Quotes About Empowerment

I can't really define it in sexual terms alone although our sexuality is so energizing why not enjoy it too?

When I use my strength in the service of my vision it makes no difference whether or not I am afraid.

I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We've been taught that silence would save us, but it won't.

The woman's place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.

There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.

We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other.

Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests.

If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.

I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.

My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.

Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time, and the arena, and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle where we are standing.

Without community, there is no liberation.

Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.

I am my best work - a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines.

But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.

Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.

We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.

There is more to sex appeal than just measurements. I don't need a bedroom to prove my womanliness. I can convey just as much sex appeal, picking apples off a tree or standing in the rain.

A woman can be beautiful as well as intellectual.

Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

Have a belief in yourself that is bigger than anyone's disbelief.

Don't you try and go through life worrying about if somebody like you or not. You best be making sure they doing right by you.