The liberals in the House strongly resemble liberals I have known through the last two decades in the civil rights conflict. When it comes time to show on which side they will be counted, they excuse themselves.

Service is the rent that you pay for room on this earth.

Tremendous amounts of talent are lost to our society just because that talent wears a skirt.

Of my two handicaps, being female put many more obstacles in my path than being black.

When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.

The liberals in the House strongly resemble liberals I have known through the last two decades in the civil rights conflict. When it comes time to show on which side they will be counted, they excuse themselves.

Congress seems drugged and inert most of the time... its idea of meeting a problem is to hold hearings or, in extreme cases, to appoint a commission.

At present, our country needs women's idealism and determination, perhaps more in politics than anywhere else.

I don't measure America by its achievement but by its potential.

The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says: It's a girl.

There is little place in the political scheme of things for an independent, creative personality, for a fighter. Anyone who takes that role must pay a price.

You don't make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.

America has the laws and the material resources it takes to insure justice for all its people. What it lacks is the heart, the humanity, the Christian love that it would take.

America is composed of all kinds of people - part of the difficulty in our nation today is due to the fact that we are not utilising the abilities and the talents of other brown and black peoples and females that have something to bring to the creativity and the rejuvenation and the revitalisation of this country.

I am not the candidate of Black America, although I am black and proud. I am not the candidate of the woman's movement of this country, although I am a woman and I am equally proud of that.

I have certainly met much more discrimination in terms of being a woman than being black, in the field of politics.

I ran because somebody had to do it first. In this country, everybody is supposed to be able to run for president, but that has never really been true.

I ran for the presidency, despite hopeless odds, to demonstrate the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo. The next time a woman runs, or a black, a Jew, or anyone from a group that the country is 'not ready' to elect to its highest office, I believe that he or she will be taken seriously from the start.

I stand before you today to repudiate the ridiculous notion that the American people will not vote for qualified candidates simply because he is not white or because she is not a male.

I want history to remember me... not as the first black woman to have made a bid for the presidency of the United States, but as a black woman who lived in the 20th century and who dared to be herself. I want to be remembered as a catalyst for change in America.

I'd like them to say that Shirley Chisholm had guts. That's how I'd like to be remembered.

I'm looking to no man walking this earth for approval of what I'm doing.

If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.

My greatest political asset, which professional politicians fear, is my mouth, out of which come all kinds of things one shouldn't always discuss for reasons of political expediency.

Of course laws will not eliminate prejudice from the hearts of human beings. But that is no reason to allow prejudice to continue to be enshrined in our laws - to perpetuate injustice through inaction.

Our representative democracy is not working because the Congress that is supposed to represent the voters does not respond to their needs. I believe the chief reason for this is that it is ruled by a small group of old men.

The fact is that a woman who aspires to be chairman of the board - or a member of the House - does so for exactly the same reasons as any man. Basically, these are that she thinks she can do the job, and she wants to try.

You dont make progress by standing on the sidelines whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.

The emotional sexual and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says Its a girl.

It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict it is the need to escape from a harsh reality.

Rhetoric never won a revolution yet.

Legal discrimination between the sexes is, in almost every instance, founded on outmoded views of society and the pre-scientific beliefs about psychology and physiology. It is time to sweep away these relics of the past and set further generations free of them.

The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, It's a girl.

I think the Civil Rights Movement changed that trajectory for me. The first thing I did was leave school. I was suspended for my participation in Movement demonstrations in my hometown, December, 1961.

We support President Truman's civil rights program.

There are those who say to you - we are rushing this issue of civil rights. I say we are 172 years late.

A lot of things happened in a lot of places. And to see how well it was handled in Atlanta. There are a lot of reasons for Atlanta being a special town in the Civil Rights era.

He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. it had to be some silly little Communist.

When it came to political power, blacks need not apply. Add to this steaming stew the growing tensions over the Vietnam War and the movement for civil rights, and you had plenty of elements to fire the imagination of a novice journalist.

Rarely in my 45 years as a civil rights lawyer have I been so angry about an injustice as I am about what happened to Billy Ray Johnson.

I'm a child of the Civil Rights Movement.

By 1962, King had become, by the media's reckoning, the new civil rights leader.

There is no contradiction between effective law enforcement and respect for civil and human rights. Dr. King did not stir us to move for our civil rights to have them taken away in these kinds of fashions.

The civil rights movement in the United States was about the same thing, about equality of treatment for all sections of the people, and that is precisely what our movement was about.

When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.

The South resented giving the Afro-American his freedom, the ballot box and the Civil Rights Law.

Eyes is the attempt to tell the story of the Civil Rights movement and to create an emotional, intellectual constituency. But what do you do after that? The black community doesn't have institutions that pick up such moments and preserve them.

It is distressing to me that we live in an age in which we still must fight to protect our civil rights as Americans, in which a hate crime perpetrated against someone based their sexual orientation can go unpunished, and in which discrimination is being written into our laws.

Nothing could be more insulting to me than the concept of civil rights. It means perpetual second-class citizenship for me and my kind.