Marilyn Waring

"I made a submission opposing the Civil Union legislation. Marriage is a civil and political right, and civil and political rights are not negotiable. You can't have half a right."

"It can also be rich and fulfilling."

"If you got this far, I want you to go on. Kia kaha tuahine - sister, be strong."

"I don't believe we shall ever be finished."

"The problems do not lie with female sport and leisure, but with the ways in which the male world and male sport creates and defines the ideological and material conditions that prescribe the female world. As in so much of life, it is time to stand back and object to incremental integration into the male world. Sport, recreation and leisure have a different meaning for women; we should act on the basis of our interpretation."

"And I start to dream - about the activities of women for temperance and the suffrage in this country, and about the activism of women for peace and disarmament; and I wonder if our great-grandmothers would have believed suffrage would be almost universal, and if we dare to dream of a world without nuclear weapons, without weapons, with peace."

"Running in all weathers. Running to the place of work. Running to despair. Running through the bottom door of the old building directly to the bathroom to be sick. Every day the same, and no way to control it. Every day my body saying, 'I can't stomach this anymore.'"

"I am still afraid of getting too tired, of giving up. I am still afraid of staying in the job, and afraid of leaving it."

"I want women to be politically aware all the time, in every conscious moment, in everything they do; and at the same time I know how exhausting it is to be so aware. I know how frustrating it is to feel so powerless. I know how it is to feel defeated before you start. But I want women to progress to a point where they recognise all the politics in their lives, to a point where the awareness is instinctive and need not be excessive, and to a point where they learn to choose political priorities, and to know that often there is not enough energy left for more than a patient observing."

"Women instinctively have the potential for a broader consciousness of politics than men. Our lives are more varied and less circumscribed. We do more things at any one time, in spite of the common myths, and generally have more responsibility."

"Those who can move from understanding the concerns of lower-paid urban omen workers in desperate need of child care to understanding isolated rural women at the end of metal roads who want extensions to bus routes; from noticing the absence of Maori explorers and pioneers from our history syllabus to observing that the same history is a record of only 49 per cent of the New Zealand population - these people are exceptional humans and rare souls in politics. Wherever they are found, they are more likely to be women."