Shirley Chisholm Quotes

Service is the rent that you pay for room on this earth.

You don't make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.

Don't list to those who say YOU CAN'T. Listen to the voice inside yourself that says, I CAN.

When I die, I want to be remembered as a woman who lived in the twentieth century and who dared to be a catalyst of change. I don't want to be remembered as the first black woman who went to Congress. And I don't even want to be remembered as the first woman who happened to be black to make a bid for the Presidency I want to be remembered as a woman who fought for change in the twentieth century. That's what I want.

In the end anti-black, anti-female, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing: anti-humanism.

Defeat should not be the source of discouragement, but a stimulus to keep plotting.

I have never cared too much what people say. What I am interested in is what they do.

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.

I ran for the presidency, despite hopeless odds, to demonstrate the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo.

Health is a human right, not a privilege to be purchased.

Laws will not eliminate prejudice from the hearts of human beings. But that is no reason to allow prejudice to continue to be enshrined in our laws - to perpetuate injustice through inaction.

I am and always will be a catalyst for change.

Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread and deepseated, that it is invisible because it is so normal.

I've always met more discrimination being a woman than being Black...men are men.

Women must become revolutionary. This cannot be evolution but revolution.

Tremendous amounts of talent are lost to our society just because that talent wears a skirt.

I love America not for what she is, but for what she can become.

I was the first American citizen to be elected to Congress in spite of the double drawbacks of being female and having skin darkened by melanin. When you put it that way, it sounds like a foolish reason for fame. In a just and free society it would be foolish. That I am a national figure because I was the first person in 192 years to be at once a congressman, black and a woman proves, I think, that our society is not yet either just or free.

At present, our country needs women's idealism and determination, perhaps more in politics than anywhere else.

America has the laws and the material resources it takes to insure justice for all its people. What it lacks is the heart, the humanity.

My God, what do we want? What does any human being want? Take away an accident of pigmentation of a thin layer of our outer skin and there is no difference between me and anyone else. All we want is for that trivial difference to make no difference.

When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.

We have been so patient and loyal ... and what has it gotten us? We want our full share now.

Rhetoric never won a revolution yet.

Be as bold as the first man or [woman] to eat an oyster.