Quotations for Women's History Month
- "Who ever thought up the word "Mammogram"? Every time I hear it, I think I'm supposed to put my breast in an envelope and send it to someone."
-- Jan King - "Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry and you cry with your girlfriends."
-- Laurie Kuslansky - "Thirty-five is when you finally get your head together and your body starts falling apart."
-- Caryn Leschen - "Think wrongly if you please, but in all cases think for yourself."
-- Doris Lessing - "I believe that what woman resents is not so much giving herself in pieces as giving herself purposelessly. "
-- Ann Morrow Lindbergh - "When will it no longer be necessary to attach special weight to the word "woman" and raise it specially?"
-- Ding Ling - "I'm all for women myself. I believe they're the comin' man."
-- Julie M. Lippmann - "If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me."
-- Alice Roosevelt Longworth - "If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive."
-- Audre Lorde - "Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, 'She doesn't have what it takes.' They will say, 'Women don't have what it takes.'"
-- Clare Boothe Luce - "Women are repeatedly accused of taking things personally. I cannot see any other honest way of taking them."
-- Marya Mannes - "A woman is the full circle. Within her is the power to create, nurture, and transform. A woman knows that nothing can come to fruition without light. Let us call upon woman's voice and woman's heart to guide us in this age of planetary transformation. "
-- Diane Mariechild - "Mother, can't you see I've got to live my life the way I feel is right for me, might not be right for you, but it's right for me."
-- Sarah McLachlan, "Elsewhere" - "I never know how much of what I say is true."
-- Bette Midler - "There's a little bit of hooker in every woman. A little bit of hooker and a little bit of God."
-- Sarah Miles - "Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music."
-- Angela Monet - "Women are not inherently passive or peaceful. We're not inherently anything but human."
-- Robin Morgan - "I want to walk through life instead of being dragged through it."
-- Alanis Morissette - "We'll love you just the way you are if you're perfect."
-- Alanis Morissette, "Perfect" - "If you have not the experience, ask. There is no shame in asking, but do not pretend you know when you don't. "
-- Mother Teresa of Calcutta - "I think being a woman is like being Irish…Everyone says you're important and nice but you take second place all the same."
-- Iris Murdoch - "Women have to be the biggest champions in the world of other women's choices. "
-- Dee Dee Myers - "You know, I think I could have the cure to AIDS or cancer in my head, but that brain cell is filled instead with old dialogue from the Brady Bunch."
-- Mary Newton - "Don't tolerate me as different. Accept me as part of the spectrum of normalcy."
-- Ann Northrop - "Behind every successful woman...is a substantial amount of coffee."
-- Stephanie Piro - "Any woman who has a career and a family automatically develops something in the way of two personalities, like two sides of a dollar bill, each different in design…Her problem is to keep one from draining the life from the other."
-- Ivy Baker Priest - "I feel there is something unexplored about a woman that only a woman can explore. "
-- Georgia O'Keeffe - "I am a woman above everything else. "
-- Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis - "I have a woman inside my soul. "
-- Yoko Ono - "Somewhere in Egypt I'm worth 4 camels A strong healthy girl like me On 42nd Street it's a quarter to look But the women outside are free"
-- Joan Osborne, "4 Camels" - "Behind every successful man is a surprised woman."
-- Maryon Pearson - "It has been women who have breathed gentleness and care into the hard progress of mankind. "
-- Queen Elizabeth II - "I base most of my fashion sense on what doesn't itch."
-- Gilda Radner - "I am a woman, hear me roar / In numbers too big to ignore, / And I know too much / To go back and pretend."
-- Helen Reddy - "Life on the planet is born of woman. "
-- Adrienne Rich - "I'd rather taste blood, yours, or mine, flowing from a sudden slash, than cut all day with blunt scissors on dotted lines like the teacher told."
-- Adrienne Rich, "On Edges" - "There is not one female comedian who was beautiful as a little girl."
-- Joan Rivers - "I think that business practices would improve immeasurably if they were guided by "feminine" pinciples, qualities like love, care, and intuition. "
-- Anita Roddick - "Women want to be free to choose from the same range of options that men take for granted. In our quest for equal pay, equal access to education and opportunities, we have made great strides. But until women can move freely and think freely in their homes, on the streets, in the workplace without the fear of violence, there can be no real freedom."
-- Anita Roddick - "Women are like tea bags; put them in hot water and they get stronger. "
-- Eleanor Roosevelt - "Campaign behavior for wives. Always be on time. Do as little talking as humanly possible. Lean back in the parade car so everybody can see the president."
-- Eleanor Roosevelt - "I'm not going to vacuum 'til Sears makes one you can ride on."
-- Roseanne - "It occurred to me when I was thirteen and wearing white gloves and Mary Janes and going to dancing school, that no one should have to dance backward all their lives."
-- Jill Ruckelshaus - "I want to have children, but my friends scare me. One of my friends told me she was in labor for 36 hours. I don't even want to do anything that feels good for 36 hours."
-- Rita Rudner - "Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that woman in her which struggles for expression."
-- Margaret Sanger - "have a brain and a uterus, and I use both."
-- Patricia Schroeder - "The phrase "working mother" is redundant."
-- Jane Sellman - "A male gynecologist is like an auto mechanic who never owned a car."
-- Carrie Snow - "Feminism is not a doctrine that seeks to confine us but rather a quest we continually define."
-- Caroline Soriosis - "God made man, and then he said 'I can do better than that' and made women. "
-- Adela Rogers St. Johns - "Because man and woman are the complement of one another, we need woman's thought in national affairs to make a safe and stable government. "
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton - "Most women's magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers. "
-- Gertrude Stein - "But the problem is that when I go around and speak on campuses, I still don't get young men standing up and saying, 'How can I combine career and family?'"
-- Gertrude Stein - "The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off."
-- Gloria Steinem - "I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career."
-- Gloria Steinem - "If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?"
-- Gloria Steinem - "Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry."
-- Gloria Steinem - "Women are the architects of society. "
-- Harriet Beecher Stowe - "So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why don't somebody wake up to the beauty of old women?"
-- Harriet Beecher Stowe - "My mother always told me I wouldn't amount to anything because I procrastinate. I said 'Just wait.'"
-- Judy Tenuta - "Once a woman is made man’s equal, she becomes his superior. "
-- Margaret Thatcher - "In politics, if you want anything said, ask a man; if you want anything done, ask a woman."
-- Margaret Thatcher - "A little more matriarchy is what the world needs, and I know it. Period. Paragraph."
-- Dorothy Thompson - "And ar'n't I a woman?"
-- Sojourner Truth - " Well-behaved women rarely make history."
-- Laurel Thatcher Ulrich - "Some leaders are born women."
-- Unknown - "I've always believed that one woman's success can only help another woman's success. "
-- Gloria Vanderbilt - "Womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender."
-- Alice Walker - "When women go wrong, men go right after them."
-- Mae West - "Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often."
-- Mae West
Face of Mae West, c.1935 - "I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat."
-- Rebecca West - "Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards and in high heels."
-- Faith Whittlesey - "Whatever women must do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult. "
-- Charlotte Whitton - "Society, while willing to make room for women, is not willing to make changes for them."
-- Shirley Williams - "I do not believe in failure. It is not failure if you enjoyed the process. "
-- Oprah Winfrey - "I think, therefore I'm single."
-- Liz Winstead - "Any measurement must take into account the position of the observer. There is no such thing as measurement absolute, there is only measurement relative."
-- Jeanette Winterson - "I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves."
-- Mary Wollstonecraft - "Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."
-- Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own - "As a woman, I have no country. As a woman my country is the world."
-- Virginia Woolf - "The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself."
-- Virginia Woolf
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