I was a working class Jewish girl. In my girlhood, anti-Semitism was a daily fact of life in Detroit. I did not come from people who had many options in their lives or many choices open to them. I was a girl in a family in which women were, as in society at large, very much second-class citizens. I did not see why I should accept these forced limitations without a fight. Being free to make my own choices thus became very important to me at an early age.
I didn't dream of joining Man City as a professional one day, or representing England, because I didn't know that was even possible.
No social policy can ever eradicate evil or perfect human nature.
I'd like to date, but I'm not really in a position to meet girls.
As we grow up, it feels like you should either invite people into your life or not. There should be fewer and fewer instances of friends you 'can only take in small doses.'
It doesn't matter how much money you've got, or how many connections, there's always something you want that's out of reach.
I can't legislate to change human nature.
Human relationships are patterned and cross-patterned and restricted and limited and delimited and caged and freed again by the elaborate conventions, rules and games which we call civilisation. They're often absurd and farcical, and sometimes they're tragic, yet we acknowledge that they are necessary.
Half a century ago women were at an infinite disadvantage in regard to their occupations. The idea that their sphere was at home, and only at home, was like a band of steel on society.
This was her last public speech.
In the circle where I was raised, I knew of no one knowledgeable in the visual arts, no one who regularly attended musical performances, and only two adults other than my teachers who spoke without embarrassment of poetry and literature — both of these being women. As far as I can recall, I never heard a man refer to a good or a great book. I knew no one who had mastered, or even studied, another language from choice. And our articulate, conscious life proceeded without acknowledgement of the preceding civilisations which had produced it.
I didn't want to live in an Islamic society because I knew I wasn't going to be a first-class citizen, and I knew I was not going to be able to keep doing what I was doing as an actress.
There was things just like not being able to date or - I'm talking like 15, 16 - like just certain things that my friends started to do. Like, they started to get phone calls from girls or like, you know, go and hang out 10, 11 at night, kind of going to the movies. There were just certain things that - it's not that I couldn't do all of those things. It's just that every choice was really deliberate and conscious and thought out and sort of balanced against the religion in a way where I felt - I wasn't necessarily trying to convert at 12 like [my mother] was.
I would get parts and not be able to take them because my mother didn't have a car.
I wasn't allowed to date in high school.
In the '50s, a lot of girls never saw beyond the wedding day.
'Who Fears Death' addresses the push and pull in African culture that powerful women face when their culture has certain duties and beliefs that can stifle them.
We left Egypt when I was seven, and we didn't return until I was 21. My teen years were divided between the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia. Up until we left the U.K., it was like your regular teenage years. The one thing I remember is that I couldn't date. That was one thing my parents made very clear.
I've learned that universal acceptance and appreciation is just an unrealistic goal.
For me, when I grew up, I never really had an outlet when it came to my social surroundings. Even if I had a form of popularity, I felt like I was very limited.
Especially in Britain, people want to limit you.
We are strange beings, we seem to go free, but we go in chains--chains of training, custom, convention, association, environment--in a word, Circumstance--and against these bonds the strongest of us struggle in vain.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
Many Africans succumb to the idea that they can't do things because of what society says. Images of Africa are negative - war, corruption, poverty. We need to be proud of our culture.
The progress of man has never been impeded by preconceived ideas regarding his abilities, his proper interests, and his appropriate activities. Woman has always been so hampered.
When you're a very career-oriented woman, sometimes you don't have as much time to go meet all kinds of guys. You're a little bit limited to the guys that work in your office. I think a lot of girls can relate to that problem.
We can be hindered in our development and our personal growth by political conditions. Outer circumstances can constrain us. Only when we are free to develop our innate abilities can we live as free beings. But we are just as much determined by inner potential and outer opportunities as the Stone Age boy on the Rhine, the lion in Africa, or the apple tree in the garden.
