Quotes by Women Activists

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.

For far too many, pregnancy and birth is still something that happens to them rather than something they set out consciously and joyfully to do themselves

Sheila Kitzinger

On being a black woman:

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

When the blood sugar is extremely low, the resulting irritability, nervous tension, and mental depression are such that a person can easily go berserk.... Add a few guns, gas jets, or razor blades, and you have the stuff murders and suicides are made of. The American diet has become dangerous in many more ways than one.

It cost Andrei Dmitrievich 10 months of complete isolation and two hunger strikes over two months, which had a terrible effect on his health. The effects are still felt to this day.

Friends are an indispensable part of a meaningful life. They are the ones who share our burdens and multiply our blessings. A true friend sticks by us in our joys and sorrows. In good times and bad, we need friends who will pray for us, listen to us, and lend a comforting hand and an understanding ear when needed.

The fact is, people work hard and rely on Food Stamps—or SNAP Program—to be able to feed their families. When they work full-time they still live in poverty. That's wrong in our nation. Students who are losing hope because of the difficulty of finding jobs in this tough economy. What we need to do, what is best for America, is to raise wages, create jobs, and then we will move forward. Hard-working people are trying their best, but those who hold on to capital are not sharing the wealth, and there is the problem.

Simone Campbell

The task of organizing human happiness needs the active cooperation of man and woman: it cannot be relegated to one half of the world.

Added to the difficulty of learning to speak the language was the greater difficulty of finding terms to express the ideas which the missionary had come to convey... in many languages the most precious truths of Christianity had to force their way by bending stubborn words to new ideas, and filling old terms with new content.

Helen Barrett Montgomery

How ridiculous we often are in our negations, our strutting self importance, our penchant for making labels and sticking them on people. As though labelling a person disposed of him!

We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In this exquisitely connected world, it's never a question of 'critical mass.' It's always about critical connections.

Grace Lee Boggs

We will join hands with you as women of this country.... We will kneel-in, we will sit-in until we can eat at any counter in the United States. We will walk until we are free, until we can walk to any school and take our children to any school in the United States. And we will sit-in, and we will kneel-in, and we will lie-in if necessary until every Negro in America can vote.

Daisy Bates (activist)

In ancient Rome, the gladiators went into the arena with these words on their lips: let me win, but if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt. Today, all of you young athletes are in the arena. Many of you will win. But even more important, I know you will be brave and bring credit to your parents and to your country. Let us begin the Olympics, thank you.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver

The gift of water, air, soap, and time allows us to heal and relieve our psyche and soul.

We need to continue to educate our elected officials and candidates for office on who we are, what we need and why they should stand in solidarity with us.

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

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.

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

Jessica Mathews

When I think of my past life, and the bitter trials I have endured, I can scarcely believe I live, and yet I do; and, with the help of Him who notes the sparrow's fall, I mean to fight for my down-trodden race while life lasts.

Sarah Winnemucca

Nowhere have women been more excluded from decision-making than in the military and foreign affairs. When it comes to the military and questions of nuclear disarmament, the gender gap becomes the gender gulf.

Whatever devotion to something else there was in him had been made impure by church taken as a weekly, dutiful thing.

The legacy of American socialism is our blighted inner cities, dysfunctional inner city school and broken black families.

Birth is not only about making babies. Birth is about making mothers,

Barbara Katz Rothman

There are times when sympathy is as necessary as the air we breathe.

Rose Pastor Stokes

Can one regard a fellow creature as a property item, an investment, a piece of meat, an 'it,' without degenerating into cruelty towards that creature?

Karen Davis (activist)