Quotes About Empowerment

There are women who have forgotten that to be a woman doesn't simply mean humiliation, doesn't simply mean bitterness. I haven't forgotten it yet...I'm not going to forget it.

They say the kids are dumb and so they're teaching them to work with their hands. Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure that they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.

The fear that I heard in my father's voice, for example, when he realized that I really believed I could do anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I heard when one of us was ill or had fallen down the stairs or strayed too far from the house. It was another fear, a fear that the child, in challenging the white world's assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destruction.

Whoever debases others is debasing himself. That is not a mystical statement but a most realistic one...

For a woman,' she said, 'I think a man is always a stranger. And there's something awful about being at the mercy of a stranger.

But if women are supposed to be led by men and there aren't any men to lead them, what happens then? What happens then?

It I'd galling indeed to have stood so long, hat in hand, waiting for Americans to grow up enough to realize that you do not threaten them. (From The Fure Next Time)

you have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

I would not allow myself to be defined by other people, white or black." —James Baldwin

It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I'd been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as thought I had a right to be here.

It I'd galling indeed to have stood so long, hat in hand, waiting for Americans to grow up enough to realize that you do not threaten them. (from The Fire Next Time)

It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I'd been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.

You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early. We cannot be free until they are free.

All you are ever told in this country about being black is that it is a terrible, terrible thing to be. Now, in order to survive this, you have to really dig down into yourself and re-create yourself, really, according to no image which yet exists in America. You have to impose, in fact—this may sound very strange—you have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring.

I think the country has to find out what it means by freedom. Freedom is a very dangerous thing. Anything else is disastrous. But freedom is dangerous. You've got to make choices. You've got to make very dangerous choices. You've got to be taught that your life is in your hands.

the little girl who walked into the Little Rock School House and was spat on was much freer than the white child who sat there with a misconceived notion.

The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you've made a hiring mistake. The best people don't need to be managed. Guided, taught, led—yes. But not tightly managed.

You can accomplish anything in life, provided that you do not mind who gets the credit. —

The good-to-great companies built a consistent system with clear constraints, but they also gave people freedom and responsibility within the framework of that system. They hired self-disciplined people who didn't need to be managed, and then managed the system, not the people.

The best people don't need to be managed. Guided, taught, led—yes. But not tightly managed.

In general, the most effective leaders tend to make extensive use of participative decision making. The best decisions are made with some degree of participation—no one is brilliant or experienced enough to have all the answers. No one.

the primary challenge you face is not in increasing creativity per se, but in making your company receptive to the vast amounts of creativity that already exist. The point is not to build a company that depends on you for its innovation, but to continually work towards an organization that is as receptive to new ideas as if those ideas had come from you.

Shared vision is the crucial link in making decentralization work.