Maya Angelou
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.

Susan B. Anthony
If women will not accept marriage with subjection, nor men proffer it without, there is, there can be, no alternative. The women who will not be ruled must live without marriage.

Join the union, girls, and together say Equal Pay for Equal Work.

Sandra Bartky
Dieting disciplines the body's hungers: Appetite must be monitored at all times and governed by an iron will. Since the innocent need of the organism for food will not be denied, the body becomes one's enemy, an alien being bent on thwarting the disciplinary project. Anorexia nervosa, which has now assumed epidemic proportions, is to women of the late twentieth century what hysteria was to women of an earlier day: the crystallization in a pathological mode of a widespread cultural obsession.

Woman lives her body as seen by another, by an anonymous patriarchal Other.

The face of the ideally feminine woman must never display the marks of character, wisdom, and experience that we so admire in men.

We women cannot begin the re-vision of our own bodies until we learn to read the cultural messages we inscribe upon them daily and until we come to see that even when the mastery of the disciplines of femininity produce a triumphant result, we are still only women.

Normative femininity is coming more and more to be centered on woman's body--not its duties and obligations or even its capacity to bear children, but its sexuality, more precisely, its presumed heterosexuality and its appearance... Images of normative femininity, it might be ventured, have replaced the religiously oriented tracts of the past.

Steven Biko
The most potent weapon in the hand of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

Susan Brownmiller
The gut distaste that women feel when we look at pornography, a distaste that, incredibly, it is no longer fashionable to admit, comes, I think, from the gut knowledge that we and our bodies are being stripped, exposed, and contorted for the purpose of ridicule to bolster that 'masculine esteem' which gets its kick and sense of power from viewing females as anonymous, panting playthings, adult toys, dehumanized objects, to be used, abused, broken and discarded.

Shirley Chisholm
As a black person, I am no stranger to race prejudice. But the truth is that in the political world I have been far oftener discriminated against because I am a woman than because I am black. Prejudice against blacks is becoming unacceptable although it will take years to eliminate it. But it is doomed because, slowly, white America is beginning to admit that it exists. Prejudice against women is still acceptable.

Cheryl Clarke.
For a woman to be a lesbian in a male-supremacist, capitalist, misogynist, racist, homophobic, imperialist culture, such as that of North America, is an act of resistance

Simone de Beauvoir
On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself -- on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.

Anarchist Voltaraine de Cleyre
Let every woman ask herself: "Why am I the slave of Man? Why is my brain said not to be the equal of his brain? Why is my work not paid equally with his? Why must my body be controlled by my husband? Why may he take my labor in the household, giving me in exchange what he deems fit? Why may he take my children from me? Will he take them away while yet unborn?" Let every woman ask.

Mary Daly
..feminism is a verb; it is female be-ing...constantly unfolding process. It was/is inevitable that women who conceive of feminism as a thing, a state, would come at some point to believe themselves to have moved 'beyond feminism.' But if one understands feminism to mean the radical, ontological process of Realizing female Elemental potency, one does not 'move beyond' it. One moves with it.

Barbara Deming
To resort to power one need not be violent, and to speak to conscience one need not be meek. The most effective action both resorts to power and engages conscience. Nonviolent actions does not have to get others to be nice. It can in effect force them to consult their consciences. Nor does it have to petition those in power to do something about a situation. It can face the authorities with a new fact and say: accept this new situation which we have created. Vengeance is not the point; change is. But the trouble is that in most people's minds the thought of victory and the thought of punishing the enemy coincide.

Andrea Dworkin
As women, nonviolence must begin for us in the refusal to be violated, in the refusal to be victimized. We must find alternatives to submission, because our submission -- to rape, to assault, to domestic servitude, to abuse and victimization of every sort -- perpetuates violence.

When I say that we must establish values which originate in sisterhood, I mean to say that we must not accept, even for a moment, male notions of what nonviolence is. Those notions have never condemned the systematic violence against us. The men who hold those notoins have never renounced the male behaviors, privileges, values, and conceits which are in and of themselves acts of violence against us.

I'm a radical feminist. Not the fun kind.

Melissa Etheridge
I can feel that thunder beneath my feet
I sold my soul for freedom
It's lonely but it's sweet.

Susan Faludi
My goal is to be accused of being strident.

Elena Fetherston
Forget the night, my sisters, take back your minds.

Marilyn Frye
If what we want is equality with our white brothers, then what we want is, among other things, our own firsthand participation in racial dominance rather than the secondhand ersatz dominance we get as the dominant group's women. No wonder such feminism has no credibility with women of colour.

Indira Gandhi
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there.

Nikki Giovanni
I resent people who say writers write from experience. Writers don't write from experience, though many are hesitant to admit that they don't... If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.

Germaine Greer
Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

Eliza Calvert Hall
Now, some folks has money to build monuments with -- great, tall, marble pillars with angels on top of 'em, like you see in Cave Hill and them big city buryin'-grounds. And some folks can build churches and schools and hospitals to keep folks in mind of 'em, but all the work I've got to leave behind me is jest these quilts, and sometimes when I'm settin' here, workin' with my caliker and gingham pieces, I'll finish off a block, and I laugh and say to myself, 'Well, there's another stone for the monument.'

Cynthia Heimel
Our society has made a practice of punishing its victims. Not only are women being punished (still!) for the feminist movement, but even worse, they are being flayed alive for feeling weak and dependent and in need of love. Society has taught women to hate themselves. Society sucks. Pay it no mind.

Billie Holiday
It's ill-becoming for an old broad to sing about how bad she wants it. But occasionally we do.

Lena Horne
You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.

Luce Irigaray
Let women tacitly go on strike, avoid men long enough to learn to defend their desire notably by their speech, let them discover the love of other women protected from that imperious choice of men which puts them in a position of rival goods, let them forge a social status which demands recognition, let them earn their living in order to leave behind their condition of a prostitute.

Sheila Jeffreys
Lesbian feminists are the bad girls who fail to love the male frame of mind that currently dominates gay and lesbian studies.

Sonia Johnson
It seems to me, therefore, that if we want a world in which women have integrity and are independent, self-governing and untamed -- and patriarchy cannot survive women's being any of these -- we have to have integrity, be independent, self-governing and wild right now. The feminist world is not somewhere off in the nonexistent future. That world is right now, or it is never.

Mother Jones
No matter what the fight, don't be ladylike! God almighty made women and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies.

Martin Luther King
We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

Ursula Le Guin
My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.

Meridel Le Sueur
The history of an oppressed people is hidden in the lies and the agreed-upon myths of its conquerors.

Audre Lorde
When I speak of knowledge...I am speaking of that dark and true depth which understanding serves, waits upon, and makes accessible through language to ourselves and others. It is this depth within each of us that nurtures vision.

Catharine MacKinnon
One genius of the system we live under is that the strategies it requires to survive it from day to day are exactly the opposite of what is required to change it.

There is nothing like femininity to dignify one's indignity as one's identity.

Women have been silenced as women: we have been told we are stupid because we are women, told that our thoughts are trivial because we are women, told that our experiences as women are unspeakable, told that women can't speak the language of significance, had our ideas appropriated by men, only to find those ideas have suddenly become worthy, even creative.

The right to privacy is a right of men 'to be let alone' to oppress women one at a time...It is a very material division that keeps the private beyond the public redress and depoliticizes women's subjection within it. It keeps some men out of the bedrooms of other men.

Christina McCall
Scratch any woman deeply enough and you find a feminist.

Meena, founder of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan
My fists are clenched with fists of thousands of compatriots
To break all these sufferings, all these fetters of slavery.
I'm the woman who has awoken,
I've found my path and will never return.

Robin Morgan
Pornography is the theory, and rape the practice...The violation of an individual woman is the metaphor for man's forcing himself on whole nations (rape as the crux of war), on nonhuman creatures (rape as the lust behind hunting and related carnage), and on the planet itself.

I detest 'vanguarditis.' I never liked it on the Left, and I find it especially distasteful weaseling its way into the Women's Movement....The responsibility of a vanguard...is to speak from, for, and to ALL of the people who give it birth...I don't like more radical-than-thou games. I don't like credentials games, intimidation-between-women games, or 'you are who you sleep with' games. I don't like people being judged by their class background, their sexual preferences, their race, choice of religion, marital status...or any other vicious standard of categorization. I hate such judgments in the male power system and I hate them in the Women's Movement. If there must be judgments at all, let them be not on where a woman is coming from, but on what she is moving toward; let them be based on her seriousness, her level of risk, her commitment, her endurance.

We are the women men have warned us about.

Holly Near
I have dreamed on this mountain
Since first I was my mother's daughter
And you can't just take my dreams away
Not with me watching.

Adrienne Rich
Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language -- this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.

In a society where women entered sexual intercourse willingly, where adequate contraception was a genuine social priority, there would be no 'abortion issue'...Abortion is violence...It is the offspring, and will continue to be the accuser of a more pervasive and prevalent violence, the violence of rapism.

Harriet Rubin
When your absence has the authority of your presence, that is power.

Nawal El Saadawi
They said, 'You are a savage and dangerous woman.' I said, 'I am speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous.'

Sol, Son of Heart
I have lots of toys; I just need one more.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Man in his lust has regulated long enough this whole question of sexual intercourse. Now let the mother of mankind, whose prerogative it is to set bounds to his indulgence, rouse up and give this whole matter a thorough, fearless examination.

And thus it ever is: so long as woman labors to second man's endeavors and exalt his sex above her own, her virtues pass unquestioned; but when she dares to demand rights and privileges for herself, her motives, manners, dress, personal appearance, and character are subjects for ridicule and detraction.

Gloria Steinem
Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.

I don't breed well in captivity

Ellen Stewart
:Lemme tell you somethin', baby. Carin's where it's at. Trust me now because I know what I'm talkin' 'bout - you got a love for what you're doin' and everythin' else, all the rest of this cree-a-tivity stuff you're wonderin' 'bout, baby, it just comes.

Lucy Stone
In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything, disappointment is the lot of women. It shall be the business of my life to deepen this disappointment in every woman's heart until she bows down to it no longer.

Sojourner Truth
There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before. So I am for keeping the thing going while things are stirring; because if we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to get it going again.

Alice Walker
The real revolution is always concerned with the least glamorous stuff. With raising a reading level from second grade to third. With simplifying history and writing it down...With helping illiterates fill out food stamp forms -- for they must eat, revolution or not. The dull, frustrating work with our people is the work of the black revolutionary artist.

To the extent that black women dissociate themselves from the women's movement, they abandon their responsibilities to women throughout the world. This is a serious abdication from and misuse of black herstorical tradition: Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, and Fannie Lou Hamer would not have liked it. Nor do I.

Mae West
Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.

When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before.

Virginia Woolf
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

War is not women's history.

If you insist upon fighting to protect me or 'our' country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share...For...in fact, as a woman, I have no country.