Dalia Grybauskaite Quotes

We have to design policies that have meaningful impacts on the quality of life of women and families. And that's something that I know I can speak passionately about because whether I'm in the White House as First Lady, as long as I have kids and I'm trying to have a life, I'm gonna be trying to make this balance work...

In the poorest countries...it is women who are the key to breaking out of poverty...and preparing another generation for...leading their countries into real security.

The most poor and backward areas in the world are those in which women are subjugated and exploited. Improving the situation of the woman improves the family, the community, and by extension the whole country.

The best judge of whether or not a country is going to develop is how it treats its women

If the feminist program goes to pieces on the arrival of the first baby, it's false and useless.

Liberating women from repeated childbirth can liberate them from poverty as well.

… the male abolitionists encouraged women to participate, not as equals, but to participate by creating resources, having sewing circles, bazaars, raising money so that the men could go out and lecture and create newspapers. And women accepted this for a while and then gradually they began to speak out. Women formed their own antislavery societies and within these societies they voiced their opinion about abolition.

Women are the social conscience of a country. They hold our societies together.

It is the woman who controls the whole house...it's her job, that's what she's supposed to do...We have to change this idea that women are not only supposed to work in the house...but she also has the ability to go outside and do business, to be a doctor, to be a teacher, to be an engineer, she should be allowed to have any job she likes. She should be treated equally, as men are.

The Cairo conferenceis about a complicated web of education and employment, consumption and poverty, development and health care. It is also about whether governments will follow where women have so clearly led them, toward safe, simple and reliable choices in family planning. While Cairo crackles with conflict, in the homes of the world the orthodoxies have been duly heard, and roundly ignored.

When the history of African development is written, it will be clear that a turning point involved the empowerment of women.

Contraceptives unlock one of the most dormant, but potentially powerful assets in development: women as decision-makers. When women have the power to make choices about their families, they tend to decide precisely what demographers, economists, and development experts recommend. They invest in the long-term human capital of their families.

When the status and power of women is greater so also is the nation’s general quality of life; when they are lower, so is the quality of life for all.

Women had always been thought of as looking after the family when men go and earn an income and they're the bread earner and so on. So there is a kind of generation of inequality, [and], on top of the fact, women have pregnancies and periods, [and] when the children are very small, there are greater demands on their time. So one way or another women have had a pretty rough deal in the past, and there's no reason why that should continue, and any country that has tried to remedy that has succeeded in doing so.

advocating women's rights and greater opportunity for women in the workplace and in every avenue of public life is inconsistent with an insistence on mother taking care of children and housework.

The connection between women's human rights, gender equality, socioeconomic development and peace is increasingly apparent.

Women tend to be conservative in youth and get more radical as they get older because they lose power with age. So if a young woman is not a feminist, I say, 'Just wait.'

What I am defending is the real rights of women. A woman should have the right to be in the home as a wife and mother.

I was in college in the '60s, and the whole feminist movement had swept me up.

As long as working women also have to do the work of child and family care at home, they will have two jobs instead of one. Perhaps more important, children will grow up thinking that only women can be loving and nurturing, and men cannot.

The Saudi government's denial of basic rights to women is not only wrong, it hurts Saudi Arabia's economic development, modernization and prosperity.

I don't know if women are meant to run, especially after having kids.

We know we cannot achieve our twin goals of ending poverty and boosting shared prosperity without ending poverty and creating equality for women and girls.

It's very important to balance things; it's imperative to do something for the society, and women in particular, and help women who aren't in position to help themselves.

In Iraq, many of my female friends were architects and professionals with a lot of power during the 1980s while all the men were at war in Iran.