Notable Quotes by Women

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

Deliver me from your cold phlegmatic preachers, politicians, friends, lovers and husbands.

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation.

One is not born a woman, one becomes one.

I've been a woman for a little over 50 years and have gotten over my initial astonishment. As for conducting an orchestra, that's a job where I don't think sex plays much part.

Somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the President's spouse. I wish him well!

I am neither a man nor a woman but an author.

We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily difference we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.

Toughness doesn't have to come in a pinstripe suit.

Parents can only give good advice or put them [children] on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.

The problem that has no name - which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities - is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.

I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.

show me someone not full of herself and i'll show
         you a hungry person

Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate?

I am gradually approaching the period in my life when work comes first. . . . No longer diverted by other emotions, I work the way a cow grazes.

The king was pregnant.

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.

I decided it is better to scream. . . . Silence is the real crime against humanity.

If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.

We only want that which is given naturally to all peoples of the world, to be masters of our own fate, only of our fate, not of others, and in cooperation and friendship with others.

The usual masculine disillusionment in discovering that a woman has a brain.

I know what every colored woman in this country is doing. . . . Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I'm going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.

A living doll, everywhere you look.It can sew, it can cook,It can talk, talk, talk. . . .My boy, it's your last resort.Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.

I came to explore the wreck.

One's prime is elusive. You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.

Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.

I've given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can't divorce a book.

I like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together.

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 or a prostitute.

Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, men are insultingly supporting their own superiority.