Shirley Chisholm Quotes

We must reject not only the stereotypes that others hold of us, but also the stereotypes that we hold of ourselves.

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).

All Americans are the prisoners of racial prejudice.

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.

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 ...

There is a good deal of evidence that the United States is moving to the right, and that the main force behind the movement is a resurgence, in a new form, of racial prejudice.

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

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

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

Most Americans have never seen the ignorance, degradation, hunger, sickness, and futility in which many other Americans live ... They won't become involved in economic or political change until something brings the seriousness of the situation home to them.

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

My greatest political asset, which professional politicians fear, is my mouth, out of which come all kinds of things one shouldn't always discuss for reasons of political expediency,

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

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

Our representative democracy is not working because the Congress that is supposed to represent the voters does not respond to their needs. I believe the chief reason for this is that it is ruled by a small group of old men.

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.

As things are now, no one can tell to whom members of Congress are responsible, except that it does not often appear to be to the people. Everyone else is represented in Washington by a rich and powerful lobby, it seems. But there is no lobby for the people.

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

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. What can I say to a man who asks that? All I can do is try to explain to him why he asks the question. You have looked at us for years as different from you that you may never see us really. You don't understand because you think of us as second-class humans. We have been passive and accommodating through so many years of your insults and delays that you think the way things used to be is normal. When the good-natured, spiritual-singing boys and girls rise up against the white man and demand to be treated like he is, you are bewildered. All we want is what you want, no less and no more. (Chapter 13).

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

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

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

I am and always will be a catalyst for change.

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

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 would think, that our society is not yet either just or free.

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.

We have never seen health as a right. It has been conceived as a privilege, available only to those who can afford it. This is the real reason the American health care system is in such a scandalous state.

Congress seems drugged and inert most of the time ... its idea of meeting a problem is to hold hearings or, in extreme cases, to appoint a commission.

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

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.

Service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth.

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

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

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.

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

Political organizations are formed to keep the powerful in power. Their first rule is "don't rock the boat." If someone makes trouble and you can get him, do it. If you can't get him, bring him in. Give him some of the action, let him have a taste of power. Power is all anyone wants, and if he has a promise of it as a reward for being good, he'll be good. Anyone who does not play by those rules is incomprehensible to most politicians.

I ran for the presidency, despite hopeless odds, to demonstrate the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo ... to give a voice to the people the major candidates were ignoring. What I hope most is that now there will be others who will feel themselves as capable of running for high political office as any wealthy, good-looking white male.

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

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

The main thing I have in common with the kids is that
we are tired of being lied to...If it is not too late for America to be saved, the young will save it – and the blacks, the Indians, the Spanish-surnamed,the young women, and the other victims of American society. They, if any, will become the conscience that the Country has lacked. They will try to force it to practice what it has preached.

It is incomprehensible to me, the fear that can affect men in political offices. It is shocking the way they submit to forces they know are wrong and fail to stand up for what they believe. Can their jobs be so important to them, their pres- tige, their power, their privileges so important that they will cooperate in the degradation of our society just to hang on to those jobs?

It is true that women have seldom been aggressive in de- manding their rights and so have cooperated in their own enslavement. This was true of the black population for many years. They submitted to oppression, and even condoned it. But women are becoming aware, as blacks did, that they can have equal treatment if they will fight for it, and they are starting to organize. To do it, they have to dare the sanctions that society imposes on anyone who breaks with its traditions. This is hard, and especially hard for women, who are taught not to rebel from infancy, from the time they are first wrapped in pink blankets, the color of their caste.

The next time a woman of whatever color, or a dark-skinned person of whatever sex aspires to be president, the way should be a little smoother because I helped pave it

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?

The one thing you've got going: your one vote.

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

If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.