Madeleine Albright Quotes

Women all live a double standard.

When we get married or interviewed for a job or play professional sports or run for president of the United States, we encounter a whole set of standards and expectations. We can be shamed for an outfit that's too slutty, too dowdy, too pricey--take your pick. That's the burden women carry into the fitting room.

People try to make women a very specific thing so that we like them.

To think that all in me of which my father would have felt proper pride had I been a man, is deeply mortifying to him because I am a woman.

I didn't want to be a boy, ever, but I was outraged that his height and intelligence were graces for him and gaucheries for me.

What works for a man, still does not work for a woman - both in terms of how they see themselves and how we see them.

Some boys accepted me, some didn't. And my family had comments made to them. Brazil is still a very macho society, and sports are mainly for boys, so people would say to them: 'What is this girl doing? Why is she always out there in the soccer games with the boys?'

In the end, I do think it's insulting to men and women to insist that they fit a certain profile. I never understood that.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage.

Men are mostly raised by women. Most men have not seen an authoritative woman since they were 8. They associate women in authority with childhood.

Women—one half the human race at least—care fifty times more for a marriage than for a ministry.

An African man should not do anything called housework or cooking.

Women have to compensate more in the personality department in order to get the things that men get. And they don't have as much leeway for being divas or jerks.

One way I try to manage it is by not having a princess party for my daughter and trying to do things that are not so stereotyped. But if she's invited to a princess party, of course I'm not going to stop her going.

It's hard for women every single day; we have to be nice, but not too nice, ambitious, but not too ambitious. It puts a lot of pressure on what we should and can be.

The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking "beautiful." If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill.

It can be exhausting eating a meal cooked by a man. With a woman, it's, Ho hum, pass the beans. A guy, you have to act like he just built the Taj Mahal.

It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession

It's acceptable for men to act the fool. When women try, they're considered aggressive and opinionated.

It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man's to keep unmarried as long as he can.

If you're a girl and you don't fit the very specific vision of what a girl should be, which is always from a man's perspective, then you're a little bit at a loss.

Why were the little girls all frightened To be just what they are The boys were told to ask themselves How high how far The girls were told to reach the shelves While the boys were reaching stars That's why little girls were frightened To be just what they are.

The Iron Rule of prudence for an Istanbulite Woman: If you are as fragile as a tea glass, either find a way to never encounter burning water and hope to marry an ideal husband or get yourself laid and broken as soon as possible. Alternatively, stop being a tea-glass woman!

A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.