Shirley Chisholm Quotes
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Service is the rent that you pay for room on this earth.
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In the end anti-black, anti-female, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing: anti-humanism.
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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.
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When I die, I want to be remembered as a woman who lived in the twentieth century and who dared to be a catalyst of change. I don't want to be remembered as the first black woman who went to Congress. And I don't even want to be remembered as the first woman who happened to be black to make a bid for the Presidency I want to be remembered as a woman who fought for change in the twentieth century. That's what I want.
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Don't list to those who say YOU CAN'T. Listen to the voice inside yourself that says, I CAN.
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You don't make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.
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Tremendous amounts of talent are lost to our society just because that talent wears a skirt.
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It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality.
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Some members of Congress are among the best actors in the world.
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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.
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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.
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Racism keeps people who are being managed from finding out the truth through contact with each other.
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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...
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That's what's wrong with the country. There are too many 'good soldiers' accepting too many bad decisions.
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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.
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Be as bold as the first man or woman to eat an oyster.
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To label family planning and legal abortion programs "genocide" is male rhetoric, for male ears.
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As there were no black Founding Fathers, there were no founding mothers - a great pity, on both counts.
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There is little place in the political scheme of things for an independent, creative personality, for a fighter. Anyone who takes that role must pay a price.
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The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, 'It's a girl.'
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Women must become revolutionary. This cannot be evolution but revolution.
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I am and always will be a catalyst for change.
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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.
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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.