Wangari Maathai Quotes

I feel, in our culture, the girl with any sort of power is called 'difficult' or various words that are demeaning just because she has a voice, has confidence, and stands for her rights. It is sad, but it is the truth of our country.

You—the outside world—will be told that it is our “culture” and “religion” to do X, Y, and Z to women. Understand that whoever deemed it as such was never a woman.

There’s no more despised figure on earth than a woman who seeks power.

When a woman shouts, she isn't usually praised for it. She's condemned as aggressive and coarse.

Men have been found to deny woman intellect; they have credited her with instinct, with intuition, with a capacity to correlate cause and effect much as a dog connects its collar with a walk.

Most women are wise to the fact that lots of men love a cat-fight, and thus go out of their way not to give them one.

What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other.

Bad behaviour makes men more glamorous. Women get destroyed, thrown out of society and locked up in institutions.

Men think a woman should not have an opinion.

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.

When women are the advisers, the lords of creation don't take the advice till they have persuaded themselves that it is just what they intended to do. Then they act upon it, and, if it succeeds, they give the weaker vessel half the credit of it. If it fails, they generously give her the whole.

I had somebody say to me once, 'You can't make the kind of music you're making and call yourself a feminist.' The door was slammed on them swiftly after that.

To me, it's disheartening when you have someone take away everything you've done as a woman because of a man.

Many of us were raised with the 'be a lady' thing, and all those kind of things that can be used against you and strip you out of opportunity and power.

Society has this deeply rooted love of seeing women fail.

Some suggest that, as a woman, I meddle in political affairs and need to be 'put in my place.'

No man is born believing that he has dominion over women. Instead, this view is handed down from generation to generation and amplified through social custom, culture, and popular media.

I had to live through being a woman who thought men always had a one-up... I knew I didn't like it. I thought that's how it was.

The stereotypes of feminists as ugly, or man-haters, or hairy, or whatever it is - that's really strategic. That's a really smart way to keep young women away from feminism, is to kind of put out this idea that all feminists hate men, or all feminists are ugly; and that they really come from a place of fear.

A woman can never be too rich or too thin, but until very, very recently, she could be too powerful, for which - if she wasn't smart enough to camouflage herself - she generally paid the price.

To be outspoken, or different at all, is a problem for women.

Nature says women are human beings, men have made religions to deny it. Nature says women are human beings, men cry out no!

All men hate the nagging.

Just as the slave master required the slaves to imitate the image he had of them, so women, who live in a relatively powerless position, politically and economically, feel obliged by a kind of implicit force to live up to culture's image of what is female.

Whenever you see a successful woman, look out for three men who are going out of their way to try to block her.