Shirley Chisholm
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.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Differences
I don’t measure America by its achievement but by its potential.Collection: America
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.Collection: Moving
Rhetoric never won a revolution yet.Collection: Revolution
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.Collection: Jobs
I had met far more discrimination because I am a woman than because I am black.Collection: Black
The minorities have been confined to the city by a moat of bigotry.Collection: Cities
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.Collection: White
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.Collection: Men
I’d like them to say that Shirley Chisholm had guts. That’s how I’d like to be remembered.Collection: Guts
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.Collection: Beautiful
Of my two `handicaps,' being female put more obstacles in my path than being black.Collection: Two
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?Collection: Brother
To label family planning and legal abortion programs "genocide" is male rhetoric, for male ears.Collection: Abortion
It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality.Collection: Reality
My God, what do we want? What does any human being want?Collection: Doe
That's what's wrong with the country. There are too many 'good soldiers' accepting too many bad decisions.Collection: Country
Any time things appear to be going better, you have overlooked something.Collection: Overlooked
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Home
The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, 'It's a girl.'Collection: Girl
Be as bold as the first man or [woman] to eat an oyster.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Powerful
Racism keeps people who are being managed from finding out the truth through contact with each other.Collection: Truth
I stand before you today as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency of the United States. I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud. I'm not the candidate of the women's movement of this country, although I am a woman, and I'm equally proud of that. I am not the candidate of any political bosses or fat cats or special interests... I am the candidate of the people...Collection: Country
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.Collection: Political
... all Americans are the prisoners of racial prejudice.Collection: Racism
Some members of Congress are among the best actors in the world.Collection: Actors
Political organizations are formed to keep the powerful in power.Collection: Powerful
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).Collection: Country
We have been so patient and loyal ... and what has it gotten us? We want our full share now.Collection: Loyal
As there were no black Founding Fathers, there were no founding mothers - a great pity, on both counts.Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Class