Inspirational Quotes for Women

The battle of the sexes is as old as the hills. In patriarchal societies, women are conditioned to accept men as the superior sex. But awareness, education, and life's struggles have led women to shed their inhibitions. Great women leaders, artists, scientists, and other professional women have inspired other women to overcome social obstacles. Read some inspirational quotes by women and for women.

Susan B. Anthony, Women's Activist
Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother.

Maya Angelou, African American PoetHow important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!

Germaine Greer, Academician, The Female Eunuch
Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a sub-humanly ugly mate?

Emily Dickinson, Poet
Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.

Martha Graham, American Choreographer
Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance. Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.

Marian Wright Edelman, American Activist, Families in Peril
We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily difference we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.

Diane Ackerman, Poet
[quoted in Newsweek, September 22, 1986] I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Activist
[Declaration of Sentiments, First Women's Rights Convention] We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Writer
Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real. Perhaps they are.

Ayn Rand, Novelist
Thinking men cannot be ruled.

Barbara Bush, First Lady
[at Wellesley College Commencement] Somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the President's spouse. I wish him well!

Carrie Chapman Catt, Women's Rights Activist
[in a speech at the Senate] No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

Mary Wollstonecraft, Writer, A Vindication of the Rights of Women
Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, men are insultingly supporting their own superiority.

Margaret Thatcher, British Politician
In politics if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.

Susan Faludi, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
Feminism's agenda is basic: It asks that women not be forced to 'choose' between public justice and private happiness.

Whoopi Goldberg, American Actor
[quoted on the Today show] An actress can only play a woman. I'm an actor, I can play anything.

Simone de Beauvoir, French Author, The Second Sex
One is not born a woman, one becomes one.

Nadia Boulanger, Conductor
[on becoming the first woman to conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra] I've been a woman for a little over 50 years and have gotten over my initial astonishment. As for conducting an orchestra, that's a job where I don't think sex plays much part.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Because man and woman are the complement of one another, we need woman's thought in national affairs to make a safe and stable government.