Gina Torres Quotes

Being the first woman speaker and breaking the marble ceiling is pretty important. Now it's time to move on.

Women have had the vote for over forty years and their organizations lobby in Washington for all sorts of causes; why, why, why don't they take up their own causes and obvious needs?

I am an anomaly in my country. I hope, in the coming years, there will be more women like me.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a pioneer and a role model for women across America. She is the reason women like me not only believed we had a right to be in the workplace, but were guaranteed it. She won us equality, and then showed us how to succeed.

The door might not be opened to a woman again for a long, long time, and I had a kind of duty to other women to walk in and sit down on the chair that was offered, and so establish the right of others long hence and far distant in geography to sit in the high seats.

It took the United States until 1920 to give women the franchise and another 40 or 50 years to start utilizing women's potential. How many women of incredible potential did we fail and what achievements were lost to all because we never tapped that potential?

When I joined Bill Clinton's start-up presidential campaign in 1991, I was confident that women would play an ever more important role, but I never gave a minute's thought to what would happen if we won. When we did - and I became the first woman to serve as White House press secretary - it changed my life. But it didn't change the world.

For a few thousand years, women had no history. Marriage was our calling, and meekness our virtue. Over the last century, in stuttering succession, we have gained a voice, a vote, a room, a playing field of our own. Decorously or defiantly, we now approach what surely qualifies as the final frontier.

It is the rank and file - the average woman - for whom the world has opened up so astonishingly.

Women's rights are women's rights. One of the things that woke me up was equal pay. I started thinking about it: Who is the leader of women? Take me to your leader. And there were no leaders.

I've done so many commencement speeches at colleges and law schools, and I tell young women that there are no glass ceilings because those were broken by a lot of women who came before us. You can be anyone you want to be. You can do anything you want to do.

I respect all women who came before me to blaze trails into the workplace for us.

There have been women who have pioneered and paved the way for me to be able to sit here and to have a platform. And it's my job and my duty to continue to push the boundary for equality on all spectrums.

Recognize that the issues we face as women advancing in business are issues my grandmother would have loved to have had. And fight the good fight nonetheless. For yourself and your peers - but also for your daughter, when it's her turn.

I say to the women out there, remember how difficult it was for women like Justice O'Connor starting out. Even though she graduated with top grades, she had to take a job as a legal secretary. Remember how far we have come.

Women are rising. It's going to get harder before it gets easier, but we can do it if we realize that we have the power. Women will always be the leaders of change.

...there is no tool for development more effective than the empowerment of women.

Glass ceilings have been broken, but more have to be broken.

And I think women have come a very, very long way, but they have a long way to go.

I think nowadays, women are breaking the borders or the boundaries and also trying to give a new interpretation in terms of impact you can have to the society.

The voices of women need to be heard. The volume needs to be turned up.

Women have a lot to say about how to advance women's rights, and governments need to learn from that, listen to the movement and respond.

The women's movement was always going to work in two parts. With one part, we'd break open the doors that were closed to women, and with the other part, we'd walk through, transforming society for men and women. Turns out it was a lot easier to open the doors.

I think, with never-ending gratitude, that the young women of today do not and can never know at what price their right to free speech and to speak at all in public has been earned.

I would chance saying globally there is a feeling that female empowerment has, at last, become a topic that is fashionable, and more power to that.