“Congress is a middle-aged, middle-class, white male power structure … no wonder it’s been so totally unresponsive to the needs of this country.”

This woman’s place is in the House – the House of Representatives.

The establishment is made up of little men, very frightened.

I always had a decent sense of outrage.

Women have been trained to speak softly and carry a lipstick. Those days are over.

Maybe we weren’t at the Last Supper, but we’re certainly going to be at the next one.

Abortion doesn’t belong in the political arena. It’s a private right, like many other rights concerning the family.

Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel.

Women will not simply be mainstreamed into the polluted stream. Women are changing the stream, making it clean and green and safe for all – every gender, race, creed, sexual orientation, age, and ability.

I prefer the word ‘homemaker’ because ‘housewife’ always implies that there may be a wife someplace else.

In the face of so much pain, I remain an incurable optimist. I am fueled by the passion of the women I have been privileged to meet and work with, buoyed by their hope for peace, justice, and democracy.

We are coming down from our pedestal and up from the laundry room.

We need laws that protect everyone – men and women, straights and gays, regardless of sexual perversion…ah, persuasion.

They are a very extensive minority who have suffered discrimination and who have the same right to participation in the promise and fruits of society as every other individual.

Women will change the nature of power, rather than power changing the nature of women.

Nixon impeached himself. He gave us Ford as his revenge.

She (a woman politician) will be challenging a system that is still wedded to militarism and that saves billions of dollars a year by underpaying women and using them as a reserve cheap labor supply

The white man is not indigenous to Africa. Africa is for Africans. Zimbabwe is for Zimbabweans.

Black people need some peace, white people need some peace, and we’re gonna have to fight, we’re gonna have to struggle, we’re gonna have to struggle relentlessly to bring about some peace.

When growing up, I saw segregation. I saw racial discrimination. I saw those signs that said white men, colored men. White women, colored women. White waiting. And I didn’t like it.

Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.

I don’t stand for black man’s side, I don’t stand for white man’s side, I stand for God’s side.

Keep England White’ is a good slogan.

There can be no black-white unity until there is first some black unity.

Whenever someone refers to me as someone “who happens to be black,” I wonder if they realize that both my parents are black. If I had turned out to be Scandinavian or Chinese, people would have wondered what was going on.