Top 88 Quotes & Sayings by Shirley Chisholm - Page 2

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

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.

That's what's wrong with the country. There are too many 'good soldiers' accepting too many bad decisions.

Any time things appear to be going better, you have overlooked something.

It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts.

Political organizations are formed to keep the powerful in power.

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

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 the Kerner Commission told white America what black America has always known, that prejudice and hatred built the nation’s slums, maintains them and profits by them, white America could not believe it. But it is true. Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies in our own country, poverty and racism, and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed in the eyes of the world as hypocrites when we talk about making people free - (Chapter 9).

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

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

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

I don’t measure America by its achievement but by its potential.

As there were no black Founding Fathers, there were no founding mothers - a great pity, on both counts.

The difference between de jure and de facto segregation is the difference between open, forthright bigotry and the shamefaced kind that works through unwritten agreements between real estate dealers, school officials, and local politicians.

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.

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

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?

... all Americans are the prisoners of racial prejudice.

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.

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.

As a black person I am no stranger to prejudice. But the truth is that in the political world I have been far more often discriminated against because I am a woman than because I am black.

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.

We Americans have a chance to become someday a nation in which all racial stocks and classes can exist in their own selfhoods, but meet on a basis of respect and equality and live together, socially, economically, and politically.

Racism keeps people who are being managed from finding out the truth through contact with each other.

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.

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

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