Shirley Chisholm Quotes

Mother always said that even when I was 3, I used to get the 6- and 7-year-old kids on the block and punch them and say, ‘Listen to me.’

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.

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.

Don’t list to those who say YOU CAN’T. Listen to the voice inside yourself that says, I CAN.

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

I am and always will be a catalyst for change.

Women have learned to flex their political muscles. You got to flex that muscle to get what you want.

Of my two handicaps, being female put many more obstacles in my path than being black.

The liberals in the House strongly resemble liberals I have known through the last two decades in the civil rights conflict. When it comes time to show on which side they will be counted, they excuse themselves.

There is a good deal of evidence that the United States is moving to the right, and that the main force behind the movement is a resurgence, in a new form, of racial prejudice.

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.

I have never cared too much what people say. What I am interested in is what they do.

Of course laws will not eliminate prejudice from the hearts of human beings. But that is no reason to allow prejudice to continue to be enshrined in our laws – to perpetuate injustice through inaction.

In the end anti-black, anti-female, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing: anti-humanism.