38 Empowering Quotes Every Badass Feminist Needs To Read
“The thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power. You just take it.” — Roseanne Barr
1. “Why do people say ‘grow some balls?’ Balls are weak and sensitive. If you wanna be tough, grow a vagina. Those things can take a pounding.”
— Sheng Wang
2. “I’m tough, I’m ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.”
— Madonna
3. “The thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power. You just take it.”
— Roseanne Barr
4. “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”
— Gloria Steinem
5. “You want me to tell you what my husband thinks? My husband is not secretary of state; I am. If you want my opinion, I will tell you my opinion. I am not going to be channeling my husband.”
— Hillary Clinton
6. “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
7. “I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass.”
— Maya Angelou
8. “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”
— Rebecca West
9. “I became a lesbian because of women, because women are beautiful, strong, and compassionate.”
— Rita Mae Brown
10. “No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.”
— Betty Friedan
11. “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
12. “No black woman writer in this culture can write ‘too much.’ Indeed, no woman writer can write ‘too much’…No woman has ever written enough.”
— Bell Hooks
13. “I am a woman and when I think, I must speak.”
— Beyoncé
14. “That night’s show was watched by ten million people, so I guess that director at The Second City who said the audience ‘didn’t want to see a sketch with two women’ can go shit in his hat.”
— Tina Fey
15. “Cosmetics is a boon to every woman, but a girl’s best beauty aid is still a near-sighted man.”
— Yoko Ono
16. “Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”
— Virginia Woolf
17. “Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.”
— Cheris Kramarae
18. “I am a Woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal Woman,
that’s me.”
— Maya Angelou
19. “She wins who calls herself beautiful and challenges the world to change to truly see her.”
— Naomi Wolf
20. “I am my own woman.”
— Evita Perón
21. “I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.”
— Audre Lorde
22. “A woman with a voice is, by definition, a strong woman.”
— Melinda Gates
23. “A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.”
— Coco Chanel
24. “I dress for the image. Not for myself, not for the public, not for fashion, not for men.”
— Marlene Dietrich
25. “He is a gentleman, and I am a gentleman’s daughter. So far we are equal.”
— Jane Austen
26. “As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.”
— Virginia Woolf
27. “No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body.”
— Margaret Sanger
28. “Women are always at the front of revolutions.”
— Buthayna Kamel
29. “Be nobody’s darling;
Be an outcast.
Take the contradictions
Of your life
And wrap around
You like a shawl,
To parry stones
To keep you warm.”
— Alice Walker
30. “I would not trade any of these features for anybody else’s. I wouldn’t trade the small thin-lipped mouth that makes me resemble my nephew. I wouldn’t even trade the acne scar on my right cheek, because that recurring zit spent more time with me in college than any boy ever did.”
— Tina Fey
31. “I know that, like every woman of the people, I have more strength than I appear to have.”
— Evita Perón
32. “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”
— Madeleine Albright
33. “It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question ‘who am I’ except the voice inside herself.”
— Betty Friedan
34. “I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence would save us, but it won’t.”
— Audre Lorde
35. “My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.”
— Mary Wollstonecraft
36. “If any female feels she need anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.”
— Bell Hooks
37. “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”
— Naomi Wolf
38. “Women, if the soul of the nation is to be saved, I believe that you must become its soul.”
— Coretta Scott King 
