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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.
Shirley Chisholm -
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.
Shirley Chisholm
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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.
Shirley Chisholm -
Tremendous amounts of talent are lost to our society just because that talent wears a skirt.
Shirley Chisholm -
Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread and deepseated, that it is invisible because it is so normal.
Shirley Chisholm -
Be as bold as the first man or woman to eat an oyster.
Shirley Chisholm -
You don't make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.
Shirley Chisholm -
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
Shirley Chisholm
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As there were no black Founding Fathers, there were no founding mothers - a great pity, on both counts.
Shirley Chisholm -
That's what's wrong with the country. There are too many 'good soldiers' accepting too many bad decisions.
Shirley Chisholm -
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.
Shirley Chisholm -
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...
Shirley Chisholm -
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.
Shirley Chisholm -
It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality.
Shirley Chisholm
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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.
Shirley Chisholm -
The minorities have been confined to the city by a moat of bigotry.
Shirley Chisholm -
Some members of Congress are among the best actors in the world.
Shirley Chisholm -
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.
Shirley Chisholm -
Racism keeps people who are being managed from finding out the truth through contact with each other.
Shirley Chisholm -
The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, 'It's a girl.'
Shirley Chisholm
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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.
Shirley Chisholm -
To label family planning and legal abortion programs "genocide" is male rhetoric, for male ears.
Shirley Chisholm -
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.
Shirley Chisholm -
Women must become revolutionary. This cannot be evolution but revolution.
Shirley Chisholm