Petra Kelly Quotes

I saw the first of the 7-mile-long column appear - red and orange and green banners, 'Ban the Bomb!' etc., shining and swaying slowly. Absolute silence. I found myself weeping to see the tan, dusty marchers, knapsacks on their backs - Quakers and Catholics, Africans and whites, Algerians and French - 40 percent were London housewives.

I said we needed to organize women around the world to push peace.

For most women, Greenham was a place of principle, growth and song. Often joyful, sometimes terrifying, and almost always cold. As it got harder, with constant evictions and mounting violence from a frustrated and humiliated police force, the women got more determined. It was a community with a shared purpose - to live in peace.

I was at a meeting two years ago in Beijing, and I passed a bunch of women who were marching in a protest. Their signs were probably saying something I wouldn't have agreed with at all. But I was so glad to see women marching. And it's happening all over the world.

In the Sixties, the hippies said "Make love, not war," and that was naive. But it might be less naive to say "Make music, not war," in the sense that the people who create musical instruments are the same people who make up new weapons.

I am a seasoned soldier of nonviolence, and I have evidence enough to sustain my faith.

The peace movement here is the biggest thing in human history.

Nonviolence, applied to very large masses of mankind, is a new experiment in the history of the world.

Nonviolence in politics is a new weapon in the process of evolution; its vast possibilities are yet unexplored.

I was like so many others passion-ately involved in trying to bring those truths to the world's attention. We did our very best to peacefully do that. The city, state, and federal governments did their very best to quell our efforts. They were used to using heavy-handed tactics to silence us.

At the meeting I argued that the state had given us no alternative to violence. I said it was wrong and immoral to subject our people to armed attacks by the state without offering them some kind of alternative. I mentioned again that people on their own had taken up arms. Violence would begin whether we initiated it or not. Would it not be better to guide this violence ourselves, according to principles where we saved lives by attacking symbols of oppression, and not people? If we did not take the lead now, I said, we would soon be latecomers and followers to a movement we did not control.

Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions. The woman who rejects the stereotype of feminine weakness and dependence can no longer find much comfort in the clich? that all men are beasts. She has no choice except to believe, on the contrary, that men are human beings, and she finds it hard to forgive them when they act like animals.

But millions at one time, beyond gender or race, had their attention fixed on her, and with that power, she chose to flash the word "feminist" all over our TV screens. If that don't do nothin' but make people Google the word, then that should make every feminist in the world proud.

It is a positive change that our country and other countries in the region are making by giving a chance to women.

Friends, haters, it's Twitter poll time. What do you think most holds back justice and equality for women? All thoughts welcome!

The world - and America - has been defined by people who haven't necessarily abided by the laws and the rules. Civil disobedience is part of our nation's history and has redirected our country in many instances, from the feminist movement to the Civil Rights movement and beyond.

Nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation.

Nonviolent action means mobilization of world opinion in our favour.

I am really glad women are speaking out.

My hopes for Iran's future lies with women first and foremost. Iran's feminist movement is very strong. This movement has no leader or head quarters. Its place is the home of every Iranian who believes in equal rights. This is currently the strongest women's movement in the Middle East.

The reason I wrote Lean In is I think people weren't actually noticing that we had stopped making progress. I gave a TED talk and said: "It turns out men still run the world." And the audience gasped as if that was news.

All women are rebels.

The Iraq War is the first war in history, in which there were huge demonstrations before the war was launched, not beginning five years later and then being broken up. All of these are changes, and the people who are writing in journals today lived through these changes.

Non violence means people in action. People have to understand that with non-violence goes a hell of a lot of organization.

the women's movement, not only here in the U.S., but worldwide, is bigger and stronger than ever before and in places where it has never been. It has arms. It has legs. And most importantly, it has heads.