Women S Rights Activists

"you don’t wake up and say, I’m going to be an activist, that is the career that I want. It doesn’t work like that really. You find yourself in these spaces because you’re angered by something or you want to change something"

"I had just entered my car then rolled down the window. That was at Langata mall, outside a supermarket called Cleanshelf at 8pm. Some well built, tall and dark man just approached me. I had seen him standing near my car but he was not a suspicious person. He then mumbled something like Wacha kelele, ama tutakumaliza (stop making noise otherwise we will kill you). He hit me on my left eye and walked away. He was not in a hurry to run or hide"

"“Theft doesn’t even stop during a pandemic,”...“We have people dying while some are stealing.”"

"“We are tried of being bombarded every single day with news of how much money we are losing that should be going to fight the COVID pandemic,”"

"I kept asking myself if there was anything I could have done. Perhaps if I had stepped in, he would still be alive"

"extremely personally lewd, body shaming me and my family"

"Women’s rights must be respected and their place should not be in the shadows, but in the light."

"When female media practitioners – who better understand the problems of women – take interest in highlighting the challenges of women in society, it would help in addressing same."

"We knew it would be dangerous"

"We are like property because we are part of the dowry"

"A Samburu woman does not have a single right"

"Our village has turned into a shelter," Lolosoli says. Women and girls fleeing forced marriages, or ostracized for being raped, or trying to save themselves from female genital mutilation, come to Umoja in Kenya for safety. Sons are welcome—as long as they are willing to follow the village's rules and do not try to dominate the women"

"Wearing green uniforms they blended with the trees and when women collected firewood, the soldiers would jump out and rape them, laughing like it was a game,"

"Education is most important so they won't be in the dark like us"

"Even in danger, I've never stopped"

"Rebecca Lolosoli: The Beadmaker's Refuge for Women,Published Mar. 8 2011,by Eliza Griswold"

"Traditional media in Ghana has a reputation for being politicized, particularly during elections. That’s why social media initiatives like Ghana Decides are important. They offer a good balance for Ghanaians at home and abroad: non-partisan, factual, and issue based information, with none of the ‘politricks’."

"What I keep thinking is: why didn't I know about you? I have needed you and I didn't know. I grew up in the Puerto Rican independence movement, in a home full of books, speaking English and knowing other families who did, pacifists, university people, circles you would have moved through. I am a poet, a translator, a feminist historian studying women's resistance, women's voices, and I never heard that Luis Muñoz Marín had a first wife, far less one like you...The world is full of opportunities to be of use, but I believe with you that poetry has a special power to reconnect our severed bonds, and I will practice it, because for myself and also for the world, you have reminded me that poetry is bread."

"The lack of understanding that comes from actual ignorance is notorious. Most North Americans know nothing even of Puerto Rico, which has been under the Stars and Stripes for thirty years; so it is hardly surprising that they are apt to confuse Uruguay with Uganda."

"Science of course is the great international bond."

"Translators, again-the most abused and patient lot of folk on earth-are helpful in making us better acquainted; though we hope the time will soon come when citizens of the twenty-one republics will no longer need translators. There is no reason for our not speaking each other's language."

"Many temples have been built to shelter Pan-Americanism. Some of them have been built with marble, some with words. But deep and true friendship is no less than beautiful. It does not come even to temples merely because it is summoned, nor even because each country of our continents may sincerely desire its coming. International friendship to be real must be unselfish, and complete unselfishness is hard of attainment when interests differ; as hard for nations as for individuals. But here, today, you have before your eyes a concrete demonstration of that very thing: a Pan-Americanism that includes all, that excludes none, that makes not the slightest difference between one and another. The women of all the Americas have one need. Every enlightened woman of this hemisphere desires for her sister of another country, the same good which she craves for herself. The woman of no country of our Americas believes that equal rights for herself will in any way give her or her country an advantage over her sisters to the north or to the south. She does not wish such advantage. She does not ask for one thing and pay with another; she is not carrying on a barter of power, of friendship, of advantage. She asks for herself and for every other woman in all of our countries, one thing, for the good of all-and for the good of those countries which we women have helped upbuild and are helping uphold."

"Our petition as women, amongst you free citizens of Pan America, is like the petition of my Puerto Rico in the community of American States. We have everything done for us and given us but sovereignty. We are treated with every consideration save the one great consideration of being regarded as responsible beings. We, like Puerto Rico, are dependents. We are anomalies before the law. We, the women of the Americas, ask for a treaty granting us equal rights before the law. We ask this not for one woman, not for one country, not for one race, but for the women of Pan America, for the women who are proving to you here today by their solidarity and mutual trust that Pan-Americanism is a fact. We offer you a new definition: Pan-Americanism is the deep desire of every country for the common good of all, favoring none and slighting none. It is the oneness of purpose that makes of us all responsible citizens of the spiritual commonwealth of Pan America. We offer you a definition and we offer you an opportunity; the opportunity of acting with unparalleled generosity and vision. We, the women of America, ask of you, the men of America, a treaty guaranteeing us our equal human rights."

"Puerto Rico is Spanish American in its past, Anglo-Saxon in its present, and, I trust, in the deepest sense Pan-American in its future"

"a visionary and fervent Pan-Americanist...one of the most extraordinary and creative figures of the twentieth century, a builder of bridges and hopes...a magnificent woman.'"

"Investing in girl-child education has immediate and long term benefits. It does not only build the assertiveness of the girls, it also builds self-confidence and empowers them to properly position themselves to be active participants in nation building,"—— "As an educationist, my joy knows no bounds when I see girls excel and as First Ladies and agenda shapers of our respective countries, we must resolve to continue to give more meaning to girl-child education and not only pay lip service to it."

"My late husband and I loved God’s word and after his demise, the Bible remains my most important source of comfort and encouragement; by the word of God, you can overcome any challenge that you face in life and it will help you take responsibility of your own lives."

"This working partnership of facts and imagination gives us reality, which I think is another word of poetry. I do not believe that poetry can ever be anything but truth. When poetry speaks in parables, or in metaphors or in similes, it is not to lead you away from what is real to what is unreal, but rather to lead you by the quickest path to the very core of reality. Poetry does not give us fanciful falsehood instead of truth: poetry is a shorthand for truth itself. When we depart from truth, we depart from poetry."

"Another's estimate has never the rich completeness of the sudden word from the inner self."

"It is poetry to express an entire philosophy in simple words"

"...of poetry as daily fare-of poetry as being as much the daily bread as the white hyacinths of life."

"For the world, which seems so various, is made up to a large extent of a few patterns used over and over again in innumerable combinations. We need not falsify in order to find the identities. We need only to look with comprehending eyes. Poetry is this recognition, and expression, of identities. The common words of our language, and of the language of every other people, is full of such poetry..."

"There is nothing to be afraid of in the name of poetry, though it is in all languages and in all ages a name for wisdom and beauty. Whether we know it or not, poetry is a part of the everyday life of all of us. It is about us, and inside us, all the time. More often than not, we do not recognize it. Even when it is most present, we may not realize that what we are seeing or hearing or even saying is poetry. But we can learn to recognize and realize it: and to the extent to which we may do so, we ourselves become poets. In an essay familiar to most high-school students, Carlyle declared that everyone who reads a poem understandingly becomes a co-creator of the poem, and so a poet. We are creators in greater degree; and, therefore, poets the more, when we open our eyes and ears and minds to the innumerable little things as well as the big things that make life."

"The Titanic disaster was a tragedy that was as unnecessary as turning the Brown Palace Hotel into Pikes Peak."

"Reality star George Galloway has dubbed Irish MEP Clare Daly a "Joan of Arc who has come back to walk among us" for her take on the war in Ukraine. The ex-MP called the politician "crusading" for speaking "so powerfully the walls of the European Parliament shake." Big Brother star George played a clip of Clare Daly addressing the European Parliament on his online talk show The Mother of All Talk Shows."

"State sponsorship of terrorism is a term of US law. It doesn’t exist in EU law, but a Zelensky advisor called for it in the Parliament... And here we are again reporting for duty. And all it will do is make peace harder to achieve. Exactly, of course, what the extremists want. No peace. No off ramps, all bridges burning and Ukraine a permanent abattoir in a suicidal holy crusade against Russia. So, if you want to start naming state sponsors of terrorism, let's do it. European sponsorship of Israeli terrorism in Palestine, Western sponsorship of Saudi terror in Yemen, ISIS, the product of French, American, British, Turkish and Gulf sponsorship in Syria and Iraq, decades of right-wing US-backed terrorism against the Cuban Revolution. The Contras in Nicaragua, death squads in Guatemala, in El Salvador. Remember Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, horror after horror, terror after terror. There's nothing constructive about the pot calling the kettle black, would ye ever cop on, start championing peace, an end to the war which is patently in the interests of the EU, Ukrainian, and Russian citizens."

"You had no interest in talking to me for five years, so I've no interest in talking to you."

"There's no doubt about it, we're living in times where…the lives of innocent civilians are sacrificed in the wars of their masters. Yes in Ukraine, but not only. Since the last plenary tens of thousands of Afghani citizens have been forced to flee in search of food and safety, five million children face famine, an agonizing and painful death, a five hundred percent increase in child marriages and children being sold just so they can survive, and not a mention of it, not here, not anywhere, no wall-to-wall TV coverage, no emergency humanitarian response, no special plenaries, not even a mention in this plenary, no Afghani delegations and no statements. My God, they must be wondering what makes their humanitarian crisis so unimportant. Is it the color of their skin, is it that they’re not white? They're not European? That their problems come from a U.S. gun or a U.S. invasion? Is it that the decision to rob their country's wealth was taken by a despotic U.S. president rather than a Russian one? Because my God, all wars are evil, and all victims deserve support and until we get on that page, we have no credibility whatsoever."

"Our point of view is if people from Ukraine or anywhere else want to join the European Union, and that’s a free choice decided by the majority, and it's done on terms that don't bankrupt its populations, well, then that's a matter for them. Of course, that's not what's on the table at the moment. The vote is being used to ratchet up the tension with Russia. Many people in Ukraine are fighting to defend their country, and that's actually legitimate in many ways. But I highly doubt that any of them are fighting or dying for European values – in a sense, because it is not stopping the war, Europe is forcing them to die. The president of Zambia came in … and he criticized the war. He said we should be for peace. He spoke about food insecurity in Africa and the global consequences of this war. He obviously was sympathetic with the victims in Ukraine, and said that we need to work together as an international community to end the war and to have a negotiated peace. Yet the overwhelming majority, like 95% of the Parliament, sat on its hands and did not applaud that sentiment. These are warmongers. And the tone in the European Parliament, being led mainly by the Baltics, is that they want the war to continue. They're deluded. Anybody who argues for peace is being accused of appeasing Russia, of being a Putin puppet, when in actual fact the continuation of the war is killing and damaging Ukrainians more than anyone else. So it's utter lunacy."

"The simple answer is this war will end when the US wants it to end. You might have thought that Europe, because it's engaging in a sort of a collective suicide, at least economically, with this war, might be pushing for it to end. Right now there’s a whole wave of strikes all across Europe, which will only escalate the longer the war continues on. I think turmoil in the Global South has to be a cause for concern for all of these actors. I suppose Italy, France and Germany have been less warmongering than the others, and are getting enormous abuse for that, by the way, by their European friends. You'd hope that maybe they could take the lead."

"At this precise moment, of course, as usual, the voices challenging the rush to war are attacked and silenced, smeared as traitors, cronies, Putin puppets, Kremlin stooges, Russian agents. Frankly, it's pathetic, And I don't make the comparison lightly, but the crudeness and cynicism of these slurs coming from mainstream E.U. parties might as well have been written by [Nazi war criminal] Hermann Goring, who infamously said that even though people never want war, they can be brought to war with threats and smears. This house should be ashamed of this debate. Words are being twisted, meanings subverted, and the truth turned on its head. Opposing the horrible madness of war is not anti-European, it's not anti-Ukrainian, it's not pro-Russian: it's common sense. The working class of Europe has nothing to gain from this war and everything to lose. And I find it laughable that those calling for arms to Ukraine never call for arms for the people of Palestine, or for the people of Yemen. Unlike you, I oppose all war. I want it stopped. I make no apology for that."

"Injustice eats me internally. I get very restless when I come in touch with it."

"More and more I realized that Ireland could rely only on force, in some form or another, to free herself."

"Dress suitably in short skirts and strong boots, leave your jewels and gold wands in the bank, and buy a revolver."

"She was like an extinct volcano, her former violent self burnt out ... What she had fought for had not really come into being; maybe nothing on earth could have brought it into being, so romantic and heroic was it."

"...condemned to death, Pardoned, drags out lonely years Conspiring among the ignorant."

"Armed for the battle, kneel we before thee / Bless Thou our banners, God of the Brave"

"You have a hatred of the Catholic Church, ... But, for your poetry you will be forgiven. But sin no more."

"Je pense qu’une constitution ne doit pas rester figée, car la société d’aujourd’hui n’est pas celle de demain et les jeunes de demain n’auront pas les mêmes aspirations que ceux d’aujourd’hui."

"We need to have men understand gender equality and cease to be oppressors and perpetrators. This will increase the involvement of human rights affairs."