"The world was hers for the reading."
— Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)

"Women make up one half of society. Our society will remain backward and in chains unless its women are liberated, enlightened and educated"
— Saddam Hussein (The Revolution and Woman in Iraq)

"we are becoming the men we wanted to marry"
— Gloria Steinem

"Today I married myself and I became my own wife."
— Johnette Napolitano, Concrete Blonde

"“As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”"
— Virginia Woolf

"Someday every woman will have orgasms- like every family has color TV- and we can all get on with the business of life. "
— Erica Jong (How to Save Your Own Life)

"But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women."
— Audre Lorde

"Never complain, never explain, get the thing done and let them howl."
— Nellie McClung

"You learn that the only way to get rock-star power as a girl is to be a groupie and bare your breasts and get chosen for the night. We learn that the only way to get anywhere is through men. And it's a lie."
— Kathleen Hanna

"Change happens very slow and very sudden."
— Dorothy Bryant (The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You)

"I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing….
I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black."
— Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)

"What can we learn from women like Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday that we may not be able to learn from Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Church Terrell? If we were beginning to appreciate the blasphemies of fictionalized blues women - especially their outrageous politics of sexuality - and the knowledge that might be gleaned from their lives about the possibilities of transforming gender relations within black communities, perhaps we also could benefit from a look at the artistic contributions of the original blues women."
— Angela Y. Davis

"To call woman the weaker sex is a libel; it is man's injustice to woman. If by strength is meant brute strength, then, indeed, is woman less brute than man. If by strength is meant moral power, then woman is immeasurably man's superior. Has she not greater intuition, is she not more self-sacrificing, has she not greater powers of endurance, has she not greater courage? Without her, man could not be. If nonviolence is the law of our being, the future is with woman. Who can make a more effective appeal to the heart than woman?"
— Mohandas K. Gandhi

"Unlike Joseph her husband, Mary is neither upright nor pious, but she is not blame for this, the blame lies with the language she speaks if not with the men who invented it, because that language has no feminine form for the words upright and pious."
— José Saramago (The Gospel According to Jesus Christ)

"people call me a feminist whenever i express sentiments that distinguish me from a doormat"
— Rebecca West

"la femme est un homme comme les autres"
— Tejal Shah

"Additionally, many widows took over family shops or businesses- and, not uncommonly, ran them better than their dead husbands. Y.pestis [black death germ] turns out to have been something of a feminist."
— John Kelly (The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time)

"I have a brain and a uterus, and I use both. "
— Patricia Schroeder