Quotes from Tarana Burke

'Me too' became a term that was both succinct and powerful, and it was a way to ring up immediate empathy between survivors.

An exchange of empathy provides an entry point for a lot of people to see what healing feels like.

As a community, we create a lot of space for fighting and pushing back, but not enough for connecting and healing.

Even when black folks make me angry, I know that the foundation is that I love us. I want us to win, and I want us to have all the things that we deserve in the world. And that's driven by love.

I founded the 'me too' movement in 2006 because I wanted to find a way to connect with the black and brown girls in the program I ran.

At the start of my career - not just Me Too, which is not the totality of my career - I wish I would have known that you don't have to sacrifice everything for a cause. And that self-care and self-preservation is also a tool that is necessary to do the work.

We have to come together and speak honestly about what the barriers are within our community - and then tear them down. It's really that simple.

Anita Hill thanklessly put herself and her career as a law professor on the line more than 25 years ago to publicly name Clarence Thomas for sexually harassing her at work.

Sexual harassment does bring shame.

I want the women I work with to find the entry point to where their healing is.

The work of #MeToo is about healing. It's about healing as individuals and healing as communities.

Part of the job is to find out what they need. #MeToo is about helping people find those resources.

I'm really a worker and about rolling up my sleeves and doing the work. If that lands me a place in history, then I would be among amazing company.

We talk about sexual harassment in the workplace, but there's sexual harassment in schools, right? There's sexual harassment on the street. So there's a larger conversation to be had. And I think it will be a disservice to people if we couch this conversation in about what happens in Hollywood or what happens in even political offices.

Social media is so immediate and in your face that I know many people have been helped and many people who have been traumatised by their entire timeline filled with 'me too.'

The world doesn't realise I have a regular job!

You cannot put a song - you cannot put a person's talent over somebody's humanity. That's just insane.

If we don't center the voices of marginalized people, we're doing the wrong work.

When one person says, 'Yeah, me, too,' it gives permission for others to open up.

The young girls of color that first encountered the 'me too' movement in community centers and classrooms and church basements were there not only because they needed a safe space, but because they needed their own space.

I'm grounded in joy; I'm not grounded in the trauma anymore.

I don't want to get into splitting hairs. Trauma is trauma. I'm not in a position to quantify or qualify people's trauma.

If I found a healing tree in my backyard, and it grew some sort of fruit that was a healing balm for people to repair what was damaged, I'm not going to just harvest all of those fruits and say, 'You cant have this.' If I have a cure for people, I'm going to share it.

Smoking is definitely not cool anymore, and the folks who have worked against that have done a great job.