Quotes About Empowerment

Idea people need to be around other idea people. They spur each other to change the world.

Forgive yourself she said. And use this grace to spread my spirit.

All women speak two languages: the language of men and the language of silent suffering. Some women speak a third, the language of queens.

I cannot operate from fear anymore.

Juma: I'm not a woman--I don't know HOW to cook! Khadra: Well, it didn't come with my BOOBS!

Indeed, all books, each and every book ever written, could be said to be offered to the reader as a form of self-help.

Nadia's experiences during her first months as a single woman living on her own did, in some moments, equal or even surpass the loathsomeness and dangerousness that her family had warned her about. But she had a job at an insurance company, and she was determined to survive, and so she did.

Moira Rose Donohue

I don't look down on them, but what can you do? If a man has only ever driven a rickshaw and never in his life held a book in his hand, then what can you expect from him?

I did not give you my permission, Madame, to treat me in this way. I am here to feed you, not to serve as your fodder. I demand more money for such services, Madame. You pay me only for my time. My story, Madame, is mine. I alone am qualified to tell it, to embelish, or to withhold.

Eduquer, c'est allumer un feu

Said to Mitch Album in Tuesday's with Morrie: The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. We're teaching the wrong things and you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it! CREATE YOUR OWN!

Reading and the Democratic Ideal of Education

o professor consegue fazer muita coisa pelos seus alunos, mas quem tem que aprender são eles. O conhecimento só frutifica na mente deles caso o aprendizado ocorra.

To regard anyone except yourself as responsible for your judgment is to be a slave, not a free man. It

Teachability is often confused with subservience. A person is wrongly thought to be teachable if he is passive and pliable. On the contrary, teachability is an extremely active virtue. No one is really teachable who does not freely exercise his power of independent judgment.

Human beings don't necessarily exist inside of (or correspond to) the neat racial, gendered or national boxes into which we often unthinkingly place them. It's a mistake to ask literature to reinforce such structures. Literature tends to crack them. Literature is where we free ourselves.

here and there in the barrios and the favelas, among those who have least, beat hearts of hope, fly sparks of Overcoming.

Conventional wisdom would have one believe that it is insane to resist this, the mightiest of empires, but what history really shows is that today's empire is tomorrow's ashes; that nothing lasts forever, and that to not resist is to acquiesce in your own oppression. The greatest form of sanity that anyone can exercise is to resist that force that is trying to repress, oppress, and fight down the human spirit.

Strength is taking charge of your own destiny and not waiting on others to do so. You don't have to swear and drink and beat people up and slay monsters. You're allowed to cry and take care of children and cook and get your heart broken and dress up and date and get pregnant. But when decisions have to be made, a strong character makes them and doesn't wait for someone else.

My mother, wore the mask, she thought as she napped the neck of the lead enforcer. And now I wear it. But it is not all that I am. Her friends -- her family -- were disarming the enforcers, or killing them before they could react. Some carried simple fishing knives loaned by the locals, and others had grabbed their own weapons from the sand. They were improving, adapting, and surviving, the way Enfys's mother had taught them. They underestimate us, and that is why they lose

But those of Miss Brodie's kind were great talkers and feminists and, like most feminists, talked to men as man?to?man. 

A person is as strong as he thinks he is, and as valuable as he thinks he is.

The teacher does not teach, not really. The teacher offers stimulation and ways in which the person can educate himself or herself. At best the teacher wakes up that person and makes a person hungry.