Women In History Quotes

#1. Here are young women with more opportunities, more liberties than almost any women in history and at that moment we tell them they're short-changed silenced victims of a patriarchy? It's defeatist and demoralising.

Christina Hoff Sommers

#2. With you ... I can understand why men have waged wars over women in history.

Melissa Petreschock

#3. I think feminists are unaware of the tremendous extent of the role of women in history.

Vivienne Westwood

#4. Some of the most dangerous women in history are not known as dangerous by having picked up a sword, a gun, or a vial of poison. They are known and regarded as dangerous because they picked up a pen.

Rhiannon Mills

#5. The truth has never been told about women in history: that everywhere man has gone woman has gone too, and what he has done she has done also. Women are ignorant of their own past and ignorant of their own importance in that past.

Pearl S. Buck

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. At this point of time in history, I don't think that women in any work force that's a male-dominated work force have the same rules to play or live by as men do.

Kari Matchett

#14. Like an unfinished symphony, her story played on my mind for most of my life. It would rock to the tune of the passage of time, an adagio of high notes, low notes an illusive movements. Then when I least expected it, I happened upon the missing notes in the life of Charlotte Howe Taylor.

Sally Armstrong

#15. 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

#16. Here you have an incredibly ambitious, accomplished woman who comes up against some of the same problems that women in power come up against today. Cleopatra plays an oddly pivotal role in world history as well; in her lifetime, Alexandria is the center of the universe, Rome is still a backwater.

Stacy Schiff

#17. Women love hairy men. Cavemen were the sexiest men in history.

Leslie Mann

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. Christianity has done more to elevate the status of women than any other movement in history.

Stasi Eldredge

#21. For the first time in history, Congress has 100 women in it. Congratulations. Welcome to modern times, America. It's great having 100 women in Congress. Unless you're in line for the congressional bathroom.

Craig Ferguson

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

Edward Schillebeeckx

#23. 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

#24. Every woman is a mad ugly bad old witch somewhere in her heart.

Philippa Gregory

#25. 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

#26. I'm not blaming men, I'm not blaming women. What's gone by has already gone by. It's history. It's done. There is no right or wrong in higher spirituality.

Frederick Lenz

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. We are all engaged in the task of peeling off the false selves, the programmed selves, the selves created by our families, our culture, our religions. It is an enormous task because the history of women has been as incompletely told as the history of blacks.

Anais Nin

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. Women are also property in our bible; adultery is a property crime in the Old Testament, not a sex crime.

Bill Maher

#35. 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

#36. I decided I had to find out if it was my scene or not. So I stepped in at the deep end. It leads you to survive or drown. Very often you survive.

Theresa Sjoquist

#37. 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

#38. The pride taken by the Italians in their gifted women is among the most important facts in the history of their Renaissance.

Walter Shaw Sparrow

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. The real mistake of women was to let the memoir, the collective, the history, space of producing history - to let it in the hands of men.

Fatema Mernissi

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. The feminine section of the proletarian army is of particularly great significance... the success of a revolution depends on the extent to which women take part in it.

Vladimir Lenin

#48. During the conflict that was placed before them, they not only gained the gratitude of many in their own generation but they proved, for the first time on a global scale, the enormous value of a woman's contribution, paving the way for future generations of women to do the same.

Kathryn J. Atwood

#49. 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

#50. I truly believed that a man should not be seen to be out front on feminism. That would be just like a man to try to take over the women's movement. We'd taken over everything else in history, in society, in the world, why not feminism, too? No, I don't think so.

Terry Fallis

#51. 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

#52. I love fiction because in fiction you go into the thoughts of people, the little people, the people who were defeated, the poor, the women, the children that are never in history books.

Isabel Allende

#53. 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

#54. In 1946 there was no money in art, no dealer galleries, no craft shops. After the war we started to teach art in every school for the first time. Our generation played a crucial role. We were the stepping stones towards today's galleries.

Theresa Sjoquist

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. Empowered Women 101: The moment you ignore bad behavior, in order to win a person's affection you have not won anything, but a person that has behavioral problems. If you couldn't fix their behavior before you won him, why could you fix him now?

Shannon L. Alder

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. Her interest in natural history was confined to observation of the crows' feet gathering around her eyes.

Nicolas Bentley

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. Any woman who dares to make her own destiny will always put herself in danger.

Philippa Gregory

#68. Is there something in women that makes us long to be humbled? Or is it something in human beings, that when we are overmastered, we rejoice in our subjection? That would explain a lot of history.

Orson Scott Card

#69. Bah! Suffragettes. I've no time for suffragettes. They made the biggest mistake in history. They went for equality. They should have gone for power!

Jennifer Worth

#70. 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

#71. The history of the women's movement in America follows a consciousness-amnesia cycle.

Carol Tavris

#72. The baby should always be saved in preference to the mother. That is the advice of the Holy Church, you know that. I was only reminding women of their duty. There is no need to make everything so personal, Margaret. You make everything into your own tragedy.

Philippa Gregory

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. It appears to me that our sex is only discussed publicly in a derogatory manner. The respectable woman is doomed to anonymity.

Karen Essex

#76. 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

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

Madame De Stael

#78. It's important that young people know about the struggles we faced to get to the point we are today. Only then will they appreciate the hard-won freedom of blacks in this country.

Amelia Boynton Robinson

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. Sexual activity, for women, has a history of vulnerability, in a way it simply does not have for men. The mother has to teach thishidden text to her daughter. The mother's warnings, her attempts to halt sexual development in her daughter, are not so much signs of disapproval or envy, but of fear.

Terri E Apter

#85. 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

#86. If you think there's a thing - anything - women didn't do in the past, you're wrong.

Kameron Hurley

#87. In the old times, women did not get their lives written, though I don't doubt many of them were much better worth writing than the men's.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. If girls can be anything, let them be anything.

This is a book for any girl who ever felt she didn't fit in. You are not alone. You come from a long line of bold, strong, fearless women. Glory in that.

This is a book for anyone who ever underestimated a girl.

Jason Porath

#91. Here we are, women who have been the beneficiaries of education, resources, reproductive choices, travel opportunities, the Internet, and a longer life expectancy than women have ever had in history.
What can and will we do?

Jean Shinoda Bolen

#92. History indulges strange whims in the way it dresses its women.

Michel Faber

#93. We men should be ashamed of ourselves. I think 85 percent of men are dangerous to women. We need to change to a values system nested in compassion and generosity, and women have carried that torch throughout history.

Patch Adams

#94. The history of the labor movement needs to be taught in every school in this land. America is a living testimonial to what free men and women, organized in free democratic trade unions can do to make a better life. We ought to be proud of it!

Hubert H. Humphrey

#95. We knew it was going to be the biggest event scheduled in the history of women's sports, but we didn't ever fathom we would be playing before sold-out stadiums all over the country.

Lorrie Fair

#96. On this International Day for the Abolition of Slavery let us reaffirm the inherent dignity of all men, women and children. And let us redouble our efforts to build societies in which slavery truly is a term for the history books.

Ban Ki-moon

#97. Of how many women might the history be comprised in those few words - 'she lived, suffered, and was buried'!

Anna Brownell Jameson

#98. If nothing else, I want women to understand that they are powerful. If you look back at history, in almost every big moment, in every leap forward, you find ordinary women at the core. We have more ability to make changes in the world than we can imagine if we have the courage to try.

Liya Kebede

#99. As history shows, childless women in America eventually provoke hysteria.

Michelle Goldberg

#100. Until quite recently women's histories were largely overlooked but in the wake of feminism there has been increasing interest in retrieving them.

Alison Weir