Women And History Quotes

#1. The theory that everyone acts from self-interest, direct or indirect, is psychologically unsound ... Throughout history ... there have been millions of men and women with some sort of Humanist philosophy who have consciously given up their lives for a social ideal.

Corliss Lamont

#2. We as women know that there are no disembodied processes; that all history originates in human flesh; that all oppression is inflicted by the body of one against the body of another; that all social change is built on the bone and muscle, and out of the flesh and blood, of human creators.

Andrea Dworkin

#3. It was the best route to get folks to understand segregation fast. Civil rights and women's rights had a clear history. Making the transition to rights for people with disabilities became easier because we had the history of the other two.

Major Owens

#4. Like their personal lives, women's history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.

Elizabeth Janeway

#5. I am a Scorpio, and playing the seductress appeals to me. There are a lot of women throughout film history, like Marlene Dietrich or Mae West - those are the women I was always attracted to. The bad girls.

Chloe Sevigny

#6. You are you because you love the way the world looks through your camera. You are you because of the way you love your friends and family. Not because some scar is on your body. That's a part of your history and what helps form what you believe in. not what defines you.

A.M. Willard

#7. To reclaim our past and insist that it become a part of our human history is the task that lies before us. For the future requires that women, as well as men, shape the world destiny.

Judy Chicago

#8. The male clerk with his quill pen and copper-plate handwriting had gone for good. The female short-hand typist took his place. It was a decisive moment in women's emancipation.

A.J.P. Taylor

#9. Most history is a record of the triumphs, disasters, and follies of top people. The black hole in it is the way of life of mute, inglorious men and women who make no nuisance of themselves in the world.

Philip Howard, 20th Earl Of Arundel

#10. Human history's greatest crime was the traffic in black flesh when the devil white man went into Africa and murdered and kidnapped to bring to the West in chains, in slave ships, millions of black men, women, and children, who were worked and beaten and tortured as slaves.

Malcolm X

#11. You know, women have a history of just being - we've been told all our lives not to say - in the fifties you couldn't say birth or even be pregnant hardly on television - and then gradually things have changed.

Cybill Shepherd

#12. The emancipation of women is practically the greatest egoistic movement of the nineteenth century, and the most intense affirmation of the right of the self that history has yet seen.

Ellen Key

#13. Good women are no fun ... The only good woman I can recall in history was Betsy Ross. And all she ever made was a flag.

Mae West

#14. The frenetic pace of modern life can lead to an obscuring or even a loss of what is truly human ... Perhaps more than in other periods of history, our time is in need of that genius which belongs to women, and which can ensure sensitivity for human beings in every circumstance.

Pope John Paul II

#15. Funny how often something she'd been so certain she needed turned out not to be a need at all, but a want
when the real 'need' was something else entirely. Something that could only be gained by giving, not by getting.

Tamera Alexander

#16. But really, for me, I tried to find first-person accounts. I tried to read stories from men and women who had survived slavery because it's different when you hear it from their mouths instead of reading it from a history book.

Jurnee Smollett

#17. women had to be controlled and kept from going wild because of their inherent susceptibility to lust; thus men had to exercise aidos, "shame," and sophrosyne, "soundness of mind," to keep women from transgressing the bounds of propriety.

Thomas Van Nortwick

#18. There is something glorious about this place we call Texas. Hell, I don't know, it must be in the water. Somehow, as overwhelming odds and pressures congregate over Texas like a spring storm, average men and women are transformed into icons of history.

David Thomas Roberts

#19. Like most little girls, I found the lure of grown-up accessories astonishing - lipstick, perfume, hats and gloves. When I write female characters in my historical novels, getting these details right is vital.

Sara Sheridan

#20. For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.

Cesare Pavese

#21. this book, giving voice to what is so basic among men and women throughout history, I have translated it "the Quester."]

Eugene H. Peterson

#22. History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women.

O. Henry

#23. Once you fall for someone, their smell can be a powerful thing. Women will wear their boyfriends' T-shirts, and throughout tales in history men have held on to their lover's handkerchief.

Helen Fisher

#24. My mother? My own mother told my lady governess that if the baby and I were in danger then they should save the baby.

Philippa Gregory

#25. The most powerful men of the kingdom have dragged a duchess down and sent her out to be a marvel to the common people of London. They are so deeply afraid of her that they took the risk to dishonor their own. They are so anxious to save themselves that they thought they should throw her aside.

Philippa Gregory

#26. If history bothered to document our stories, there wouldn't be enough paper in the world to bear witness to all the women who've been imprisoned because our emotions proved too inconvenient for men to handle and too terrifying for them to ignore.

Clementine Ford

#27. History is no longer just a chronicle of kings and statesmen, of people who wielded power, but of ordinary women and men engaged in manifold tasks. Women's history is an assertion that women have a history.

Toshiko Kishida

#28. The study of women's intelligence and personality has had broadly the same history as the one we record for Negroes ... in drawing a parallel between the position of, and feeling toward, women and Negroes, we are uncovering a fundamental basis of our culture.

Gunnar Myrdal

#29. There was virtually no aspect of twentieth-century defense technology that had not been touched by the hands and minds of female mathematicians.

Margot Lee Shetterly

#30. I pray every single moment of my life; not on my knees but with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with men. Work and worship are one with me.

Susan B. Anthony

#31. A compelling and important story of First Word War Scotland, a time when women redefined the word hope as the world was losing its innocence. Andrea MacPherson writes beautifully, balancing the lives of her characters between history and the poetry of gesture, secrets and love.

Ami McKay

#32. Wilder watched Armstrong head back to video village under the lights of the set, attacking another apple as she went, and thought, Apples and women. Not a good history there.

Jennifer Crusie

#33. In the history of the human race, those periods which later appeared as great have been the periods when the men and the women belonging to them had transcended the differences that divided them and had recognized in their membership in the human race a common bond.

Haile Selassie

#34. I wanted to show the history and strength of all kinds of black women. Working women, country women, urban women, great women in the history of the United States,

Elizabeth Catlett

#35. I like powerful women, and I gravitate to any point in history when a female has significant power. I can spend hours researching any such amazing lady, from Ching Shih to Hatshepsut to Boudica to Zenobia.

Gail Carriger

#36. Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.

Grover Cleveland

#37. I never set out to write a book to change women's lives, to change history. It's like, 'Who, me?' Yes, me. I did it. And I'm not that different from other women. Maybe my power and glory was that I could speak my truth as a woman and it was the truth of every woman.

Betty Friedan

#38. Within the stable economy it's necessary to eliminate all forms of sexual discrimination, and to provide women for the first time in our history with economic opportunities equal to those of men.

Jimmy Carter

#39. Islamic tradition is full of examples of supporting the autonomy of women and the empowerment of women. Very few people know that in Islamic history there have been well over two thousand women jurists.

Khaled Abou El Fadl

#40. Love which is only an episode in the life of men, is the entire history of the life of women.

Madame De Stael

#41. An indigenous feminism has been present in every culture in the world and in every period of history since the suppression of women began.

Robin Morgan

#42. Gender equality cannot be achieved by cutting programs that allow girls to get the same chance to compete, learn, and play. The United States has had a solid history of commitment to its female athletes and expanding opportunity for women, and it is imperative that we continue on this path.

Linda Sanchez

#43. There's a long, long history of women suffering abuse, injustice, and not having the same opportunities as men, and I think that's been very detrimental to the human race as a whole.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

#44. You see history in the making and that is definitely the highlight. You get to meet these amazing sportsmen and women, and see them develop as individuals. You get to meet them when they're first coming into their sport. You watch them develop and you build up relationships with them.

Jill Douglas

#45. I speak for the colored women of the South, because it is there that the millions of blacks in this country have watered the soil with blood and tears, and it is there too that the colored woman of America has made her characteristic history and there her destiny is evolving.

Anna Julia Cooper

#46. Denied access to information about important arenas of human life, history, and art, women like Augusta Welland demonstrate well into adulthood a lack of moral insight and sympathetic compassion.

Edith Wharton

#47. Phillip Roth uses his Black women characters to make anti intellectual remarks about Black history month, begun by a man who reached intellectual heights that Roth will never attain.Roth is a petty bigot and his ignorant remarks about black culture expose him as a buffoon to scholars the world over.

Ishmael Reed

#48. If you look back at British history, women being allowed to play sport in schools meant they had to change their clothing. They couldn't be running around in their long skirts and corsets, because you can't.

Clare Balding

#49. The history of fan fiction demonstrates how efficient, and effective, women have been at pooling together to get what they want out of their stories. It's been a largely female-driven world.

Sherwood Smith

#50. The history of God's people is not a record of God searching for courageous men and women who could handle the task, but God transforming the hearts of cowards and calling them to live courageous lives.

Erwin McManus

#51. My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silence and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated.

Edward W. Said

#52. Only a handful of men and women leave an imprint on the conscience of a nation and on the history that they helped shape.

Barack Obama

#53. What do I want in a good fantasy book? Court politics and social interactions based around houses and cities. Powerful women and devious men. Drama and action with emotional ramifications. Frocks. Kissing. Swords. An intense impression of history in the world-building.

Tansy Rayner Roberts

#54. Suppressed I Rise is for anyone interested in a very personal, human view of the history of World War II. A mother's attempt to protect and raise her two young daughters in hostile NAZI Germany challenges her sensibilities and resourcefulness.

Hank Bracker

#55. Only in a secular history where men and women are freed for unexpected true humanity can God reveal his own being.

Edward Schillebeeckx

#56. The great men and women of history were not great because of what they earned and owned, but rather for what they gave their lives to accomplish.

John C. Maxwell

#57. Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

C.S. Lewis

#58. I first saw 'The Dinner Party' in 2007 at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. While perusing the Heritage Panels, which honor 999 women who have made important contributions to Western history, I came upon the names of two sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grimke.

Sue Monk Kidd

#59. Mother, before God," I say, my voice shaking with tears, "I swear that I have to believe that there is more for me in life than being wife to one man after another, and hoping not to die in childbirth!

Philippa Gregory

#60. I defend the authority of women and explore its meaning for them rather than assume they need to be more accommodating or sensitive.

David Bedrick

#61. Feminism rotates between backlash and interest. And the cool thing about the Internet is that it's allowing women more access to their own history. Part of the problem before the Internet was that we didn't know which books to read. Someone had to tell you.

Kathleen Hanna

#62. I understand people, and I think that my life and my history and what I represent can relate to a lot of the women, the independents, the moderate voters.

Mia Love

#63. In the history of humanity, women have never been as oppressed as they are right now. Men can make babies with us and then walk away.

Laura Schlessinger

#64. If you look back in history of the women who are most memorable and most stylish, they were never the followers of fashion. They were the ones who were unique in their style, breakers of the rules. They were authentic, genuine, original. They were not following the trends.

Nina Garcia

#65. It is Republicans that have led the fight for women's equality. Go back through history and look at who was the first woman to ever vote, elected to office, go to Congress.

Marsha Blackburn

#66. The White Queen in many ways it is representative of the sort of drama that I'm talking about. The books by Philippa Gregory were best sellers and they specifically told the story of history from the point of view of women.

Colin Callender

#67. Sit peacefully in a church and think of church history: witchburning perhaps, or child abuse, genocide, the amassing of disgusting wealth, the repression of women, inquisitions, castrating child choir singers, the denial of Santa Claus and the support of fascists in power.

Kaz Cooke

#68. A parcel
taken from one place to another, handed from one owner to another, unwrapped and bundled up at will
is all that I am. A vessel, for the bearing of sons, for one nobleman or another: it hardly matters who.

Philippa Gregory

#69. When we love all parts of ourselves, when we bless all of ourselves, when we honor all of our history and all of our insecurities, doubts, worries, and fears, we become the women that we always wanted to be.

Debbie Ford

#70. At no moment in history has a bright young girl with plenty of food and a good constitution perished from too much learning.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#71. Men tell stories. Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over.

Kristin Hannah

#72. Black women all over the world should re-unite and re-examine the way history has portrayed us.

Buchi Emecheta

#73. We believe in equality for all, and privileges for none. This is a belief that each American regardless of background has equal standing in the public forum, all of us. Because we believe this idea so firmly, we are an inclusive, rather than an exclusive party. Let everybody come.

Barbara Jordan

#74. For the khan, we will take their cities, their women, and their lands. This is the great raid, the farthest strike in the history of the nation of Genghis. We will not be stopped.

Conn Iggulden

#75. It Begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible.

Steven Pinker

#76. The early years of statistical development were dominated by men. Many women were working in the field, but they were almost all employed in doing the detailed calculations needed for statistical analysis, and were indeed called "computers".

David Salsburg

#77. Elizabeth Cady read the nation's great Declaration, and it bothered her. All men are created equal, it said. But what about women?

Joy Hakim

#78. History is made by men and women of vision and courage. Tonight freedom is on the march.

Ronald Reagan

#79. It's the 21st century. It's untenable to suggest that women had no significance and no interest and that just because they didn't vote they had no relevance to the course of our history.

Kate Williams

#80. The perfect woman is a higher type of humanity than the perfect man, and also something much rarer. The natural history of animals furnishes grounds in support of this theory.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#81. We live in an era of globalization and the era of the woman. Never in the history of the world have women been more in control of their destiny.

Oscar De La Renta

#82. The tears in my eyes are now running down my cheeks at the thought that I have been his wife and his bedfellow, his companion and his duchess, and even now, though he is near to death, still he does not love me. He has never loved me. He never will love me.

Philippa Gregory

#83. The twenty-first-century successful black woman is brilliant and tenacious and not afraid to flex her intellectual, spiritual, or financial muscles. She has accomplished, earned, and owned more than black women of any other generation in American history.

Sophia Nelson

#84. I'm not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself - then they get to say 'See, you did it yourself.'

Alice Walker

#85. The upward course of a nation's history is due in the long run to the soundness of heart of its average men and women.

Queen Elizabeth II

#86. Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.

Doris Lessing

#87. The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul.

Emma Goldman

#88. My generation of bossy, confident, baby-boom women were something brand new in history. Our energy and assertiveness weren't created by Betty Friedan, unknown before her 1963 book, or by Gloria Steinem, whose political activism, as even the Lifetime profile admitted, did not begin until 1969.

Camille Paglia

#89. History is not a long series of centuries in which men did all the interesting/important things and women stayed home and twiddled their thumbs in between pushing out babies, making soup and dying in childbirth.

Tansy Rayner Roberts

#90. Playboy has a long history of high-quality interviews along with the objectification of women, and so I think she does have a point there. I don't think that the words are necessarily nullified. It's just that that context is something you ought to be suspicious of.

Cornel West

#91. The woman's march of today have deep roots and shoud be respected. Our country must find unification and not division, with men as well as women of all parties rallying around their cause!" Captain Hank Bracker, author of "The Exciting Story of Cuba.

Hank Bracker

#92. Real solemn history, I cannot be interested in ... The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all.

Jane Austen

#93. It begins with skepticism.147 The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible. One therefore ought to seek good reasons for believing something.

Steven Pinker

#94. The arc of American history almost inevitably moves toward freedom. Whether it's Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, the expansion of women's rights or, now, gay rights, I think there is an almost-inevitable march toward greater civil liberties.

James McGreevey

#95. Hip to the fact that well-behaved women rarely make history, Diane [Wilson] has already inspired a new movement of totally uncontrollable, irresistible and unreasonable women!

Medea Benjamin

#96. A woman's got one life: She's got to reach out and grab it with both hands, or it'll pass her by and leave nothing but a smelly old fart in her face.

Robin Schone

#97. And in the act of making things, just by living their daily lives, they also make history.
Knitting is clothing made in spare moments, or round the fire, whenever women gathered together ... It's something to celebrate-clothes made in love and service, something women have always done.

Anne Bartlett

#98. I look at history, there's not a government on the planet I respect. No country in history was ever safe to its women; internet sex is $100 billion a year industry, and 15-20 million men a day have sex with a child in sexual slavery.

Patch Adams

#99. If I look at history, it seems that most wars and most cruel things have been done by men and not by women.

Peter Zumthor

#100. It's all very romantic," Gabriel said, and then frowned. "Or it would be, if my brother could get a word out without sounding like a choking frog. I fear he will not go down in history as one of the world's greatest wooers of women.

Cassandra Clare