Women And Assertiveness Quotes & Sayings

All the backpedaling and backstepping that goes on with powerful women today, with Hillary Clinton saying she could have stayed home and baked cookies and blah blah blah, and then offending everybody so that she had to say that she does, in fact, *love* to make cookies, loves it almost as much as she likes to trade agricultural futures. I mean, what is that about? All this I'm really a lady, I'm really a nice girl crap- who needs it? It really is nothing more than surrender. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Logic must look after itself. In a certain sense, we cannot make mistakes in logic. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Religion was created by insecure men to oppress women. Religion is the basis of all political ideas and it exempts the human being to find the "I" in them. — Mutabaruka

Give away love to be loved. — Debasish Mridha

You don't even know me, or what I am capable of, boy. — S.R. Crawford

Perhaps one of my biggest lessons was learning the healthy difference between passive, aggressive, and assertive characteristics of behavior. I think this is one of the great balances necessary for healthy individuals and cultures, and I have considered it carefully. To be passive means you don't stand up for your own rights. To be aggressive means that you stand up for your rights while not honoring the rights of others. Both of these patterns of unhealthy behavior were dominant in our society, with men and women in substantial measure and in all of their relationships. What was missing was assertiveness, as it was predominantly programmed right out of us. Assertiveness means that you stand up for your rights while honoring the rights of others. It is difficult to be manipulated or to manipulate others when you are genuinely assertive, so that was why it was a danger in a culture built on manipulation. — Rebecca Musser

Men need men to keep their edges hot and clean, whereas women keep us warm and soft. — Richard Rohr

My comebacks aren't nearly as sharp as my shiv. Come inside and I'll show you. — Cassia Leo

There cannot be perfect civilization until Man realizes that the rights of every living creature are as sacred as his own. — David Starr Jordan

When women have so absorbed the disease of sexism that they themselves can inflict it on each other, we clearly have a perfect, self-replenishing machine for the continuation of sexism. Unable to turn our assertiveness against men, we turn it against each other. Thus we remain stuck in the troubles we always had. It is imperative we renovate the machine
no, not renovate it, but smash it entirely, so that we allow women to be all they need to be. — Erica Jong

Never have I dealt with anything more difficult than my own soul, which sometimes helps me and sometimes opposes me. — Al-Ghazali

You said you wanted Superman. And when Superman comes along, you give him the stink eye."
"I did not."
"Yes you did," Steve said. "If looks could kill, poor Superman would be a goner. — Ute Carbone

In retrospect, the second cause for delay makes less feminist sense: the long popularity of assertiveness training. Though most women needed to be more assertive (or even more aggressive, though that word was considered too controversial), many assertiveness courses taught women how to play the existing game, not how to change the rules. — Gloria Steinem

In the Golleschau quarry, stone-carriers were forced to haul huge blocks of limestone endlessly, from one mound to another and back again. During the torture, they carried their lives in their hands. The insane task was not futile only in the sense that faith is not futile.
A camp inmate looked up at the stars and suddenly remembered that they'd once seemed beautiful to him. This memory of beauty was accompanied by a bizarre stab of gratitude. When I first read this I couldn't imagine it. But later I felt I understood. Sometimes the body experiences a revelation because it has abandoned every other possibility. — Anne Michaels

Active or ambitious women were not only rare but often evil. Wonder Woman flipped this paradigm by embodying the strength, assertiveness, and independence usually associated with bad girls and villains in a positive heroic light. The Golden Age Wonder Woman was a blatant rejection of the good girl/bad girl binary and even offered a critique of the good girl role. — Tim Hanley

And girls who hold on to their assertiveness and self-esteem are less likely to grow up to be depressed women. — Julie Holland

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader. — Plato

Sometimes I feel I am everything, I call that Love.
Sometimes I feel I am nothing, I call that Wisdom.
Between Love and Wisdom
my life continuously flows. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

That is supposed to be the rallying cry of women in the age of AIDS: no condom, no sex. But the dirty little secret is that the rallying cry is a whisper ... The great unspoken on the heterosexual AIDS front has been how behavior is still determined by the old psychosexual minuet of the sexes, the lack of responsibility in young men and of assertiveness in young women. — Anna Quindlen

Most characteristics associated with leaders are masculine: dominance, authority, assertiveness, and so forth. — Barbara Kellerman

My generation of bossy, confident, baby-boom women were something brand new in history. Our energy and assertiveness weren't created by Betty Friedan, unknown before her 1963 book, or by Gloria Steinem, whose political activism, as even the Lifetime profile admitted, did not begin until 1969. — Camille Paglia

The feminist challenge was sweeping: it embraced education and
occupation, together with legal, political, and social status. It even
dared broach the subject of equality in personal, and especially
matrimonial, relationships. Such assertiveness was more unsettling
than the racial threat because it was more intimate and immediate:
few white men lived with blacks, but most lived with women. — Cynthia Russett

I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification. — Charles Darwin

Hollywood is the only place on earth that has more vampires, more undead, more resurrections than a month of Easter Sundays. — Roseanne Barr