Quotes from Shirley Chisholm

But it was true that there was a parallel between George Wallace's candidacy and mine, and there were places—such as northern Florida and North Carolina—where we seemed to be the only two candidates in the field. Although we represented opposite poles on many questions of policy, we both spoke for groups who felt dispossessed by the establishment and alienated by the course our society is taking.

The law cannot do the major part of the job of winning equality for women. Women must do it themselves. Against them is arrayed the weight of centuries of tradition, from St. Paul's "Let women learn in silence" down to the American adage "A woman's place is in the home." Women have been persuaded of their own inferiority.

As one put it to me once, "I just wish white women would get as concerned about the health and well-being of black babies being born, as they are about me being able not to have babies.

Muskie, Lindsay, Humphrey, and Jackson were pouring about half a million dollars each into the campaign. In the end, I would spend less than $10,000. It was all I had; there was no alternative to depending on volunteers.

One corrected an outrageous legal discrimination against women schoolteachers. If pregnancy interrupted their careers, they lost their tenure rights. My bill changed that.

I want to be remembered as a woman … who dared to be a catalyst of change.

If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair

As long as the nation permits doctors to run the show, that

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.

It is going to have to be the have-nots — the blacks, browns, reds, yellows, and whites who do not share in the good life that most Americans lead — who somehow arouse the conscience of the nation and thus create a conscience in the Congress. My role, as I see it, is to help them do so, working outside of Washington, perhaps, as much as inside it.

To label family planning and legal abortion programs "genocide" is male rhetoric, for male ears.

Unless nominees are chosen democratically, with the widest possible participation in the process, nothing else really matters.

The only criterion that matters in picking members for committee vacancies is their length of service in Congress. Congress calls it the seniority system. I call it the senility system.

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.

The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says: It's a girl.

As a teacher, and as a woman. I do not think I will ever understand what kind of values can be involved in spending nine billion dollars–and more, I am sure–on elaborate, unnecessary and impractical weapons when several thousand disadvantaged children in the nation's capital get nothing. (From Voices of Multicultural America)

Mr. Nixon had said things like this: "If our cities are to be livable for the next generation, we can delay no long. er in launching new approaches to the problems that beset them and to the tensions that tear them apart." And he said, "When you cut expenditures for education, what you are doing is shortchanging the American future." But frankly. I have never cared too much what people say. What I am interested in is what they do. (From Voices of Multicultural America)

Will part of this nation rejoice at seeing the rest oppressed, and reward a leader who has cunningly manipulated its fears and prejudices? Or will a majority of voters insist on a leader . . . who will appeal to their birthright of idealism and their love of justice, instead of to their heritage of racism and special privilege?

Apparently launching those new [domestic social] programs can be delayed for a while, after all. It seems we have to get some missiles launched first. (From Voices of Multicultural America)

Two more years of fantastic waste in the Defense Department and of penny pinching on social programs (From Voices of Multicultural America)

I did this [ran for president as a democrat instead of third party] because I feel that the time for tokenism and symbolic gestures is past. Women need to plunge into the world of politics and battle it out toe to toe on the same ground as male counterparts. (From Voices of Multicultural America)

for those who thought I was the best candidate but chose to work for someone else because they viewed my campaign as hopeless, they will need to reexamine their thinking for truly, no woman will ever achieve the presidency as long as their potential supporters hold this view. (From Voices of Multicultural America)

The cost of living is first on all of our minds this important year. Yet the President [Nixon] has decided that it is a year for travel. (From Voices of Multicultural America)

The cost of living is first on all of our minds this important year. Yet the President [Nixon] has decided that it is a year for travel. I ask–when is he going to make a "Trip to Peking" in regard to the basic problems facing us in the United States this year? He is willing to go halfway 'round the world--yet he doesn't have time to walk ten blocks from the White House in Washington and look at the lives people are living under Phase II. (From Voices of Multicultural America)