Political Leaders

"Black people have freed themselves from the dead weight of the albatross of the Blackness that once hung around their neck. They have done it by picking it up in their arms and holding them out with pride for all the world to see. They have done it by embracing it. Women must come to realize that the superficial symbolisms that surround us are negative only when we ourselves perceive and accept them as negative. We must begin to replace the old negative thoughts about our femininity with positive thoughts and positive actions that affirm them more and more. What we must also remember, is that we’ll be breaking with tradition. And so when you break with tradition, you have to prepare yourselves educationally, economically, and psychologically in order that you’ll be able to accept and bear with the sanctions that society will immediately impose upon us."

"I’m a politician. I detest the word because of the connotation that cling like slime to it. But for want of a better term, I must use it. I have been in politics for twenty years and in that time, I’ve learned a few things about the role of women in politics. The major thing that I have learned is that women are the backbone of America’s political organizations: they are the letter writers, the envelope stuffers, they are the speech writers and the largest numbers of potential voters. Yet, they are but rarely the standard bearers or elected officials."

"when I first announced that I was running for Congress, both male and females advised me, as they had when I ran for the New York State Assembly, go back to teaching, a woman’s vocation, and leave the politics to men."

"We must reject the thought of Saint Paul who said, “let the woman marry in silence.""

"for those who thought I was the best candidate but chose to work for someone else because they viewed my campaign as hopeless, they will need to reexamine their thinking for truly, no woman will ever achieve the presidency as long as their potential supporters hold this view."

"Few, if any Americans, are free of the psychological wounds imposed by racism and antifeminism."

"The question which now faces us is: will women dare in numbers sufficient to have an effect on their own attitude towards themselves and thus change the basic attitudes of males and the general society? Women will have to brave the social sanctions in great numbers in order to free themselves from the sexual, psychological, and emotional stereotyping that plagues us. It is not feminine egoism to say that the future of mankind may very well be ours to determine, it is simply a plain fact, the softness warmth and gentleness that are often used to stereotype us are positive human values, values that are becoming more and more important as the general values of the whole of mankind are put more and more out of kilter. And the strength that marked Christ, Ghandi, and King was a strength born not out of violence but of gentleness, understanding, and gentle human compassion. We must move outside the walls of our stereotypes but, we must retain the values on which they were built."

"The law cannot do it for us. We must do it for ourselves. We must refuse to accept the old, the traditional roles, and stereotypes."

"It was an amazing and apparently spontaneous transformation in the attitudes and behavior of youth; the generation of the 1950s had been so famous for its "apathy" that some college newspapers banned the overused word from their editorials. Now it was enlisting en masse in a high-minded and high-spirited campaign to integrate the society by living and fighting together, going to jail together, and sometimes (this must never be forgotten) dying together. But the civil rights movement did not achieve its lofty ideals. Hotels and buses were desegregated, but blacks perceived slowly that they were not much better off than before. What good is it to be allowed to sit in the front of the bus when you haven't got the fare? Inevitably, the movement fell apart along racial lines. The blacks began to see that they were still, subtly, being treated as inferiors by the white students. They were in the same position that Frederick Douglass found himself in a century earlier with the famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. The well-meaning Garrison was using Douglass as an "exhibition piece," Douglass perceived, and when the great black leader demanded a more important role in the abolition movement, Garrison said he thought that the most black people were able to do at the moment was to serve as exhibits of the fact that they could be taught to read, write and speak about their experiences as slaves. Douglass understood then that he was still in a master-slave relationship with the white man and resolved to break his intellectual chains as well as his physical ones. Young blacks in the 1960s played out the same story. Where they had been integrationist and nonviolent, they became separatist and militant. It was the era of Black Power. Discovering that they were not going to win any important gains by carrying picket signs and coaching people for literacy tests, they declared their independence from white society in every way. In diet, dress, religion, clothing and behavior, they set out to become black, black and beautiful, black and proud. This struck a deep chord in the soul of black Americans, whose great need is to believe in their worth and dignity, their selfhood, after generations of having been beaten, sold, murdered, exploited and demeaned. They have been told in the most direct, brutal ways that they are worthless, and there are deep psychic wounds in the minds of all black Americans. A few hard-won gains in status have not healed them, and healing them is the most important priority for blacks. Independence movements, from community-united black fronts to the Black Panthers and the Republic of New Africa-each has an essential role to play in the cure. Of course, one may criticize some of their tactics. I have, myself; but it should not be missed that the people who hate and fear the militant black movements the most, and who would mobilize all the resources of the law against them, do not come with clean hands; they are people who have profited through the years from black subjugation. Many of them have supported in the past, by inaction or action, a group that was far worse than the most militant black ones, the Ku Klux Klan."

"different women view different segments of the women's movement agenda as priority items."

"The movement has, for the most part, been led by educated white middle-class women. There is nothing unusual about this. Reform as movements are usually led by the better educated and better off. But, if the women's movement is to be successful you must recognize the broad variety of women there are and the depth and range of their interests and concerns. To black and Chicano women, picketing a restricted club or insisting on the title Ms are not burning issues. They are more concerned about bread-and-butter items such as the extension of minimum wage, welfare reform and day care. Further, they are not only women but women of color and thus are subject to additional and sometimes different pressures."

"Who knows? It took a little black woman, Harriet Tubman, to lead three hundred of her people out of slavery; it required another little black woman, Rosa Parks, to say she was tired of going to the back of the bus for a seat, and this act of very real courage precipitated the Montgomery bus boycott, which was a turning point in the civil rights struggle. It may take another little black woman to bring us together' in these troubled times of war and worry."

"Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Nation, and Sojourner Truth were not evolutionaries, they were revolutionaries, just as many of the young women in today’s society and more and more women must join their rank."

"Well, it's being done very subtly in many instances, but our country has definitely moved to the right, there's no question about it, and so you find a kind of what should I say? There's a cutback on the kind of funding that is so necessary to help lower-class and middle class people to at least gain some opportunities. So in some instances it's worse than it used to be."

"The income for domestics in this country. Domestic workers. Every year we had the increase in income domestic workers never, never fit into the scale of things."

"I did this [ran for president as a Democrat instead of third party] because I feel that the time for tokenism and symbolic gestures is past. Women need to plunge into the world of politics and battle it out toe to toe on the same ground as male counterparts."

"Of my two handicaps, being female put many more obstacles in my path than being black."

"The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, 'It's a girl.'"

"Little Shirley grew up with a strong sense of her own destiny. Her early heroes were Mary McLeod Bethune, Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony. Miss Anthony, the homeliest of the suffragettes, was one of the movement's best speakers. In her Brooklyn campaign, Mrs. Chisholm would reel off a long quotation from Miss Anthony ("The hour is come when the women will no longer be the passive recipients...") when she was bothered by male hecklers on street corners. "It always stopped them cold," she reports. (April 1969)"

"The Constitution they wrote was designed to protect the rights of white, male citizens. As there were no black Founding Fathers, there were no founding mothers — a great pity, on both counts. It is not too late to complete the work they left undone. Today, here, we should start to do so."

"My grandmother had a fantastic influence in my life. She would always check homework, and she would, each night she would "Repeat it to me." And if I didn't stand up straight, she said, "Child"-this is the way she'd talk-"Child, you got to stand up straight, let the world see you coming." And I would have to stand up straight...And she would say, "And don't slur your words." She, oh, she was pushy. My grandmother-I would say that my granny had the greatest influence in my life."

"Frantz Fanon pointed out in Black Skin, White Masks, that the anti-Semitic was eventually the anti-negro. I want to say that eventually both are antifeminist and even further, I want to indicate that all discrimination is essentially the same thing – anti-humanism. That is my charge to those of you in the audience this morning, whether you are male or female."

"It's the same old priority that we have today...Housing. Employment. Health. The same priorities follow black people in these United States time after time after time...the same issues. It's strange that they don't change."

"The cost of living is first on all of our minds this important year. Yet the President [Nixon] has decided that it is a year for travel. I ask–when is he going to make a "Trip to Peking" in regard to the basic problems facing us in the United States this year? He is willing to go halfway 'round the world--yet he doesn't have time to walk ten blocks from the White House in Washington and look at the lives people are living under Phase II."

"A sales tax is the enemy of the poor person. It is the enemy of the elderly couple who live on fixed income. And it is the enemy of the everyday American consumer, poor or not."

"She was our Moses that opened the Red Sea for us,""

"Our Lady of Food Justice & SNAP, trailblazer extraordinaire...OG Queen of Brooklyn."

"I don’t bend, that I come from the Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm school of Democrats, and that is unbought and unbossed."

"We are being colonised without New Zealanders having some say in the numbers of people coming in and where they are coming from. This is a deliberate policy of ethnic engineering and re-population."

"I'm putting it to you and to all of my critics, if you can find any Asian leader in any Asian country of whatever political persuasion who doesn't subscribe to the immigration views of New Zealand First, then name that person now. None of you can, all the way to Turkey."

"A corporate raid on a country is not foreign investment. It's just a corporate raid. A corporate raid doesn't expand our wealth, our employment, our exports, is not advantageous to most economies and most economies understand that. In New Zealand we did not. Everything that came from overseas was regarded as foreign investment, when, in fact, it was often a downsizing of the operation, a break-up of the operation and a mass of sackings."

"Anne Arundel County has become the world’s epicenter of military intelligence and defense-related information technology."

"A budget must be more than a ledger sheet. It should have a heart and serve as a blueprint for a better quality of life for all residents."

"My obligation is to focus on the priorities of classroom instruction, parental involvement and student safety, targeting student performance and eliminating unnecessary administrative costs."

"We have now reached the point where you can wander down Queen Street in Auckland and wonder if you are still in New Zealand or some other country."

"Geoffrey Howe from this point on would be remembered not for his staunchness as Chancellor, nor for his skilful diplomacy as Foreign Secretary, but for this final act of bile and treachery. The very brilliance with which he wielded the dagger ensured that the character he assassinated was in the end his own."

"The third and last in this sequence of events was Geoffrey Howe's resignation speech of 13 November 1990... Always a deliberate man – one of his favourite sayings was that a government should proceed "at all deliberate speed" – he had spent the intervening period agonizing and drafting and redrafting. By agreement, I sat by his side when he delivered it; but I was wholly unprepared for what he had to say. It was, quite simply, the most devastating speech I, or I suspect anyone else in the House that afternoon, had heard uttered in the House of Commons... It was all the more powerful because it was Geoffrey, that most moderate, long-suffering and patient of men, who was uttering it."

"Denis Healey: Can he assure us there is no question of American military intervention as this could only make the situation worse? Sir Geoffrey Howe: There is no question of that."

"In this case, the United States had particular reason to consult most closely with those Caribbean countries which had called on it to help resolve the crisis. Nevertheless, their lack of consultation was regrettably less than we would have wished."

"How on earth are the Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank of England, commending the 'Hard ECU' as they strive to, to be taken as serious participants in the debate against that kind of background noise? I believe that both the Chancellor and the Governor are cricketing enthusiasts, so I hope that there is no monopoly of cricketing metaphors. It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain."

"The well-being of the British people and the health of our economy are far more important than any government's commitment to a particular strategy, but to change course now would be fatal to the whole counter-inflation strategy."

"The conflict of loyalty, of loyalty to my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister--and, after all, in two decades together that instinct of loyalty is still very real--and of loyalty to what I perceive to be the true interests of the nation, has become all too great. I no longer believe it possible to resolve that conflict from within this Government. That is why I have resigned. In doing so, I have done what I believe to be right for my party and my country. The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps too long."

"Britain's future depends, above all, on mastering inflation. That can be done, as the right hon. Member for Leeds, East ([[Denis Healey|Mr. [Denis] Healey]]) well knows, only if we bring the money supply under firm control, progressively reduce the rate of monetary growth over the years and pursue the most rigorous restraint on public spending. The supposed alternatives to these policies are a delusion. None of those alternatives would be responsible and none would be sustainable. The action that I have taken today underlines the Government's total and continuing commitment to getting inflation down."

"I start with the measures which the Government announced last Thursday, and which are the immediate occasion of today's debate, and to which the right hon. Gentleman finally came round – a trifle nervously, I thought - after ploughing through that tedious and tendentious farrago of moth-eaten cuttings presented to him by the Conservative Research Department. I must say that part of his speech was rather like being savaged by a dead sheep."

"A fine mind, intellectual conviction, integrity, tenacity, resilience, great courtesy allied to almost ruthless ambition, more than made up for a somewhat colourless public personality (although he was far from colourless in private) and lack-lustre parliamentary performances. Although in no sense an economist, his experience of trying to implement the absurdities of a statutory prices and incomes policy as Minister for Consumer Affairs in the Heath cabinet, coupled with his liberal principles in the true sense of the word, meant that there was a ready meeting of minds. Very much a lawyer, he is a glutton both for work and for detail, and needs remarkably little sleep. This is something he shares with Margaret; but in other respects, they could scarcely be more different. For him politics is about being reasonable, and persuasion a matter of patient education. My manner, too, is very different from Geoffrey's, but I never felt his to be a sign of weakness, as she clearly did. Curiously, in the light of subsequent events, our only significant policy difference was over Europe, where the drift towards a United States of Europe was something that I viewed with deep foreboding, but which Geoffrey manifestly did not."

"The answer is to let Israel say it will recognize a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders, release the prisoners, and recognize the rights of the refugees to return to Palestine. Hamas will have a position if this occurs."

"In the Name of Allah, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful. This is the (final) command of Abu Bakr ibn Abu Quhafah, which he writes as he is exiting this world of the Hereafter... a time during which a disbeliever comes to believe, a wicked-doer comes to have faith, and a liar tells the truth: Verily, I appoint over you Umar ibn al-Khattab as my successor, so listen to him and obey him... If he acts justly, then that is what I think of him and that is what I know about him. But if he changes for the worse (i.e., he begins to act unjustly), then for each person is that which he has earned. Goodness is what I wanted, and I do not know anything of the Unseen world. "And whose who do wrong will come to know by what overturning they will be overturned." Quran, Chapter 26, verse 227"

"In the name of the most merciful God, Abdallah Athik Ibn Abi Quhafa, to the rest of the true believers; health and happiness, and the mercy and blessing of God be upon you. I praise the most high God, and I pray for his prophet Mohammed. This is to acquaint you that I intend to send the true believers into Syria, to take it out of the hands of the infidels, And I would have you know, that the fighting for religion is an act of obedience to God."

"How wretched are those in the sight of God who disobey Him."

"It is a matter of great shame that the birds wake up in the morning before you."