Bob Brown Quotes

I couldn't find anyone doing something about the astounding injustices women were experiencing, so I decided to do something myself. I cannot tell you how many people ridiculed my efforts.

Every time a person sacrifices himself for a larger injustice, it aids in the cycle of change.

Deeds Not Words

There are real consequences when women speak out. It's really dangerous, and it takes real courage. We are still speaking out against a white male majority. Forget the glass ceiling. We haven't even broken the glass floor!

It takes one brave woman to implement change and for other women to be able to follow that.

Today, whether it is a student who holds a sit-in to get the army recruiters off his campus, or the mother of a dead soldier who refuses to leave the front gate of the president's ranch, we continue to be saved by brave people who risk ridicule and rejection but end up turning huge tides of public opinion in the direction of righteousness. We owe them enormous debts of gratitude. It is not easy to stand up for what is right, especially when everyone else is afraid to leave the comfortable path of conformity.

It's not exactly courageous to be an anti-racist these days; a hundred years ago, it was.

My own feminist revolution evolved slowly, and traveled the world with me. To this day I have no idea what dissident professor or librarian placed feminist tests on the bookshelves at the university library in Jeddah, but I found them there. They filled me with terror. I understood they were pulling at a thread that would unravel everything. Now that I am older, I can see that feeling terrified is how you recognize what you need. Terror encourages you to jump, even when you don't know if you will ever land.

Justice needs money; it always has . . . whether for abolition of slavery and early women's rights movements or the civil rights and environmental drives of our generation.

Those stories weren't being written at all - stories about women's inner lives and outer activism. We've come miles and miles, but we still don't have an equal rights amendment yet. We don't have equal pay yet. There's a lot of blind misogyny that's not personal, but institutionalized. We still have work to do, but even just looking at those old Ms. Magazines is a cool thing to do - to see how daring they were. They just went right into the belly of the beast.

If it wasn't for the women's movement, I wouldn't be where I am today.

Leaning her silly, beautiful, drunken head on my shoulder, she said, "Oh, Esther, I don't want to be a feminist. I don't enjoy it. It's no fun." "I know," I said. "I don't either." People think you decide to be a "radical," for God's sake, like deciding to be a librarian or a ship's chandler. You "make up your mind," you "commit yourself" (sounds like a mental hospital, doesn't it?). I said Don't worry, we could be buried together and have engraved on our tombstone the awful truth, which some day somebody will understand: WE WUZ PUSHED.

Women speaking up for themselves and for those around them is the strongest force we have to change the world.

I'm like a bit of a feminist, I have kinds of highly political dreams. I'm a dreamer about taking on the patriarchy and all that kinda stuff. So I actually have the secret belief that there are enough people who would consider themselves quote-unquote "other" to support my particular taste.

All men should be feminists. If men cared about women's rights, the world would be a better place

... it is the right and duty of every woman to employ the power of organization and agitation in order to gain those advantages which are given to the one sex and unjustly withheld from the other.

I firmly believe today that the only way to stop violence against women is to speak out and refused to be silenced.

... being a feminist means that you believe in civil rights and social justice.

The American suffrage movement has been, until very recently, altogether a parlor affair, absolutely detached from the economic needs of the people.

With all my heart I beseech and beg my two hundred million female compatriots to assume their responsibility as citizens. Arise! Arise! Chinese women, arise!

Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women.

The generation of women who came before us did much of our shouting. They laid the groundwork and now we can be calm and constant and steady.

I feel that all revolutionary causes should start with addressing misogyny.

I remember what it was like in the 1960's in rural Louisiana. Women did not have many options. My own best friend in high school had a baby at 16. I don't want us to go back to those days.