"Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor.
It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel."
--- Bella Abzug
"If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning."
---Catherine Aird
"It takes people a long time to learn the difference between talent and genius, especially ambitious young men and women."
---Louisa May Alcott
"I would rather exercise than read a newspaper."
---Kim Alexis
"If I'm making a movie and get hungry, I call time-out and eat some
crackers."
---Carol Alt
"Let them eat cake."
---Marie Antoinette
"Life's too short to be an adult. Unless you're a mother. Then sometimes you have to be. But only sometimes."
---Grace Aspinall
"A word after a word after a word is power."
---Margaret Atwood
"If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose
Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary."
--- Margaret Atwood
"The post-office has a great charm at one period of our lives. When
you have lived to my age, you will begin to think letters are never
worth going through the rain for."
--- Jane Austen
"Imagination is the highest kite one can fly."
---Lauren Bacall
"The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people.
The hardest is with one."
---Joan Baez
"You don't get to choose how you're going to die or when. You
can only decide how you're going to live."
---Joan Baez
"Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really
have to love yourself to get anything done in this world."
---Lucille Ball
"The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age."
---Lucille Ball
"I love the confidence that makeup gives me."
---Tyra Banks
"I refuse to think of them as chin hairs. I think of them as stray eyebrows."
-- -Janette Barber
"Happiness is good health and a bad memory."
---Ingrid Bergman
"Great thoughts speak only to the thoughtful mind, but great
actions speak to all mankind."
---Emily P. Bissell
"I refuse to allow someone else's bias to become my limitation."
---Mary Bono
"Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth."
---Erma Bombeck
"My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint."
---Erma Bombeck
"Remember all those people on the Titanic who waved off the dessert
cart."
-- Erma Bombeck
"We have women in the military, but they don't put us in the front
lines.
They don't know if we can fight, if we can kill. I think we can. All the
general has to do is walk over to the women and say, 'You see the enemy
over there? They say you look fat in those uniforms.'"
---Elayne Boosler
"Being a sex symbol is a heavy load to carry, especially when one is
tired, hurt and bewildered."
---Clara Bow
"If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome."
---Anne Bradstreet
"I wish my butt did not go sideways, but I guess I have to face that."
---Christie Brinkley
"Life, believe, is not a dream
So dark as sages say;
Oft a little morning rain
foretells a pleasant day."
---Charlotte Bronte
"She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years."
---Anita Brookner (b. 1938), British novelist, art historian. Hotel du Lac, ch. 4 (1984).
"Once you know what women are like, men get kind of boring. I'm not
trying to put them down, I mean I like them sometimes as people, but
sexually they're dull."
---Rita Mae Brown
"Men do not think of sons and daughters, when they fall in love."
---Elizabeth Barrett Browning
"Any kind of knowledge gives a certain amount of power. A knowledge of details has served many a crisis. A knowledge of details has often caught an error before it became a catastrophe."
---Aimee Buchanan
"When I was young, I was put in a school for retarded kids for two years before they realized I actually had a hearing loss... and they called ME slow!"
---Kathy Buckley
"If you want to say it with flowers, a single rose says: "I'm cheap!""
---Delta Burke
"What is right for one soul may not be right for another. It may
mean having to stand on your own and do something strange in the eyes
of others."
---Eileen Caddy
"I never cared to be Miss America. I am so bored by it all."
---Margaret Gorman Cahill, Miss America 1921
"Sometimes when I look at my children I say to myself, 'Lillian, you should
have stayed a virgin.'"
---Lillian Carter
"Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin.
Economics and art are strangers."
--- Willa Cather
"Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions."
---Coco Chanel
"If I were king...I would have women participate in all human rights,
especially those of the mind. It would seems as if they were born only
to deceive--that being the only intellectual exercise allowed them."
---Madame du Chatelet
"If it were natural for fathers to care for their sons, they would not
need so many laws commanding them to do so."
---Phyllis Chesler
"Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody."
---Agatha Christie
"The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes."
--- Agatha Christi
"Give me a dozen such heart-breaks, if that would help me to lose
a couple of pounds."
---Colette
"Life is too short to stuff a mushroom."
---Shirley Conran
"I never married because there was no need. I have three pets at home
which answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog which growls
every morning, a parrot which swears all afternoon and a cat that comes
home late at night."
--- Marie Corelli
"Parenthood; that state of being better chaperoned than you were
before marriage."
---Marcelene Cox
"There is glory in a great mistake."
---Nathalia Crane
"They were doing a full back shot of me in a swimsuit and I thought, Oh
my God, I have to be so brave. See, every woman hates herself from
behind."
---Cindy Crawford
"Glamour is what makes a man ask for your telephone number. But it
is also what makes a woman ask for the name of your dressmaker."
---Lily Dache
"In time your relatives will come to accept the idea that a career is as
important to you as your family. Of course, in time the polar ice cap will
melt."
---Barbara Dale
"If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent."
---Bette Davis
"Old age ain't no place for sissies."
---Bette Davis
"Silly, you men, so very adept at wrongly faulting womankind,
not seeing you are alone to blame for faults you plant in woman's mind."
---Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz.
"I thought I could change the world. It took me a hundred years to figure out I can't change the world. I can only change Bessie. And honey, that ain't easy, either."
---Bessie Delany (of the Delany sisters, who wrote a memoir about living 100+ years)
"A good education is usually harmful to a dancer. A good calf is better
than a good head."
---Agnes De Mille
"We only make a dupe of the friend whose advice we ask, for we never tell
him all; and it is usually what we have left unsaid that decides our
conduct."
-Diane De Poitiers
"Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune
Without the words
And never stops at all."
---Emily Dickinson
"when i look down, i just miss all the good stuff.
when i look up, i just trip over things."
---Ani Difranco
"Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling
the walk before it stops snowing."
---Phyllis Diller
"In a world where there is so much to be done, I felt strongly impressed that there must be something for me to do."
---Dorothea Dix
"Please know that I am aware of the hazards. I want to do it because
I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men as tried. When
they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others."
---Amelia Earhart
"Education was almost always a matter of luck--usually ill luck--in those
distant days."
---George Eliot
"I will make you shorter by the head."
---Elizabeth I
"If men can run the world, why can't they stop wearing neckties? How
intelligent is it to start the day by tying a little noose around your neck?"
---- Linda Ellerbee
"A few weeks after my surgery, I went out to play catch with my golden retriever. When I bent over to pick up the ball, my prosthesis fell out. The dog snatched it, and I
found myself chasing him down the road yelling, 'Hey, come back here with my breast!'"
---Linda Ellerbee
"Preparing for the worst is an activity I have taken up since I turned thirty-five, and the worst actually began to happen."
--- Delia Ephron
If they had Nautilus on the Concorde, I would work out all the time."
---Linda Evangelista
"I've been on a diet for two weeks and all I've lost is two weeks."
---Totie Fields
"A mother is not a person to lean on but a person to make
leaning unnecessary."
---Dorothy Canfield Fisher
"The more you learn about the dignity of the gorilla, the more you want to
avoid people."
---Diana Fossey
"Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim. The real enemy
is women's denigration of themselves."
---Betty Friedan
"It is easier to live through someone else than to become a complete
person yourself."
---Betty Friedan
"I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man I keep his house."
--- Zsa Zsa Gabor
"I've made so many comebacks that every time I return from the bathroom,
someone issues a press release."
---Judy Garland
"Anytime someone is allowed to defame any category of people, whether by description of depiction, those people can become regarded as less than human. In studies, the objects of such discrimination tend to be viewed as less important as individuals and less deserving of a place in our society. ... This erosion of mutual respect is just that: a mutual loss for us all."
Joan M. Garry
"In our family we don't divorce men--we bury them."
---Ruth Gordon
"If high heels were so wonderful, men would be wearing them."
--- Sue Grafton
"Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be."
---"Grandma Moses"