Women's History Month Quotations
- "The Rubicons which women must cross, the sex barriers which they must breach, are ultimately those that exist in their own minds."
-- Freda Adler - "If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning."
-- Catherine Aird - "Now we are expected to be as wise as men who have had generations of all the help there is, and we scarcely anything."
-- Louisa May Alcott - "Women must understand that simply attacking or hating men is just another form of disempowerment. A woman has to realize that when she makes a man crawl it doesn't give her power."
-- Tori Amos - "I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass."
-- Maya Angelou - "I'm a woman / Phenomenally / Phenomenal woman, / That's me."
-- Maya Angelou - "Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory. "
-- Susan B. Anthony - "The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? "
-- Susan B. Anthony - "Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less."
-- Susan B. Anthony & Elizabeth Cady Stanton (motto of The Revolution newspaper) - "Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel."
-- Bella Abzug - "I married beneath me. All women do."
-- Lady Nancy Astor - "Women love the lie that saves their pride, but never an unflattering truth."
-- Gertrude Atherton - "I've never had a humble opinion. If you've got an opinion, why be humble about it?"
-- Joan Baez - "It's the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never have the time."
-- Tallulah Bankhead - "Sentences that begin with "all women" are never, never true."
-- Margaret Culkin Banning - "One is not born a woman, one becomes one. "
-- Simone de Beauvoir - "It is really asking too much of a woman to expect her to bring up her husband and her children too?"
-- Lillian Bell - "In every girl is a goddess. "
-- Francesca Lia Block - "Women are never what they seem to be. There is the woman you see and there is the woman who is hidden. Buy the gift for the woman who is hidden. "
-- Erma Bombeck - "My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint."
-- Erma Bombeck - "Never lend your car to anyone whom you have given birth."
-- Erma Bombeck - "When women are depressed they either eat or go shopping. Men invade another country."
-- Elayne Boosler - "I'm just a person trapped inside a woman's body."
-- Elayne Boosler - "Let Greeks be Greeks, and women what they are. "
-- Anne Bradstreet - "Conventionality is not morality."
-- Charlotte Brontë - "Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere."
-- Helen Gurley Brown - "Consider the "new" woman. She's trying to be Pollyanna Borgia, clearly a conflict of interest. She's supposed to be a ruthless winner at work and a bundle of nurturing sweetness at home."
-- Rita Mae Brown - "Lead me not into temptation, I can find the way myself."
-- Rita Mae Brown - "She had always been too wise to tell him all she thought and felt, knowing by some intuition of her own womanhood that no man wants to know everything of any woman. "
-- Pearl S. Buck - "It certainly must have been a relief for women of the country to realize that one could be a woman and a lady and yet be thoroughly political. "
-- Pearl S. Buck - "The basic discovery about any people…is the discovery of the relationship between its men and women."
-- Pearl S. Buck - "There is more difference within the sexes than between them."
-- Ivy Compton-Burnett
October 1957 (Vogue Cover) - "The trouble with some women is that they get all excited about nothing ~ and then marry him. "
-- Cher - "In the end antiblack, antifemale, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing - antihumanism."
-- Shirley Chisholm - "Women are adaptable to what the man presents to her. If he presents affection she presents affection. If he presents anger then that is what she gives back. And if he present stupidity, then she adapts to the fact that she has to do the thinking for the both of them."
-- Tina Cleland - "I never expect men to give us liberty. No, women, we are not worth it until we take it."
-- Voltairine de Cleyre - "The challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible. "
-- Hillary Rodham Clinton - "I never married because there was no need. I have three pets at home which answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog which growls every morning, a parrot which swears all afternoon and a cat that comes home late at night."
-- Marie Corelli - "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood."
-- Marie Curie - "Old age ain't no place for sissies."
-- Bette Davis - "Women never have young minds. They are born three thousand years old."
-- Shelagh Delaney - "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry."
-- Emily Dickinson - "My idea of feminism is self-determination, and it's very open-ended: every woman has the right to become herself, and do whatever she needs to do."
-- Ani DiFranco - "Women want men, careers, money, children, friends, luxury, comfort, independence, freedom, respect, love, and three dollar pantyhose that won't run."
-- Phyllis Diller - "There is space within sisterhood for likeness and difference, for the subtle differences that challenge and delight; there is space for disappointment--and surprise. "
-- Christine Downing - "Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences. "
-- Isadora Duncan - "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle."
-- Irina Dunn - "Adventure is worthwhile. "
-- Amelia Earhart - "If men can run the world, why can't they stop wearing neckties? How intelligent is it to start the day by tying a little noose around your neck?"
-- Linda Ellerbee - "There is a hidden fear that somehow, if they are only given a chance, women will suddenly do as they have been done by."
-- Eva Figes - "Instant gratification takes too long."
-- Carrie Fisher - "Behind every successful woman...... is a basket of dirty laundry."
-- Sally Forth - "Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from."
-- Jodie Foster - "Women have broken through the glass ceiling, and they're now more and more in the power seats. "
-- Aretha Franklin, Billboard, 9/03 - "When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman. "
-- Betty Friedan - "Nature provides exceptions to every rule."
-- Margaret Fuller - "I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man I keep his house."
-- Zsa Zsa Gabor - "Normal is in the eye of the beholder."
-- Whoopi Goldberg - "Women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open."
-- Emma Goldman - "The thing women must do to rise to power is to redefine their femininity. Once, power was considered a masculine attribute. In fact, power has no sex. "
-- Katharine Graham - "If high heels were so wonderful, men would be wearing them."
-- Sue Grafton - "What happened to the good old days of "Woman as passive recipient?" What happened to being courted? What happened to sitting back under a parasol and granting someone a chance to try to win us over? "
-- Cathy Guisewite - "Not only is life a bitch, but it is always having puppies."
-- Adrienne Gusoff - "Soon they'll be telling you you can't be Batman, Shakespeare, President, or God. Little fat baby, going on schoolgirl, you can be anyone, but it won't be easy."
-- Marilyn Hacker - "A man's got to do what a man's got to do. A woman must do what he can't."
-- Rhonda Hansome - "To be meek, patient, tactful, modest, honorable, brave, is not to be either manly or womanly; it is to be humane."
-- Jane Harrison - "The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy."
-- Helen Hayes (at 73) - "The only jobs for which no man is qualified are human incubator and wet nurse. Likewise, the only job for which no women is or can be qualified is sperm donor."
-- Wilma Scott Heide - "Since when do we have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?"
-- Lillian Hellman - "I find a woman's point of view much grander and finer than a man's. "
-- Katharine Hepburn - "Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then."
-- Katharine Hepburn - "If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun."
-- Katharine Hepburn - "If you are going to generalize about women, you'll find yourself up to here in exceptions."
-- Dolores Hitchens - "We haven't come a long way, we've come a short way. If we hadn't come a short way, no one would be calling us 'baby.'"
-- Elizabeth Janeway - "Had I been a man, I might have explored the Poles or climbed Mount Everest, but as it was, my spirit found outlet in the air."
-- Amy Johnson - "You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy."
-- Erica Jong - "Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got. "
-- Janis Joplin
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