Quotes About Empowerment

In teaching me independence of thought, they had given me the greatest gift an adult can give to a child besides love, and they had given me that also.

The true mark of a leader is not how many followers he has, but how he inspires them to greatness.

It is better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees.

1975 was International Women's Year. I had never heard the word 'feminism' before then. I was writing my books from the experiences of my own life and from watching and studying the lives of those around me in general. I did not know that writing the way I was, was putting me into a special category. I had the first inkling of it on 28 June 1975 when the International Women's League invited me to give a speech.

Before I spoke, the general talk was drifting to women's emancipation, birth control in the Third World, and how the Third World women were suffering. I don't know why I hated people talking about us like that......... So I got up and shocked all those ladies, telling them to mind their own business and leave us Third World women alone. One could have heard a pin drop. I thought at one time I would be thrown out. But I was not.

An intelligent, energetic, educated woman cannot be kept in four walls -- even satin-lined, diamond-studded walls -- without discovering sooner or later that they are still a prison cell.

There will be no real content among American women unless they are made and kept more ignorant or unless they are given equal opportunity with men to use what they have been taught. And American men will not be really happy until their women are.

Our power is in our ability to decide.

We are called to be the architects of the future, not its victims.

We've been there and come back. When you fall in the pit, people are supposed to help you up. But you have to get up on your own. We'll take your arms, but you have to get your legs underneath you and stand.

The greatest gift is to give people your enlightenment, to share it. It has to be the greatest.

I am the miracle.

He is able who thinks he is able.

Therefore, be ye lamps unto yourselves, be a refuge to yourselves. Hold fast to Truth as a lamp; hold fast to the truth as a refuge. Look not for a refuge in anyone beside yourselves. And those, who shall be a lamp unto themselves, shall betake themselves to no external refuge, but holding fast to the Truth as their lamp, and holding fast to the Truth as their refuge, they shall reach the topmost height.

Thousands of candles can be hit by a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decrease by being short

What we think, we become

Modern women ... they don't sew your pockets ... forget that.

[The Barefoot College is] the only college where the teacher is the learner and the learner is the teacher.

Better be an old maid, a woman with herself for a husband, than the wife of a fool; and Solomon more than hints that all men are fools; and every wise man knows himself to be one.

No one pigeonholes us better than we ourselves do.

Just because some man pays you some attention doesn't mean you're somehow obliged to devote your life to him. You're worth MORE than that.

Peaceful Warrior

We don't have to allow stereotypical notions or past experiences to immediately alter our personal future.

I don't want to sound cliché or corny or anything, but Black men and women have always been pitted against each other.We've been made to believe so many lies about each other, and that's why I think our loving each other, whether it's expressed through friendship or marriage or both, is a revolutionary act. It means that we're able to see and accept the truth in each other, and in ourselves.