in front of me, which is suffering.

I'd rather be a born-once hog than a born-again Christian any day...

In the aftermath of Black Is Beautiful, I began to feel black and blue.

Let's forget about the mythical Jesus and look for encouragement, solace and inspiration from real women... Two thousand years of patriarchal rule under the shadow of the cross ought to be enough to turn women toward the feminist 'salvation' of this world

Annie Laurie Gaylor

My job here today, our job, is to tell you the one thing you can count on. The one thing I can guarantee you can expect in life is that you will experience the thoroughly unexpected.