Quotes About Empowerment

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

I felt the joy of knowing that in some small way I had fought back against someone who wanted to rule me against my will. I said no.

Leadership, Boal concluded, is the art of facilitating imaginative interventions by the greatest possible number...

At some point you can no longer insist that your children do this or that. I had learned this lesson the hard way. You have to let them fall down and then you can help them get back up. But you have to let them become adults.

Give the ones you love wings to fly, roots to come back to, and reasons to stay.' I just always loved

at my age, if I were sexually harassed, I'd send the guy flowers

Something in me had changed when Archie asked me if I wanted Sharon's cats. I thought then that if I didn't start saying what it was that I wanted, I shouldn't expect to get it. Archie got so off base about me because I let him be so off base about me. I was never clear.

Isn't it amazing how much good people can do for each other when you give them the opportunity to help?

I want you to think . Gawd got his special purpose for you, just like He does for every one of us. He done give you a very good mind. The world you have when you grow up is gonna be the one you make. You use your mind and make it better.

Give the ones you love wings to fly, roots to come back to, and reasons to stay.

But notice that where you must do work not your own, assume these responsibilities; see that you do not allow them to be thrust upon you. What you undertake open-eyed will seldom be made later a cause of martyrdom and sullenness.

All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail.

Act boldly and unseen forces will come to your aid.

All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail. That is the talisman, the formula, the command of right-about-face which turns us from failure towards success.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I would rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.

Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you that there is magic in it, and if you show yourself naked for me, I'll be naked for you. It will be our covenant

I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way. Do not buy into their system of censorship, imagining that if you drop this character or hide that emotion, you can slide through their blockades. Do not eat your heart out in the hope of pleasing them.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I'd rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.

For years and years, I convinced myself that I was unbreakable, an animal with an animal strength or something not human at all. Me, I told people, I take damage like a wall, a brick wall that never falls down, never feels anything, never flinches or remembers. I am one woman but I carry in my body all the stories I have ever been told, women I have known, women who have taken damage until they tell themselves they can feel no pain at all.

Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different...I claimed myself and remade my life. Only when I knew I belonged to myself completely did I become capable of giving myself to another, of finding joy in desire, pleasure in our love, power in this body no one else owns.

The only magic we have is what we make in ourselves, the muscles we build up on the inside, the sense of belief we create from nothing.

Dorothy Corkille Briggs

No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.

I despised men who accepted their fate. I shaped mine twenty times and had it broken twenty times in my hands.