Alice Donovan Rouse

37 Powerful Quotes From 37 Remarkable Women

We will not be silent! We will not play dead!
Sade Andria Zabala
March 7, 2017
“What I know for sure is that every day brings a chance for you to draw in a breath, kick off your shoes, and step out and dance — to live free of regret and filled with as much joy, fun, and laughter as you can stand. You can either waltz boldly onto the stage of life and live the way you know your spirit is nudging you to, or you can sit quietly by the wall, receding into the shadows of fear and self-doubt.”
— Oprah Winfrey, What I Know For Sure
Tagged: Life, Self-Doubt, Affirmative Advice
“It’s not my responsibility to be beautiful. I’m not alive for that purpose. My existence is not about how desirable you find me.”
— Warsan Shire, via twitter.com
Tagged: feminism, Being A Female, Female Empowerment
“We should not wait for someone else to come and raise our voice. We should do it by ourselves. We should believe in ourselves. Yes, we can do it. One day you will see that all the girls will be powerful; all the girls will be going to school. And it is possible only by our struggle; only when we raise our voice.”
— Malala Yousafzai, Malala Yousafzai - 2013 Vital Voices Global Leadership Awards, Global Trailblazer
Tagged: Alpha Female, Women, Woman, voice, Power, Believe In Yourself, Girls, School, Education, Struggle
“In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.”
— Anne Frank, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
Tagged: Literature Quotes, Literary Quotes
“When someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level. No, our motto is, when they go low, we go high.”
— Michelle Obama, Michelle Obama’s dignified restraint: “When they go low, we go high” are words to live by
Tagged: bullying, Manners, Class
“If we’re going to heal, let it be glorious.”
— Beyoncé Knowles, Beyoncé's Powerful Grammys Performance Was All About Women & Motherhood
Tagged: Healing, Moving Forward, Survivor, Beyonce, beyonce Grammys, beyonce grammys performance, beyonce lemonade, beyonce grammys performance meaning, beyonce Feminism, beyonce pregnant, beyonce twins, beyonce womens march
“Love is profoundly political. Our deepest revolution will come when we understand this truth. Only love can give us the strength to go forward in the midst of heartbreak and misery. Only love can give us the power to reconcile, to redeem, the power to renew weary spirits and save lost souls. The transformative power of love is the foundation of all meaningful social change. Without love our lives are without meaning. Love is the heart of the matter. When all else has fallen away, love sustains.”
— Bell Hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love
Tagged: Love, Powerful, Activism, Social Change
“i bleed
every month.
but
do not die.
how am i
not
magic.”
— Nayyirah Waheed, salt.
Tagged: period, menstruation, Womanhood
“And one day, you’ll wake up and realize that you are too big for your own skin.

Molt.
Don’t be afraid.”
— Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being
Tagged: Existential Crisis
“Random tip: Beware of the controlling boyfriend that tells you how to speak, how to dress, etc. You don't wanna be married to that.”
— Lea Salonga
Tagged: Toxic Relationships, Abusive Relationships, Dating Advice
“Mothers don't realize, but when they put their sons and boys (even when they have grown into men) ahead of their daughters, they are leaving the most painful heartbreaking legacy: that we are inferior. That we do not deserve love as easily, and must work for it with all our blood and sweat, tears and pain. That we cannot have love if we are "bad". Which means headstrong, emotional, needy, disobedient, disruptive, fiesty, strong willed, free, big, open, confident, sexual. In sum total: Difficult. Too much.

My holy prayer is that we all have mothers who encourage us to eat the forbidden fruit, who rejoice in our hard fought for escape from the garden we were caged in. Who lead us into the new garden where consciousness blossoms and we learn about our divine feminine power. Who tell us to taste taste taste, because the apple illumins who we truly are. Feminine. Formidable. Force. And who tell us to trust the serpent. Because she is not temptation, but enlightenment.

My holy prayer is that our mothers honor their daughters' rebellious nature, her strong will, her independent mind, her wildness. That these be held as sacred virtues. To SEE and honor the Goddess that lives in her. In all her wild glory. So that she may Rise. And to be with her, beside her, in all the holy disruptions and sacred rebellions to come.

And to never put her second.”
— Monique Wilson
Tagged: Mother Daughter, Parenting, Motherhood, Womanhood
“The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.”
— Rosa Luxemburg, The Rosa Luxemburg Reader
Tagged: Activism, Revolution, Standing Up, Truth, Justice
“Give a girl an education and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without further expense to anybody.”
— Jane Austen
Tagged: Education, Knowledge, Independent Woman
“By virtue of her pen she has won her freedom. She ranges the world, free like any other human being to laugh, to scold, to say what she likes, to be what she is.”
— Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays
Tagged: Free Spirit
“But women have lust, too. Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of infants, feeder of soul, body and pride of man?”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Lust, Womanhood, gender roles, Gender Norms
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
— Marie Curie, Our Precarious Habitat
Tagged: Ignorance, Knowledge, Understanding, Science
“People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
— Rosa Parks
Tagged: Civil Rights, BLM
“Stand for the weak, for the poor, for the lonely, for the fearful, for the ignorant, and for the silent. We must not stand for the powerful only, or for the rich only, or for the arrogant only. Justice does not demand that.”
— Wangari Maathai, Unbowed: A Memoir
Tagged: Standing Up, Activism
“If the state stops behaving badly, then I won’t have anything to say. Then there will be no cause for anyone to exploit anything. But if what I say is being exploited, the root of the problem is the state’s behavior.”
— Shirin Ebadi, Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran
Tagged: Corruption, Activism
“Now girls are often raised to see love only as giving. Women are praised for their love when that love is an act of giving. But to love is to give AND to take. Please love by giving, and by taking. Give and be given. If you are only giving and not taking, you’ll know. You’ll know from that small and true voice inside you that we females are so often socialized to silence. Don’t silence that voice. Dare to take.”
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Grads: Make Feminism an Inclusive Party
Tagged: Love, Dating Advice, Love Yourself, Self-Worth
“No human being is illegal.”
— Angela Davis, Here's the Full Transcript Of Angela Davis's ~Fire~ Women's March Speech
Tagged: racism, Immigiraition, Refugees, Immigrants
“They may call me a sinner, but I am at peace with myself.”
— Brigitte Bardot
Tagged: Sin, Womanhood, Self-Love, femininity
“When the United Nations refugee agency was created after World War II, it was intended to help people return to their homes after conflict. It wasn’t created to feed, year after year, people who may never go home, whose children will be born stateless, and whose countries may never see peace... And above all, the international community as a whole has to find a path to a peace settlement. It is not enough to defend our values at home, in our newspapers and in our institutions. We also have to defend them in the refugee camps of the Middle East, and the ruined ghost towns of Syria.”
— Angelina Jolie, Angelina Jolie on the Syrians and Iraqis Who Can’t Go Home
Tagged: War, Syria, Refugees, Selective Morality
“Does Mary Poppins have an orgasm? Does she go to the bathroom? I assure you, she does.”
— Julie Andrews, JULIE ANDREWS: PRIM AND IMPROPER
Tagged: Lady
“We have to stop perpetuating the racist myth that [only a] white man can save the world. It’s not based on actual fact. Our heroes don’t look like Matt Damon. They look like Malala. Gandhi. Mandela. Your big sister when she stood up for you to those bullies that one time. [M]oney is the lamest excuse in the history of being human. So is blaming the Chinese investors. (POC’s choices can be based on unconscious bias, too.) Remember it’s not about blaming individuals, which will only lead to soothing their lame ‘b-but I had good intentions! but…money!’ micro-aggressive excuses. Rather, it’s about pointing out the repeatedly implied racist notion that white people are superior to POC and that POC need salvation from our own color via white strength. When you consistently make movies like this, you ARE saying that. YOU ARE. Yes, YOU ARE. YES YOU ARE. Yes dude, you fucking ARE. Whether you intend to or not. We don’t need salvation. We like our color and our culture and our own strengths and our own stories. (If we don’t, we should.) We don’t need you to save us from anything. And we’re rrrreally starting to get sick of you telling us, explicitly or implicitly, that we do. Think only a huge movie star can sell a movie? That that has NEVER been a total guarantee. Why not TRY to be better? If white actors are forgiven for having a box office failure once in a while, why can’t a POC sometimes have one? And how COOL would it be if you were the movie that took the ‘risk’ to make a POC as your hero, and you sold the shit out of it?! The whole community would be celebrating!! If nothing else, you’d get some mad respect (which is WAY more valuable than money.) So MAKE that choice. I know that overcoming your own bias and doing something differently takes balls… Well don’t you WANT balls? Look. I know there are lotsa POC who honestly don’t care. Who think I’M being crazy. Well excuse me for caring about the images that little girls see, and what that implies to them about their limitations or possibilities. If you know a kid, you should care too. Because we WERE those kids. Why do you think it was so nice to see a nerdy white kid have a girl fall in love with him? Because you WERE that nerdy white kid who felt unloved. And seeing pictures of it in Hollywood’s stories made it feel possible. That’s why it moved you, and that’s why it was a great story Hollywood is supposed to be about making great stories. So make them.”
— Constance Wu
Tagged: racism, Racism In Hollywood, Whitewashing, POC, Asian, Representation
“We can whimper. We can whine. Or we can fight back! We come here to stand shoulder to shoulder to make clear: We are here! We will not be silent! We will not play dead! We will fight for what we believe in!”
— Elizabeth Warren, Elizabeth Warren Rallied Women Against President Trump
Tagged: Standing Up, Fight Back, Resist, Resistance
“It is a commitment to human rights, the respect of the dignity of the human being. There should be no compromises.”
— Angela Merkel, Looking to Egypt’s Future, Merkel Recalls Her Past
Tagged: human rights
“When all the public eye sees are headscarves instead of individual stories, our community is collectively tokenized.”
— Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age
Tagged: Muslim, Islam, Hijab
“I break the rules, I allow myself to step out of my comfort zone and make people uncomfortable along the way. That personal ‘rebellion’ is a form of honesty; it’s about being your most authentic self and living up to the meaning of Noor (‘Light’ in Arabic).”
— Noor Tagouri
Tagged: rebel, Rebellion, Muslim, Break The Norm, Free Spirit, Wild Child
“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.”
— Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter
Tagged: Perspective, Optimism, breathe