“If I stop to kick every barking dog I am not going to get where I'm going.” - Jackie Joyner-Kersee % “Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement.” - Helen Keller % “You are the one that possesses the keys to your being. You carry the passport to your own happiness.” - Diane von Furstenberg % “I was smart enough to go through any door that opened.” - Joan Rivers % “Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputations can never effect a reform.” - Susan B. Anthony % “When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful.” - Malala Yousafzai % “Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.” - Golda Meir % “Knowing what must be done does away with fear.” - Rosa Parks % “I didn't get there by wishing for it or hoping for it, but by working for it.” - Estée Lauder % “Power's not given to you. You have to take it.” - Beyoncé Knowles Carter % “The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.” - Amelia Earhart % “The difference between successful people and others is how long they spend time feeling sorry for themselves.” - Barbara Corcoran % “You can waste your lives drawing lines. Or you can live your life crossing them.” - Shonda Rhimes % “I'd rather regret the things I've done than regret the things I haven't done.” - Lucille Ball % “I hope the fathers and mothers of little girls will look at them and say 'yes, women can.'” - Dilma Rousseff % “Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.” - Edith Wharton % “If you don't risk anything, you risk even more.” - Erica Jong % “I have stood on a mountain of no's for one yes.” - B. Smith % “The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice.” - Peggy O'Mara % “You can never leave footprints that last if you are always walking on tiptoe.” - Leymah Gbowee % “If you don't like the road you're walking, start paving another one.” - Dolly Parton % “If you think taking care of yourself is selfish, change your mind. If you don't, you're simply ducking your responsibilities.” - Ann Richards % “You can't give up! If you give up, you're like everybody else.” - Chris Evert % “No matter how difficult and painful it may be, nothing sounds as good to the soul as the truth.” - Martha Beck % “One of the secrets to staying young is to always do things you don't know how to do, to keep learning.” - Ruth Reichl % “Be first and be lonely.” - Ginni Rometty % “One cannot accomplish anything without fanaticism.” - Eva Perón % “Look your best - who said love is blind?” - Mae West % “It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it, I am not going to be silent.” - Madeleine Albright % “Don't take too much credit for your children — or too much blame!” - Debora Spar % “You can imprison a man, but not an idea. You can exile a man, but not an idea. You can kill a man, but not an idea.” - Benazir Bhutto % “Step out of the history that is holding you back. Step into the new story you are willing to create.” - Oprah Winfrey % “What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.” - Jane Goodall % “I may be wearing makeup, but I can throw a fastball by you at the same time.” - Jennie Finch % “A good compromise is one where everybody makes a contribution.” - Angela Merkel % “A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done.” - Marge Piercy % “I choose to make the rest of my life the best of my life.” - Louise Hay % “Drama is very important in life: You have to come on with a bang. You never want to go out with a whimper.” - Julia Child % “If your home environment is good and peaceful and easy, your life is better and easier.” - Lori Greiner % So if you leave with only one thing you leave with, it must be this: choose to fight only righteous fights, because then when things get tough – and they will – you will know that there is only option ahead of you: nevertheless, you must persist. - Elizabeth Warren % “In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.” - Coco Chanel % “Take criticism seriously, but not personally. If there is truth or merit in the criticism, try to learn from it. Otherwise, let it roll right off you.” - Hillary Clinton % “When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.” - Audre Lorde % “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself.” - Eleanor Roosevelt % “Women will only have true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation.” - Ruth Bader Ginsburg % “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.” - Nora Ephron % “You should treat your marriage like a business that you wouldn't want to let fail.” - Lisa Ling % “It's one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody.” - Maya Angelou % “Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.” - Simone de Beauvoir % “If you're not making some notable mistakes along the way, you're certainly not taking enough business and career chances.” - Sallie Krawcheck % “A surplus of effort could overcome a deficit of confidence.” - Sonia Sotomayor % “Doubt is a killer. You just have to know who you are and what you stand for.” - Jennifer Lopez % “You can be the lead in your own life.” - Kerry Washington % “When you feel copied, remember that people can only go where you have already been, they have no idea where you are going next.” - Liz Lange % “You can't please everyone, and you can't make everyone like you.” - Katie Couric % “No one changes the world who isn't obsessed.” - Billie Jean King % “Hold your head and your standards high even as people or circumstances try to pull you down.” - Tory Johnson % “The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.” - Audrey Hepburn % “Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from.” - Jodie Foster % “I am always busy, which is perhaps the chief reason why I am always well.” - Elizabeth Cady Stanton % “I learned a long time ago that there is something worse than missing the goal, and that's not pulling the trigger.” - Mia Hamm % “When I'm hungry, I eat. When I'm thirsty, I drink. When I feel like saying something, I say it.” - Madonna % “Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it.” - Brene Brown % “I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.” - Arianna Huffington % “I'm always perpetually out of my comfort zone.” - Tory Burch % “If you can't go straight ahead, you go around the corner.” - Cher % “If you don't get out of the box you've been raised in, you won't understand how much bigger the world is.” - Angelina Jolie % “Everyone shines, given the right lighting.” - Susan Cain % “If you're someone people count on, particularly in difficult moments, that's a sign of a life lived honorably.” - Rachel Maddow % “When you embrace your difference, your DNA, your look or heritage or religion or your unusual name, that's when you start to shine.” - Bethenny Frankel % “You can't be that kid standing at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it. You have to go down the chute.” - Tina Fey % “If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.” - Margaret Thatcher % “The challenge is not to be perfect…it's to be whole.” - Jane Fonda % “Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.” - Anne Lamott % “There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there.” - Indira Gandhi % “All careers go up and down like friendships, like marriages, like anything else, and you can't bat a thousand all the time.” - Julie Andrews % “If somebody can do something 80 percent as good as you think you would have done it yourself, then you've got to let it go.” - Sara Blakely % “This journey has always been about reaching your own other shore no matter what it is, and that dream continues.” - Diana Nyad % “You have trust in what you think. If you splinter yourself and try to please everyone, you can't.” - Annie Leibovitz % “If you find someone you love in your life, then hang on to that love.” - Princess Diana % “When you're through changing, you're through.” - Martha Stewart % “We need to start work with the idea that we're going to learn every day. I learn, even at my position, every single day.” - Chanda Kochhar % “Cherish forever what makes you unique, cuz you're really a yawn if it goes.” - Bette Midler % “Style is a way to say who you are without having to speak.” - Rachel Zoe % “Dying seems less sad than having lived too little.” - Gloria Steinem % “When I believe in something, I'm like a dog with a bone.” - Melissa McCarthy % “Women asking for raises should not only know their value, but they should ask with the confidence that they're helping the company to be successful.” - Senator Kirsten Gillibrand % “Whenever you are blue or lonely or stricken by some humiliating thing you did, the cure and the hope is in caring about other people.” - Diane Sawyer % “I need to listen well so that I hear what is not said.” - Thuli Madonsela % “I try to live in a little bit of my own joy and not let people steal it or take it.” - Hoda Kotb % “It's not the absence of fear, it's overcoming it. Sometimes you've got to blast through and have faith.” - Emma Watson % “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” - Anaïs Nin % “I learned compassion from being discriminated against. Everything bad that's ever happened to me has taught me compassion.” - Ellen DeGeneres % “When I'm tired, I rest. I say, 'I can't be a superwoman today.'” - Jada Pinkett Smith % “Don't live life in the past lane.” - Samantha Ettus % “Many receive advice, only the wise profit from it.” - Harper Lee % “In trans women's eyes, I see a wisdom that can only come from having to fight for your right to be recognized as female, a raw strength that only comes from unabashedly asserting your right to be feminine in an inhospitable world.” — Julia Serano % “We are not what other people say we are. We are who we know ourselves to be, and we are what we love. That's OK.” — Laverne Cox % “I followed the trail out of the room, invigorated by the possibility of reinventing my own body. The meaning was mine, as long as I was with those who had the vision and vocabulary to understand my creation.” — Nick Krieger % “I exclusively use they/them and he/him pronouns now, and that is what I expect people to use when referring to me in the past. I know this sounds confusing, but I think it's okay to have a different set of rules for myself in relation to my gender and past than I do for others.” — Nevo Zisin % “There isn't a trans moment. There were zero, and now there are 10 to 15. That's not a moment. […] It's just a presence where there was an absence. We deserve so much more.” — Hari Nef % “Transgender folks have been part of the push for LGBT equality from the beginning, and we've spoken with loud and intelligent voices and have found political and personal success and advancement all over the world.” — Chelsea Manning % “I've always been transgender, and I always will be. Having said that, my spirit is feminine. If you had to divide humanity into two groups, I would sit with the women.” — Anohni % “Makeup can be used to express yourself as well. Those experiences should not be limited to women. Everyone should be free to be as colorful as they want to be.” — Ian Thomas Malone % “There's power in naming yourself, in proclaiming to the world that this is who you are. Wielding this power is often a difficult step for many transgender people because it's also a very visible one.” — Janet Mock % “People ask the same questions about me being transgender. […] And I tell them, 'You know, I'm not just a transgender individual, I'm also Jazz.' I'm a soccer player, I'm an artist, I love to be creative. I am a representative in my class office. I'm on the varsity soccer team, I am going to do tennis later in the year. I'm in the Gay-Straight Alliance and the Jewish Student Connection, as well.'” — Jazz Jennings % But from the moment I had voiced my trans identity that first night, every step I took felt like coming home. — Calvin Payne Taylor % “I believe in a future where we don't have anyone telling us how to express ourselves — be that the bullies at school, the police, or even our own friends and families.” - Alok Vaid-Menon, Dark Matter % “You can't move forward — you can't have people love you, you can't look at other people and accept them for who they are — unless you completely love yourself.” - Samira Wiley, actress % “I hadn't been happy in so long. I've been sad again since, but it's a totally different take on sad. There's just some magic in truth and honesty and openness.” - Frank Ocean, musician % “The tide of history only advances when people make themselves fully visible.” - Anderson Cooper, journalist and TV host % “We are powerful because we have survived.” - Audre Lorde % “To be afraid is to behave as if the truth were not true.” - Bayard Rustin % “Marriage is a magic word. And it is magic throughout the world. It has to do with our dignity as human beings, to be who we are openly.” — Edie Windsor % “You don't have to live a lie. Living a lie will mess you up. It will send you into depression. It will warp your values.” — Gilbert Baker, creator of the rainbow Pride flag % “Burst down those closet doors once and for all, and stand up, and start to fight.” — Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be an elected official in California. % “I believe that telling our stories, first to ourselves and then to one another and the world, is a revolutionary act.” — Janet Mock, a transgender rights activist, author, and TV host % “I've never been interested in being invisible and erased.” — Laverne Cox, a transgender rights activist and actress % “Hell hath no fury like a drag queen scorned.” — Sylvia Rivera, a transgender rights activist who was at the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969 % “I would like to put airbrushing in the bin. I want it gone. I want it out of here. I think it's a disgusting tool that has been weaponised, predominantly against women, and is responsible for so many more problems than we realise because we are blinded by the media, our culture and our society.” - Jameela Jamil % “It's true – I am a bisexual. But I can't deny that I've used that fact very well. I suppose it's the best thing that ever happened to me. Fun, too.” % “Ladies and gentlemen are not the only words – we're just making assumptions about other people. It's about allowing life to be so much more diverse and mysterious and beautiful than when we just assume we know all these things about total strangers.” - Asia Kate Dillon % “Normal is just a dryer setting.” — Patsy Clairmont % “If you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism.” — Stephen Shore % “What would America be like if we loved black people as much as we love black culture?” ― Amandla Stenberg % “Bigger than you or me. Discussions are healthy. Ignorance is not.” ― Amandla Stenberg % “I don't want to be included. Instead, I want to question who created the standard in the first place. After a lifetime of embodying difference, I have no desire to be equal. I want to deconstruct the structural power of a system that marked me out as different. I don't wish to be assimilated into the status quo. I want to be liberated from all the negative assumptions that my characteristics bring. The same onus is not on me to change. Instead it's the world around me.” ― Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race % “I will keep writing about these intersections as a writer and a teacher, as a black woman, as a bad feminist, until I no longer feel like what I want is impossible. I no longer want to believe that these problems are too complex for us to make sense of them.” ― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist % “The feminism that has mattered to the media and made magazine headlines in recent years has been the feminism most useful to heterosexual, high-earning middle- and upper-middle-class white women. Public 'career feminists' have been more concerned with getting more women into 'boardrooms', when the problem is that there are altogether too many boardrooms, and none of them are on fire.” ― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution % “Today, with the defeat of [the Equal Rights Amendment], the tightening economy, and increased conservatism, it is easier once again for white women to believe the dangerous fantasy that if you are good enough, pretty enough, sweet enough, quiet enough, teach the children to behave, hate the right people, and marry the right men, then you will be allowed to co-exist with patriarchy in relative peace, at least until a man needs your job or the neighborhood rapist happens along. And true, unless one lives and loves in the trenches it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.” ― Audre Lorde % “So one of my responsibilities, as a white, cis-gendered woman, is to learn how to be a traitor to the 'joys' of patriarchal culture that I experience, however unconsciously.” ― Erin Wunker, Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Everyday Life % “I don't know any more about the future than you do. I hope that it will be full of work, because I have come to know by experience that work is the nearest thing to happiness that I can find.” - Zora Neale Hurston % “Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light. Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing.” - Frida Kahlo % “Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.” - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's, We Should All Be Feminists % “For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?” - bell hooks % “Racism should never have happened and so you don't get a cookie for reducing it.” - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie % “The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labeling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization.” - bell hooks % “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” - Audre Lorde % “I'm a woman. I'm a black woman. I'm a poor woman. I'm a fat woman. I'm a middle-aged woman. And I'm on welfare. In this country, if you're any one of those things you count less as a human being. If you're all those things, you don't count at all. Except as a statistic.” - Johnnie Tillmon