Shirley Chisholm Quotes - Page 3

I had met far more discrimination because I am a woman than because I am black.

The minorities have been confined to the city by a moat of bigotry.

Some fine men are in Congress, too few, trying to do a responsible job. But they are surrounded and almost neutralized by a greater number whose instinct is to make a deal before they make a decision.

Of my two `handicaps,' being female put more obstacles in my path than being black.

I am not antiwhite, because I understand that white people, like black ones, are victims of a racist society. They are products of their time and place.

One distressing thing is the way men react to women who assert their equality: their ultimate weapon is to call them unfeminine. They think she is anti-male; they even whisper that she's probably a lesbian.

I was well on the way to forming my present attitude toward politics as it is practiced in the United States; it is a beautiful fraud that has been imposed on the people for years, whose practitioners exchange gelded promises for the most valuable thing their victims own: their votes. And who benefits the most? The lawyers.

I’d like them to say that Shirley Chisholm had guts. That’s how I’d like to be remembered.

Which is more like genocide, I have asked some of my black brothers - this, the way things are, or the conditions I am fighting for in which the full range of family planning services is available to women of all classes and colors, starting with effective contraception and extending to safe, legal terminations of undesired pregnancies at a price they can afford?

My God, what do we want? What does any human being want?

To label family planning and legal abortion programs "genocide" is male rhetoric, for male ears.

It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality.

Women know, and so do many men, that two or three children who are wanted, prepared for, reared amid love and stability, and educated to the limit of their ability will mean more for the future of the black and brown races from which they come than any number of neglected, hungry, ill-housed and ill-clothed youngsters. Pride in one's race, as will simple humanity, supports this view.