Top 56 Shirley Chisholm Quotes
#1. Don't list to those who say YOU CAN'T. List to the voice inside yourself that says, I CAN.
Shirley Chisholm
#2. When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.
Shirley Chisholm
#3. I love America not for what she is, but for what she can become.
Shirley Chisholm
#4. We have never seen health as a right. It has been conceived as a privilege, available only to those who can afford it. This is the real reason the American health care system is in such a scandalous state.
Shirley Chisholm
#5. In the end anti-black, anti-female, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing: anti-humanism.
Shirley Chisholm
#6. Some members of Congress are among the best actors in the world.
Shirley Chisholm
#7. I don't measure America by its achievement but by its potential.
Shirley Chisholm
#8. As things are now, no one can tell to whom members of Congress are responsible, except that it does not often appear to be to the people. Everyone else is represented in Washington by a rich and powerful lobby, it seems. But there is no lobby for the people.
Shirley Chisholm
#9. We have been so patient and loyal ... and what has it gotten us? We want our full share now.
Shirley Chisholm
#10. Congress seems drugged and inert most of the time ... its idea of meeting a problem is to hold hearings or, in extreme cases, to appoint a commission.
Shirley Chisholm
#11. If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.
Shirley Chisholm
#13. Racism keeps people who are being managed from finding out the truth through contact with each other.
Shirley Chisholm
#14. I have never cared too much what people way. What I am interested in is what they do.
Shirley Chisholm
#15. I am not antiwhite, because I understand that white people, like black ones, are victims of a racist society. They are products of their time and place.
Shirley Chisholm
#16. It is not female egotism to say that the future of mankind may very well be ours to determine. It is a fact.
Shirley Chisholm
#18. Our representative democracy is not working because the Congress that is supposed to represent the voters does not respond to their needs. I believe the chief reason for this is that it is ruled by a small group of old men.
Shirley Chisholm
#20. The difference between de jure and de facto segregation is the difference between open, forthright bigotry and the shamefaced kind that works through unwritten agreements between real estate dealers, school officials, and local politicians.
Shirley Chisholm
#22. Tremendous amounts of talent are lost to our society just because that talent wears a skirt.
Shirley Chisholm
#23. Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread, and deep-seated, that it is invisible because it is so normal.
Shirley Chisholm
#24. The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says: It's a girl.
Shirley Chisholm
#25. I've always met more discrimination being a woman than being Black ... men are men.
Shirley Chisholm
#26. At present, our country needs women's idealism and determination, perhaps more in politics than anywhere else.
Shirley Chisholm
#27. Women must become revolutionary. This cannot be evolution but revolution.
Shirley Chisholm
#28. I had met far more discrimination because I am a woman than because I am black.
Shirley Chisholm
#29. There is little place in the political scheme of things for an independent, creative personality, for a fighter. Anyone who takes that role must pay a price.
Shirley Chisholm
#30. It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts.
Shirley Chisholm
#32. Some fine men are in Congress, too few, trying to do a responsible job. But they are surrounded and almost neutralized by a greater number whose instinct is to make a deal before they make a decision.
Shirley Chisholm
#33. Service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth.
Shirley Chisholm
#34. Of my two handicaps, being female put many more obstacles in my path than being black.
Shirley Chisholm
#35. The Constitution they wrote was designed to protect the rights of white, male citizens. As there were no black Founding Fathers, there were no founding mothers
a great pity, on both counts. It is not too late to complete the work they left undone. Today, here, we should start to do so.
Shirley Chisholm
#36. America has the laws and the material resources it takes to insure justice for all its people. What it lacks is the heart, the humanity ...
Shirley Chisholm
#37. Any time things appear to be going better, you have overlooked something.
Shirley Chisholm
#38. We Americans have a chance to become someday a nation in which all racial stocks and classes can exist in their own selfhoods, but meet on a basis of respect and equality and live together, socially, economically, and politically.
Shirley Chisholm
#39. I'd like them to say that Shirley Chisholm had guts. That's how I'd like to be remembered.
Shirley Chisholm
#40. That's what's wrong with the country. There are too many 'good soldiers' accepting too many bad decisions.
Shirley Chisholm
#41. The minorities have been confined to the city by a moat of bigotry.
Shirley Chisholm
#42. That I am a national figure because I was the first person in 192 years to be at once a congressman, black, and a woman proves, I would think, that our society is not yet either just or free.
Shirley Chisholm
#43. Most Americans have never seen the ignorance, degradation, hunger, sickness, and futility in which many other Americans live ... They won't become involved in economic or political change until something brings the seriousness of the situation home to them.
Shirley Chisholm
#44. Defeat should not be the source of discouragement, but a stimulus to keep plotting.
Shirley Chisholm
#45. No matter what men think, abortion is a fact of life. Women have always had them; they always have and they always will. Are they going to have good ones or bad ones? Will the good ones be reserved for the rich, while the poor women go to quacks?
Shirley Chisholm
#47. As there were no black Founding Fathers, there were no founding mothers - a great pity on both counts.
Shirley Chisholm
#48. To label family planning and legal abortion programs "genocide" is male rhetoric, for male ears.
Shirley Chisholm
#49. The liberals in the House strongly resemble liberals I have known through the last two decades in the civil rights conflict. When it comes time to show on which side they will be counted, they excuse themselves.
Shirley Chisholm
#50. One distressing thing is the way men react to women who assert their equality: their ultimate weapon is to call them unfeminine. They think she is anti-male; they even whisper that she's probably a lesbian.
Shirley Chisholm
#51. Laws will not eliminate prejudice from the hearts of human beings. But that is no reason to allow prejudice to continue to be enshrined in our laws to perpetuate injustice through inaction.
Shirley Chisholm
#53. My greatest political asset, which professional politicians fear, is my mouth, out of which come all kinds of things one shouldn't always discuss for reasons of political expediency,
Shirley Chisholm
#54. You don't make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.
Shirley Chisholm
#55. We must reject not only the stereotypes that others hold of us, but also the stereotypes that we hold of ourselves.
Shirley Chisholm
#56. There is a good deal of evidence that the United States is moving to the right, and that the main force behind the movement is a resurgence, in a new form, of racial prejudice.
Shirley Chisholm
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