Top 98 Chisholm Quotes
#1. The law cannot do it for us. We must do it for ourselves. Women in this country must become revolutionaries." - Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Congress
Jessica Bennett
#2. Shirley Chisholm is another one [political hero]. She was a dynamic speaker, and the first black woman to run for President.
Donna Brazile
#3. The next year, the Court decided what is generally viewed as the major case of the early years. The decision, Chisholm v. Georgia (1793), provoked an immediate backlash, in the form of the first constitutional amendment to be ratified after the ten amendments of the Bill of Rights.
Linda Greenhouse
#4. I'd like them to say that Shirley Chisholm had guts. That's how I'd like to be remembered.
Shirley Chisholm
#5. I'm benefitting from the sacrifices and seeds sown by Shirley Chisholm, John Lewis, and so many others. Those of us who are beneficiaries owe it to have a season of service in which we try to give back.
Terri Sewell
#6. Service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth.
Shirley Chisholm
#7. 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
#8. Of my two handicaps, being female put many more obstacles in my path than being black.
Shirley Chisholm
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Any time things appear to be going better, you have overlooked something.
Shirley Chisholm
#12. 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
#13. That's what's wrong with the country. There are too many 'good soldiers' accepting too many bad decisions.
Shirley Chisholm
#14. We were in the same band, but we're two completely different people. People have asked me to make comparisons with our albums, and I can't, because there's no comparison. Her album's okay. I don't think she's the best singer on Earth, but she's okay.
Melanie Chisholm
#15. The minorities have been confined to the city by a moat of bigotry.
Shirley Chisholm
#16. 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
#17. The British press have written some nasty and spiteful things about the way I look which used to affect me quite badly when it was new to me but luckily, I've learned to ignore the comments. why do they even care about how I look?
Melanie Chisholm
#18. 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
#19. Conscience is what your mother told you before you were six years old.
Brock Chisholm
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. I had met far more discrimination because I am a woman than because I am black.
Shirley Chisholm
#24. Women must become revolutionary. This cannot be evolution but revolution.
Shirley Chisholm
#25. I don't think I'm a great singer myself. I'm all right. I've worked with different writers, different producers ... I've just been blessed with the caliber of people I've been able to work with.
Melanie Chisholm
#26. At present, our country needs women's idealism and determination, perhaps more in politics than anywhere else.
Shirley Chisholm
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. If you turn the pages and look inside, there is nothing of me I feel that I have to hide.
Melanie Chisholm
#31. We must reject not only the stereotypes that others hold of us, but also the stereotypes that we hold of ourselves.
Shirley Chisholm
#32. If the race is to be freed from its crippling burden of good and evil it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility
Brock Chisholm
#33. You don't make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.
Shirley Chisholm
#34. Give it your best shot, have a good time and if it doesn't work at least you tried!
Melanie Chisholm
#35. 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
#37. 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
#38. Carey was one of those appalling people who wake refreshed and ready for anything every morning about an hour before everyone else, and then bounce around whistling happily, avoiding death only because they move faster than the people who want to kill them.
P.F. Chisholm
#39. I wouldn't say I worked with these people because I was looking for a particular vocal sound. I worked with them because I loved what they had done before-and because they really wanted to work with me.
Melanie Chisholm
#41. Defeat should not be the source of discouragement, but a stimulus to keep plotting.
Shirley Chisholm
#42. 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
#43. The success of this album is very much in question. Who knows where it's going to go? My being a Spice Girl is no guarantee of anything, although I hope it'll benefit the sales.
Melanie Chisholm
#44. To label family planning and legal abortion programs "genocide" is male rhetoric, for male ears.
Shirley Chisholm
#45. As there were no black Founding Fathers, there were no founding mothers - a great pity on both counts.
Shirley Chisholm
#47. I swear in real life-probably too much-though I don't swear in front of my gran. We adapt to every situation.
Melanie Chisholm
#48. I love being onstage and I love to perform. To be honest with you, I'm more comfortable performing than I am in an everyday situation, which I can't quite explain.
Melanie Chisholm
#49. I just feel, in life, I'm searching for something I can rely on, something that's constant and something that's going to guide me through. And I felt that the Northern Star is a very beautiful image of that.
Melanie Chisholm
#50. 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
#51. I feel there should have been some recognition of the Spice Girls at this year's 25th anniversary. We flew the flag for Britain around the globe in the 1990s and we achieved a hell of a lot.
Melanie Chisholm
#52. I don't measure America by its achievement but by its potential.
Shirley Chisholm
#53. Racism keeps people who are being managed from finding out the truth through contact with each other.
Shirley Chisholm
#55. You can only cure retail but you can prevent wholesale.
Brock Chisholm
#56. Putting out my album on my own label has been a great experience for me. It's been very inspiring. It's like a new start for me and having all this creative freedom is so liberating and exciting.
Melanie Chisholm
#58. If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.
Shirley Chisholm
#59. Meat-eaters make every day a 9/11 for animals in slaughterhouses.
Brock Chisholm
#60. 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
#61. I know I'm not a great singer. But I love to sing and I like to use my voice in different ways.
Melanie Chisholm
#62. We have been so patient and loyal ... and what has it gotten us? We want our full share now.
Shirley Chisholm
#63. 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
#64. I have never cared too much what people way. What I am interested in is what they do.
Shirley Chisholm
#65. Some members of Congress are among the best actors in the world.
Shirley Chisholm
#66. In the end anti-black, anti-female, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing: anti-humanism.
Shirley Chisholm
#67. I recognise a lot of myself in these kids who enter shows like Pop Idol. It's very hard to get into the music industry and you have to take every opportunity that you can. Something like Pop Idol is a great opportunity but unfortunately, I think it's tainted by the people that make these shows.
Melanie Chisholm
#68. 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
#69. I love America not for what she is, but for what she can become.
Shirley Chisholm
#70. When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.
Shirley Chisholm
#71. Everybody starts with a clean slate only altered by unnecessary hate.
Melanie Chisholm
#72. Don't list to those who say YOU CAN'T. List to the voice inside yourself that says, I CAN.
Shirley Chisholm
#73. To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men, their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas.
Brock Chisholm
#74. At the back of my mind there is always a fear the depression could return but I do all the right things. I try to get the right amount of sleep because I know that I need sleep to function and I need to eat properly and to do some exercising.
Melanie Chisholm
#75. A lot of people have been quite surprised with the stuff that I'm doing on my own, which shocks me because I've always known what I wanted to do. But people have only seen me with the Spice Girls, so I suppose it's not that surprising.
Melanie Chisholm
#76. The funny thing about making this record and being away from the girls and on my own in LA is that it allowed me to reflect on how much we've accomplished.
Melanie Chisholm
#77. The reinterpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong are that belated objectives of nearly all Psychotherapy
Brock Chisholm
#78. The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says: It's a girl.
Shirley Chisholm
#80. Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread, and deep-seated, that it is invisible because it is so normal.
Shirley Chisholm
#81. Tremendous amounts of talent are lost to our society just because that talent wears a skirt.
Shirley Chisholm
#83. 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
#85. A musical would be fantastic. The soundtrack would be great and I'd like to do acting.
Melanie Chisholm
#86. I don't want to be daft and say I had some spiritual awakening or something, but I really did come of age in Los Angeles, where we recorded the album. I had my own little house and my own little circle and I really got to feel how the city ticks.
Melanie Chisholm
#88. I've always met more discrimination being a woman than being Black ... men are men.
Shirley Chisholm
#90. 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
#91. I don't want to hurt anybody or be offensive. But I don't want to not be me.
Melanie Chisholm
#93. A lot of the time, the British press make me ashamed and embarrassed to be British. They give others the impression that the British are selfish, envious and bitter people, which is simply not true in my opinion. I think that British people in general are really nice and friendly.
Melanie Chisholm
#94. 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
#95. All I want is for people to listen to it with unbiased ears, and decide for themselves. I just don't want them to be dictated to by the media, or have preconceptions about it. If you like it, great. If you don't, fair enough.
Melanie Chisholm
#96. I don't think the Spice Girls are celebrated as much as they should be. We championed British pop worldwide. We toured everywhere to sell-out crowds and I think there should have been a reflection of that at February's Brit's anniversary.
Melanie Chisholm
#97. No one wins a war. It is true, there are degrees of loss, but no one wins.
Brock Chisholm
#98. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
