Quotes About Empowerment

I remember the moment when it hit me. I was walking down Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side, and it felt like I was literally walking out of a jail cell that I had been in. At that moment, I realized I could shave if I wanted. It was up to me and no one else.

I wish all high schools could offer students the outside activities that were available at the old Harrison High on Chicago's West Side in the late '20s. They enabled me to become part of a school newspaper, drama group, football team and student government.

We simply must stand with the Boy Scouts and give them the support they need to make a difference in communities across West Virginia.

I don't know why people have divided the whole world into two groups, west and east. Education is neither eastern nor western. Education is education and it's the right of every human being.

A Western woman is not her brother's or her father's property. She's just herself. She can choose her own lifestyle. But in a Muslim family, the honor of the man is between the legs of a woman.

The Western media has depicted the Afghan woman as a helpless, weak individual. I have said it before, and I shall repeat it: The Afghan woman is strong. The Afghan woman is resourceful. The Afghan woman is resilient.

When you look at human rights, look at gender, and the rights of girls for education in the world - that are crucial issues - some are saying 'Oh, these are western values.' But these are really universal values.

We are here because we are determined to offer the people of the Western Cape choices which are long overdue.

Neither Western donor countries like the U.S. nor poor recipients like Cameroon care much about Africans who are poor, rural and female.

Unlike their Western counterparts, Africans take elections very seriously - rising up early to queue patiently in line for hours under the hot sun and cast their ballots. Any misguided attempt to nullify or steal their votes will evoke a strong reaction from them.

I'm not becoming western; I am still following my Pashtun culture, and I'm wearing a shalvar kamiz, a dupatta on my head.

It's incredible being a woman. I was, of course, fortunate to have an Irish mother who is an empowered woman. She comes from the western culture where women's rights and empowerment happened much earlier in the 19th century.

All I've ever wanted to be is a strong, powerful, beautiful black woman.

It is in the power of every individual to do that which the community as a whole is powerless to effect.

When you label so much of what happens to you as 'bad,' it reinforces the feeling that you are a powerless pawn at the mercy of outside forces over which you have no control. And - this is key - labeling something a bad thing almost guarantees that you'll experience it as such.

There's nothing more paralysing or more likely to make people fall into a malaise of believing they are powerless than just hearing that everything's negative and everything's shot to bits. It's really important that we know we can change this planet for the better and that every single one of us, no matter how small we may feel, has that power.

If there's something I hate the most, it's feeling helpless, powerless.

I think a lot of women have felt really powerless.

That's such a powerless place for me to think about: what is working against me. I don't think of what I don't have; I think of what I do and use that to get the next thing.

Nobody is powerless.

Sure you're powerless, sure you're just one person, sure you can't change anything... but you don't have to be miserable about it as well.

You feel kind of powerless as a kid, so I wanted to create a world where the kid actually gets some power.

I feel like, throughout lots of my life, especially growing up, I felt powerless.

If we give up on politics, we're done for. Powerlessness is a self-fulfilling prophesy.