women's rights Quotes

“Islamabad was totally different from Swat. It was as different for us as Islamabad is to New York. Shiza introduced us to women who were lawyers and doctors and also activists, which showed us that women could do important jobs yet still keep their culture and traditions. We saw women in the streets without purdah, their heads completely uncovered. I stopped wearing my shawl over my head in some of the meetings, thinking I had become a modern girl.”

“As we crossed the Malakand Pass I saw a young girl selling oranges. She was scratching marks on a piece of paper with a pencil to account for the oranges she had sold, as she could not read or write. I took a photo of her and vowed I would do everything in my power to help educate girls just like her. This was the war I was going to fight.”

“We felt like the Taliban saw us as little dolls to control, telling us what to do and how to dress. I thought if God wanted us to be like that He wouldn’t have made us all different.”

“I am very proud to be a Pashtun, but sometimes I think our code of conduct has a lot to answer for, particularly where the treatment of women is concerned.”

“If I am speaking for my rights, for the rights of the girls, I am not doing anything wrong. It’s my duty to do so.”

“Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.”

“Intellectual freedom depends on material things. Poetry depends on intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. [...] Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry.”

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

“What we do not claim remains invisible. That is why the process of personal transformation — the true work of spiritual growth, whether couched in religious terms or not — is the only antidote to the pernicious effects of society’s backlash against genuine female empowerment.”

“It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.”

“Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance [...] But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out, she was locked up, beaten, and flung about the room.”

“The regime of oppression is almost over; its life force is waning, and only its ghost remains. Don’t tarry too long to mourn its effects; celebrate and rejoice in the new. The past is over. Wipe the dirt off your feet.”

“Well, what I mean is that I shouldn’t mind being a bride at a wedding if I could be one without having a husband. But since a woman can’t show off in that way by herself I shan’t marry—at least yet.”

“...the more of us who understand the game and see through the lie and forge ahead in support of every other woman’s right to a passionate response to life, the more we will hasten the end of our jail term.”

“We don’t know how to be women because we were taught it was not OK to be girls. Our most natural impulses were thwarted and distorted.”

“I hate to be thought men’s property in that way—though possibly I shall be had some day.”

“It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession.”

“And, I think, for those of us who came of age with the women’s movement, there’s always the fear that it’s not real, you’re not really allowed to determine your own life. It may be pulled back at any moment.”

“I believe that I am first and foremost a human being, like you – or anyway, that I must try to become one. I know most people think as you do, Torvald, and I know there’s something of the sort to be found in books. But I’m no longer prepared to accept what people say and what’s written in books. I must think things out for myself, and try to find my own answer.”

“It was a story of white selling black, of black cultures “contaminating” white ones with a single cell in an era when a person with “one drop” of black blood had only recently gained the legal right to marry a white person. It was also the story of cells from an uncredited black woman becoming one of the most important tools in medicine.”

“Even as a professional in an integrated world, I had been the only black woman in enough drawing rooms and boardrooms to have an inkling of the chutzpah it took for an African American woman in a segregated southern workplace to tell her bosses she was sure her calculations would put a man on the Moon.”

“They wore their professional clothes like armor. They wielded their work like weapons, warding off the presumption of inferiority because they were Negro or female.”

“What I wanted was for them to have a grand, sweeping narrative that they deserved, the kind of American history that belongs to the Wright Brothers and the astronauts, to Alexander Hamilton and Martin Luther King Jr. Not told as a separate history, but as part of the story we all know. Not at the margins, but at the very center, the protagonists of the drama. And not just because they are black, or because they are women, but because they are part of the American epic.”

” We progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table - er, so long as they aren’t conservatives.”

“There is nothing else which better exposes the modern Left’s rank hypocrisy, their disregard for the facts, and their hatred for the West and all it stands for than their attitude to Islam. Every noble principle the Left claims to uphold, from rights for women to gay liberation, even diversity itself, dies on the altar of its sycophantic defense of Islam.”

“Jane Austen did not become one of the most renowned authors in the English language by having her characters dye their armpit hair and join a lesbian commune.”

“We need to understand that there is no formula for how women should lead their lives. That is why we must respect the choices that each woman makes for herself and her family. Every woman deserves the chance to realize her God-given potential.”

“Women, on the other hand, had to wield their intellects like a scythe, hacking away against the stubborn underbrush of low expectations.”

“Katherine Johnson knew: once you took the first step, anything was possible.”

“Their path to advancement might look less like a straight line and more like some of the pressure distributions and orbits they plotted, but they were determined to take a seat at the table.”

“Let woman share the rights and she will emulate the virtues of man.”

“An actress,” Tom sneers, “What sort of way is that for a woman to live, without a solid home, husband, children? Running about like she’s her own lord and master. She’ll certainly never be accepted in society as a proper lady.”

“Sense will always preponderate; and if women be not, in general, brought more on a level with men, some superiour women, like the Greek courtezans, will assemble the men of abilities around them, and draw from their families many citizens, who would have stayed at home had their wives more sense.”

“It is time to effect a revolution in female manners.”

“I am fully persuaded that we should hear of none of these infantine airs, if girls were allowed to take sufficient exercise, and not confined in close rooms till their muscles are relaxed, and their powers of digestion destroyed.”

“This is the very point I aim at. I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.”

“Women, I allow, may have different duties to fulfil; but they are human duties, and the principles that should regulate the discharge of them, I sturdily maintain, must be the same.”

“Besides, how should a woman void of reflection be capable of educating her children?”

“For Lemoni there would be no freedom until widowhood, which was precisely the time when the community would turn against her, as though she had no right to outlive a husband, as though he had died only because of his wife’s negligence.”

“You must allow Pelagia to become a doctor. She is not only my daughter. She is, since I have no son, the nearest to a son that I have fathered.”

“If there was such a thing as a doctor who was also a woman. She toyed with the idea, and then went to look for a paintbrush, as though this action could cancel the uncomfortable sensation of having been born into the wrong world.”

“She must have a son’s prerogatives, because she will continue my life when I am gone. I have not brought her up to be a domestic slave, for the simple reason that such company would have been tedious in the absence of a son.”

Calonice: “And you, Lysistrata. What’s bothering you? Don’t frown, child. Knitted brows don’t become you.” Lysistrata: “But my heart’s on fire, Calonice, and I’m terribly annoyed about us women. You know, according to the men we’re capable of any sort of mischief—” Calonice: “And so we surely are!” Lysistrata: “But when they’re told to meet us here to discuss a matter of no trifling importance, they sleep in and don’t show up.”

Lysistrata: “But if the women gather together here—the Boeotian women, the Peloponnesian women, and ourselves—together we’ll be able to rescue Greece.” Calonice: “But what can mere women do that’s intelligent or illustrious? We sit around the house looking pretty, wearing saffron dresses, and make-up, and Cimberic gowns, and pleasure-boat slippers.” Lysistrata: “Exactly! That’s exactly what I think will rescue Greece: our fancy little dresses, our perfumes and our slippers, our rouge and our see-through underwear!”

Lysistrata: “Well, what did you expect? Did you think you were going up against a bunch of slave girls? Or did you think women lack gall?” Magistrate: “Oh yes, they’ve got plenty of that, provided there’s a wine bar nearby.”

Women’s Leader: “I’ll rip out your lungs and your guts with my fangs.” Men’s Leader: “No poet’s wiser than Euripides: as he says, no beast exists so shameless as womankind!”

Calonice: “But don’t you think the men will quickly launch a concerted counterattack on us?” Lysistrata: “I’m not worried about them. They can’t come against us with enough threats or fire to get these gates open, except on the terms we’ve agreed on.” Calonice: “No they can’t, so help me Aphrodite! Otherwise we women wouldn’t deserve to be called rascals you can’t win a fight with!

“Well, sir, you shouldn’t lift your hand against your neighbors just anytime you feel like it. If you do, you’re going to end up with a black eye. You see, I’d rather be sitting modestly at home like a maiden, bothering no one here, stirring not a single blade of grass. But if anyone annoys me and rifles my nest, they’ll find a wasp inside.”

“In China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born.”