50 Badass Quotes From 50 Badass Women

"Who runs the world? Girls." —Beyoncé Knowles

By Lorenzo Jensen III

Updated 10 years ago, May 12, 2015

1.

Who runs the world? Girls.
—Beyoncé Knowles

2.

Women hold all the power. They should use it like a whip, not offer it up like a sacrifice.
—Tarryn Fisher

3.

There’s nothing a man can do, that I can’t do better and in heels.
—Ginger Rogers

4.

The thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power. You just take it.
—Roseanne Barr

5.

Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.
—Charlotte Whitton

6.

Women are small and fragile…yet the power they hold is unmeasureable.
—Da Xia

7.

It is amazing what a woman can do if only she ignores what men tell her she can’t.
—Carol K. Carr

8.

These days, I strive to be a bitch, because not being one sucks. Not being a bitch means not having your voice heard.
—Margaret Cho

9.

It’s hard not to be a fighter when you’re constantly under siege.
—Cassandra Duffy

10.

I’m not a humanitarian, I’m a hell-raiser.
—Mother Jones

11.

I’m tough, I’m ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.
—Madonna

12.

People call me a feminist whenever I express statements that distinguish me from a doormat.
—Rebecca West

13.

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
—Gloria Steinem

14.

Do you know they found land mines in women’s souls?
—Andrea Gibson

15.

My family has very strong women. My mother never laughed at my dream of Africa, even though everyone else did because we didn’t have any money, because Africa was the ‘dark continent’, and because I was a girl.
—Jane Goodall

16

There are some people who still feel threatened by strong women. That’s their problem. It’s not mine.
—Gloria Allred

17.

I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself.
—Simone de Beauvoir

18.

No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body.
—Margaret Sanger

19.

If any female feels she needs anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.
—bell hooks

20.

I’m not going to limit myself just because people won’t accept the fact that I can do something else.
—Dolly Parton

21.

Vaginas beat penises every time.
They’re like kryptonite.
Penises are defenseless against them.
—Emma Chase

22.

It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.
—Mary Wollstonecraft

23.

If women want rights more than they got, why don’t they just take them, and not be talking about it.
—Sojourner Truth

24.

The emerging woman…will be strong-minded, strong-hearted, strong-souled, and strong-bodied…strength and beauty must go together.
—Louisa May Alcott

25.

For too many centuries women have been being muses to artists. I wanted to be the muse, I wanted to be the wife of the artist, but I was really trying to avoid the final issue—that I had to do the job myself.
—Anaïs Nin

26.

The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.
—Simone de Beauvoir

27.

I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns.
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton

28.

My idea of feminism is self-determination, and it’s very open-ended: every woman has the right to become herself, and do whatever she needs to do.
—Ani DiFranco

29.

No longer will we (women) agree to protect the hearth at the price of extinguishing the fire within ourselves.
—Celia Gilbert

30.

I’ve heard it said that God made all men, but Samuel Colt made all men equal. We’d see what Mr. Colt could do for a woman.
—Cherie Priest

31.

There shall never be another season of silence until women have the same rights men have on this green earth.
—Susan B. Anthony

32.

The heart of a woman will never be found in the arms of a man.
—Vanessa Carlton

33.

Why can’t a girl be smart without it being explained away as a rare supernatural phenomenon?
—Cat Winters

34.

A woman isn’t a whore for wanting pleasure. If it were unnatural, we would not be born with such drives.
—Nenia Campbell

35.

How could I choose someone who would force me to give up my own small reach for meaning? I chose myself, and without consolation.
—Sue Monk Kidd

36.

I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes.
—Toni Morrison

37.

I am a warrior in the time of women warriors; the longing for justice is the sword I carry.
—Sonia Johnson

38.

My recipe for life is not being afraid of myself, afraid of what I think or of my opinions.
—Eartha Kitt

39.

They always, always underestimate women.
—Susan Ee

40.

Now and then women should do for themselves what men have already done—occasionally what men have not done—thereby establishing themselves as persons, and perhaps encouraging other women toward greater independence of thought and action.
—Amelia Earhart

41.

I don’t like rules, especially the unwritten ones that say I need to let myself be controlled by my man.
—Stephanie Tyler

42.

When I dare to be powerful—to use my strength in the service of my vision—then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
—Audre Lorde

43.

A WOMAN’S PLACE IS IN THE HOUSE…AND THE SENATE.
—Kristin Hannah

44.

I had to get a close-hand view of the misery and unhappiness of a man made world, before I reached the point where I could successfully revolt against it.
—Emmeline Pankhurst

45.

It was a thought, that. Not to attach yourself to a man, but to confront instead the open world, the wide fields of France and Spain, the ocean, anything. Not just to hitch a lift with the first fellow who looked as though he knew where he was going, but just to go.
—Jo Baker

46.

When men imagine a female uprising, they imagine a world in which women rule men as men have ruled women.
—Sally Kempton

47.

Women have traditionally taken secondary roles to men. I want to be the boss not the secretary.
—Bianca Frazier

48.

But whatever, we descendants of the Girl Line may not have wealth and proper windows in our drafty homes but at least we have rage and we will build empires with that, gentlemen.
—Miriam Toews

49.

A woman brings so much more to the world than birth, for she can birth discovery, intelligence, invention, art, just as well as any man.
—Shannon Celebi

50.

The rest of us have never embraced your victim mentality; we are not victims. We are people, the same way that men are. We are equal, yet different. We, unlike you, realize that is not mutually exclusive.
—Lori Ziganto