Who runs the world? Girls.
—Beyoncé Knowles
Women hold all the power. They should use it like a whip, not offer it up like a sacrifice.
—Tarryn Fisher
There’s nothing a man can do, that I can’t do better and in heels.
—Ginger Rogers
The thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power. You just take it.
—Roseanne Barr
Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.
—Charlotte Whitton
Women are small and fragile…yet the power they hold is unmeasurable.
—Da Xia
It is amazing what a woman can do if only she ignores what men tell her she can’t.
—Carol K. Carr
These days, I strive to be a bitch, because not being one suck. Not being a bitch means not having your voice heard.
—Margaret Cho
It’s hard not to be a fighter when you’re constantly under siege.
—Cassandra Duffy
I’m not a humanitarian, I’m a hell-raiser.
—Mother Jones
I’m tough, I’m ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.
—Madonna
People call me a feminist whenever I express statements that distinguish me from a doormat.
—Rebecca West
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
—Gloria Steinem
Do you know they found land mines in women’s souls?
—Andrea Gibson
My family has very strong women. My mother never laughed at my dream of Africa, even though everyone else did because we didn’t have any money, because Africa was the ‘dark continent’, and because I was a girl.
—Jane Goodall
16
There are some people who still feel threatened by strong women. That’s their problem. It’s not mine.
—Gloria Allred
I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself.
—Simone de Beauvoir
No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body.
—Margaret Sanger
If any female feels she needs anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.
—bell hooks
I’m not going to limit myself just because people won’t accept the fact that I can do something else.
—Dolly Parton
Vaginas beat penises every time.
They’re like kryptonite.
Penises are defenseless against them.
—Emma Chase
It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.
—Mary Wollstonecraft
If women want rights more than they got, why don’t they just take them, and not be talking about it?
—Sojourner Truth
The emerging woman…will be strong-minded, strong-hearted, strong-souled, and strong-bodied…strength and beauty must go together.
—Louisa May Alcott
For too many centuries women have been being muses to artists. I wanted to be the muse, I wanted to be the wife of the artist, but I was really trying to avoid the final issu that I had to do the job myself.
—Anaïs Nin
The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.
—Simone de Beauvoir
I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns.
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton
My idea of feminism is self-determination, and it’s very open-ended: every woman has the right to become herself, and do whatever she needs to do.
—Ani DiFranco
No longer will we (women) agree to protect the hearth at the price of extinguishing the fire within ourselves.
—Celia Gilbert
I’ve heard it said that God made all men, but Samuel Colt made all men equal. We’d see what Mr. Colt could do for a woman.
—Cherie Priest
There shall never be another season of silence until women have the same rights men have on this green earth.
—Susan B. Anthony
The heart of a woman will never be found in the arms of a man.
—Vanessa Carlton
Why can’t a girl be smart without it being explained away as a rare supernatural phenomenon?
—Cat Winters
A woman isn’t a whore for wanting pleasure. If it were unnatural, we would not be born with such drives.
—Nenia Campbell
How could I choose someone who would force me to give up my own small reach for meaning? I chose myself, and without consolation.
—Sue Monk Kidd
I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes.
—Toni Morrison
I am a warrior in the time of women warriors; the longing for justice is the sword I carry.
—Sonia Johnson
My recipe for life is not being afraid of myself, afraid of what I think or of my opinions.
—Eartha Kitt
They always, always underestimate women.
—Susan Ee
Now and then women should do for themselves what men have already done—occasionally what men have not done—thereby establishing themselves as persons, and perhaps encouraging other women toward greater independence of thought and action.
—Amelia Earhart