Quotes by Women Activists

The abstract categories of imperialism are neither exempt from the need of a foundation, nor will the fact that they are coextensive with ordinary discourse provide them with the needed foundation.

Silvia Federici

Autonomy is the capacity to act on principles that are one's own and one will exercise this capacity by means of a process of rational reflection on these principles. Autonomy is thought to be necessary for attributing political responsibility.

The counters stepped up; the pen started its upward rise. It showed no tendency to level off. A chain reaction was taking place in the pile. In the back of everyone's mind was one avoidable question, "When do we become scared?"

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)

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

I'm convinced nonviolence can be successful in working for positive change in our relations with other countries right now.

Politics is not just about voting one day every four years. Politics is the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the road we walk on.

Unita Blackwell

I have never heard of a tradition among Jews that encourages us to support each others' differences. Quite the contrary. What I've always been taught is that Jews forever see each other as bitter enemies whose differences are irreconcilable.

I have all the guns and all the money. I can withstand challenge from without and from within.

If the government had the right to free us she had a right to make some provision for us and since she did not make it soon after Emancipation she ought to make it now.

Slavery in America was debasing, but the debasement of the Negro woman was deeper than that of the Negro man. Slavery made her the only woman in all America for whom virtue was not an ornament and a necessity.

Fannie Barrier Williams

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

Brothers and Sisters: Our ancient homeland is spotted today with an array of chemical dumps. Along the Niagara River, dioxin, a particularly deadly substance, threatens the remaining life there and in the waters which flow from there. Forestry departments spray the surviving forests with powerful insecticides to encourage tourism by people seeking a few days or weeks away from the cities where the air hangs heavy with sulphur and carbon oxides.

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

The dioxin story is the story of how science has failed to provide us with answers, how corporations control policymaking and decisions in our society, and how government is silenced.

Please God, try to forgive those people.
Because even if they say those bad things,
They don't know what they're doing.
So You could forgive them,
Just like You did those folks a long time ago,
When they said terrible things about You.

I am a woman that came from the cotton fields of the South. I was promoted from there to the washtub. Then I was promoted to the cook kitchen, and from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations.... Everybody told me I was making a mistake by going into this business, but I know how to grow hair as well as I know how to grow cotton.

Madam C. J. Walker

It's past due. The United States will never be able to pay us all they owe us. They don't have the money. But they'11 owe it.

Queen Mother Moore

Daring to dream what is deepest in our collective longings is what makes us most human and fully alive.

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)

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

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

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

You know that all over the world, people fight for their freedom, fight for their rights. Some battle oppressive governments. Others battle oppressive societies. Which battle do you think is harder?

Manal al-Sharif