Women And Children Quotes & Sayings

Most women had the one thing in common: they had great pain when they gave birth to their children. This should make a bond that held them all together; it should make them love and protect each other against the man-world. But it was not so. It seemed like their great birth pains shrank their hearts and their souls. They stuck together for only one thing: to trample on some other woman ... whether it was by throwing stones or by mean gossip. It was the only kind of loyalty they seemed to have. Men were different. They might hate each other but they stuck together against the world and against any woman who would ensnare one of them. — Betty Smith

Women without children are also the best of mothers,often, with the patience,interest, and saving grace that the constant relationship with children cannot always sustain. I come to crave our talk and our daughters gain precious aunts. Women who are not mothering their own children have the clarity and focus to see deeply into the character of children webbed by family. A child is fortuante who feels witnessed as a peron,outside relationships with parents by another adult. — Louise Erdrich

I do not live in a world where people can walk on water, or still a storm, or take five loaves of bread and feed 5000 men plus women and children. If that is a requirement of my commitment to Jesus, I find it difficult to stretch my mind outside the capacities of my world view. — John Shelby Spong

Most of these people will never make the headlines and their names will not appear in Who's Who. Yet when years have rolled past and when the blazing light of truth is focused on this marvelous age in which we live - men and women will know and children will be taught that we have a finer land, a better people, a more noble civilization - because these humble children of God were willing to suffer for righteousness' sake. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Admitting that this job isn't always easy doesn't make somebody a bad mother. At least, it shouldn't. We're all on this ride together. We are not the first ones to ever accidentally tell our children to shut up, or wonder - just for a moment - what it would be like if we'd never had children. We aren't the first mothers to feel overwhelmed and challenged and not entirely fulfilled by motherhood. And we certainly won't be the last. Nothing can be lost by admitting our weaknesses and imperfections to one another. In fact, quite the opposite is true. We will be better mothers, better wives, and better women if we are able to finally drop the act and get real. Who are we pretending for, anyway? — Jill Smokler

Migrants and refugees are not pawns on the chessboard of humanity. They are children, women and men who leave or who are forced to leave their homes for various reasons, who share a legitimate desire for knowing and having, but above all for being more — Pope Francis

One of the women at the clinic had remarked dryly that Harrow's personal magnetism not only affected men, women and children but also extended to armoires, assorted chairs and the nearby goldfish in a bowl. — Lisa Kleypas

124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For — Toni Morrison

It takes a world with trouble in it to train men and women for their high calling as children of God. Faced with trouble, some people grow wings; others buy crutches. Which kind are you? Read Isaiah 40:31, and wherever you encounter the word they, substitute your own name. It's a promise aimed at you. — Anonymous

She would go home and marry a man who owned carpet shops, and she would bear his children, and he would take other women to nightclubs, and she would get old and die and hope for better luck next time around. — Nick Hornby

Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you're a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democrac and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain. — Barbara Kingsolver

The child in Bethlehem would grow up to be a friend of sinners, not a friend of Rome. He would spend his life with the ordinary and the unimpressive. He would pay deep attention to lepers and cripples, to the blind and the beggar, to prostitutes and fishermen, to women and children. He would announce the availability of a kingdom different from Herod's, a kingdom where blessing - of full value and worth with God - was now conferred on the poor in spirit and the meek and the persecuted. — John Ortberg

Fat men in tank tops drank beer while the women and children streamed back and forth between the tables and their battered station wagons, bringing ice chests and boxes of potato chips and marshmallows. A little dog was doing circles around the kids' legs. The far curb of the turnout lane was lined with semis, the cabs dark and the drivers inside sleeping or shaving or eating, staring at the horizon and thinking whatever it is truckers think. — Rick Riordan

One out of six women are toxic with mercury. Mercury comes out of coal plants and chlorine plants. I am toxic, I deal with symptoms, children are born with, you know, autism - there is an epidemic in this country. This is like, the air that we breath. — Daphne Zuniga

If you're poor and ignorant, with a child, you're a slave. Meaning that you're never going to get out of it. These women are in bondage to a kind of slavery that the 13th Amendment just didn't deal with. The old master provided food, clothing and health care to the slaves because he wanted them to get up and go to work in the morning. And so on welfare: you get food, clothing and shelter
you get survival, but you can't really do anything else. You can't control your life. — Joycelyn Elders

Tailor's work
the finishing of men's outside garments
was the "trade" learned most frequently by women in [the 1820s and 1830s],and one or more of my older sisters worked at it; I think it must have been at home, for I somehow or somewhere got the idea, while I was a small child, that the chief end of woman was to make clothing for mankind. — Lucy Larcom

Slavery was endemic in the classical world and huge numbers of men, women and children, the captives of Rome's ceaseless wars, flooded into Italy. Slaves provided a cheap workforce, contributing significantly to unemployment among free-born citizens. — Anthony Everitt

I had never fully understood our tradition- why women wailed so loudly and for so long after someone died. It was only now I realized that women wailed more on account of everything they never had a chance to say. All the questions they never asked. All the times we never really talked about the things that mattered most.
It was the one time that women could be angry. Be loud. Say anything. Yell. Purge the soul. And no one thought less of them. Everyone expected it. — Eucabeth A. Odhiambo

Few stories are written about what happens to the princess after the wedding. Reading between the lines of other stories, we can sketch out her "happily ever after": The princess gets pregnant and hopes for sons. As long as she is faithful and bears sons, she is considered to be a good wife. We don't hear whether or not she's a good mother, unless something goes wrong with her children ... All of history has been written about the subsequent adventures in the chapters of his life. — Elizabeth Debold

A hundred men, women and children died on that voyage and were dropped over the side; and some of the captives who were dropped over the side had not yet died, but the green chill of the ocean cooled their final fever and they went down flailing, choking, lost. — Neil Gaiman

Malaria kills and its main victims are children and women. We can stop this scourge so people can live with dignity and go to work and school. — Youssou N'Dour

There is a profound difference between fighting to avoid death and fighting in order to live. Men who fight to avoid death preserve their dignity and one and all - men, women and children - defend it jealously, tenaciously, fiercely ... When men fight to avoid death they cling with a tenacity born of desperation to all that constitutes the living and eternal part of human life, the essence, the noblest and purest element of life: dignity, pride, freedom of conscience. They fight to save their souls. But after the liberation men had to fight in order to live ... It is a humiliating, horrible thing, a shameful necessity, a fight for life. Only for life. Only to save one's skin. — Curzio Malaparte

If technology and medicine are used by women to have children or not to have children or to have healthier children - that's one thing. But if it's used to say, 'You're not a real woman unless you have a child; therefore, take all these dangerous hormones and have one at 54,' then it's another story. — Gloria Steinem

I cannot step into any day without help. I have a fantastically engaged husband who is very present for his children and our family life. We've got a brilliant nanny, other help from parents-in-law, godparents, friends. Also, I've had incredible women around me in the business. — Tamsin Greig

So now you are a woman. Do you have the least idea of what that means?
It means that I am now fit to be wedded and bedded ( ... ) and to bear children for the king. — George R R Martin

Twelve million illegal immigrants later, we are now living in a nation that is beset by people who are suicidal maniacs and want to kill countless innocent men, women and children around the world, — Fred Thompson

When you consider that God could have commanded anything he wanted
anything!
the Ten [Commandments] have got to rank as one of the great missed moral opportunities of all time. How different history would have been had he clearly and unmistakably forbidden war, tyranny, taking over other people's countries, slavery, exploitation of workers, cruelty to children, wife-beating, stoning, treating women
or anyone
as chattel or inferior beings. — Katha Pollitt

Hence both women and children must be educated with an eye to the constitution, if indeed it makes any difference to the virtue of a city-state that its children be virtuous, and its women too. And it must make a difference, since half the free population are women, and from children come those who participate in the constitution. — Aristotle.

To suppose such a thing possible as a society, in which men, who are able and willing to work, cannot support their families, and ought, with a great part of the women, to be compelled to lead a life of celibacy, for fear of having children to be starved; to suppose such a thing possible is monstrous. — William Cobbett

The earth had two children
A son named Adam
and a daughter — Karan Patade

The night was a magnificent confirmation of "women and children first," yet somehow the loss rate was higher for Third Class children than First Class men. — Walter Lord

These are the things of which men think, who live: of their own selves and the dwelling place of their fathers; of their neighbors; of work and service; of rule and reason and women and children; of Beauty and Death and War. — W.E.B. Du Bois

Study after study confirms that even when you control for variables like profession, education, hours worked, age, marital status, and children, men still are compensated substantially more - even in professions, like nursing, dominated by women. No wonder there's a gender gap. — Dee Dee Myers

I play a scientist in a futuristic world in which 99% of the men have been wiped out. As a result, the women are nearly all homosexuals and the children are cloned. — Julie Bowen

If they lived in Saudi Arabia, under Shari'a law, these college girls in their pretty scarves wouldn't be free to study, to work, to drive, to walk around. In Saudi Arabia girls their age and younger are confined, are forced to marry, and if they have sex outside of marriage they are sentenced to prison and flogged. According to the Quran, their husband is permitted to beat them and decide whether they may work or even leave the house; he may marry other women without seeking their approval, and if he chooses to divorce them, they have no right to resist or to keep custody of their children. Doesn't this matter at all to these clever young Muslim girls in America? — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Mothers who are strong people, who can pursue a life of their own when it is time to let their children go, empower their childrenof either gender to feel free and whole. But weak women, women who feel and act like victims of something or other, may make their children feel responsible for taking care of them, and they can carry their children down with them. — Frank Pittman

Targeting women is key in developing countries. It allows them to go to school, to say how many children they're going to have, which drives the issue of population and how their children will be educated. Women are the best investments in developing countries. — Philippe Cousteau Jr.

I don't care how happily married you are or how deeply enmeshed you are with your children and family and career
every woman needs a couple of chicks who'll break out the sangria just because you need to vent. — Jen Lancaster

The funeral pyre technique was abandoned when it became apparent how great was the toll. There was not enough labor to do it nicely, so a man with a flame-thrower was sent down instead, and he cremated them where they lay. Burned alive, suffocated, crushed - men, women, and children indiscriminately killed. — Kurt Vonnegut

Women's work, married or unmarried, is menial and low paid. Women's right to possess property is curtailed, more if they are married. How can marriage provide security? In any case a husband is a possession which can be lost or stolen and the abandoned wife of thirty odd with a couple of children is far more desolate and insecure in her responsibility than an unmarried woman with or without children ever could be. — Germaine Greer

Women are no longer required to be chaste or modest, to restrict their sphere of activity to the home, or even to realize their properly feminine destiny in maternity. Normative femininity [that is, the rules for being a good woman] is coming more and more to be centered on women's body - not its duties and obligations or even its capacity to bear children, but its sexuality, more precisely, its presumed heterosexuality and its appearance. . . . The woman who checks her makeup half a dozen times a day to see if her foundation has caked or her mascara has run, who worries that the wind or the rain may spoil her hairdo, who looks frequently to see if her stockings have bagged at the ankle, or who, feeling
fat, monitors everything she eats, has become, just as surely as the inmate
of Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a self committed to a relentless self-surveillance. This self-surveillance is a form of obedience
to patriarchy. — Rosemarie Tong

If men and women were equal, everybody would have the same values.Because at this point in time, many women feel compelled to care for the children, feel empathetically into another person's reality, more so than many men who often are on more of a straight-shooting path towards achievement come what may. — Elizabeth Lesser

Brooding is more something I do when I'm working. I know so much more about sitting around worrying about a work project than I do about worrying about kids. This could just be a fact of life for older moms. We've worked and worked and worked and if we are lucky enough to finally have a child or two, we find ourselves suddenly catapulted into a most alien kind of chaos.
Work is so much easier. Anyone will tell you that. To have a desk, where you have everything all lined up, and a schedule you more or less get to agree to. Work. I am a worker. This is so funny because I never really think of my work as work. I certainly never though of myself as having a career. Writing, work, this is just who I am. I am a person who sits at a desk and makes phone calls and taps at a computer keyboard and sips coffee and calls her mom at five. That I am anything better or smaller than that has come as sudden news to me.
Brand new.
News. — Jeanne Marie Laskas

We are members of the most destructive culture ever to exist. Our assault on the natural world, on indigenous and other cultures, on women, on children, on all of us through the possibility of nuclear suicide and other means
all these are unprecedented in their magnitude and ferocity. — Derrick Jensen

When it comes to the education of our young, this privilege should only be given to those whose visions are solely in the uplifting benefit of the child. There is no room for the ego in the education of children! Children should not be looked after, nor educated, by those who have not made a sacrifice within their hearts, laying down their own personal agenda and dreams, for the total ascension of the child. Even if you are to educate the children simply sitting under a tree; if you have the vision and the heart of a sage, those children will grow to be mighty men and women under your watch! And even if you wine and dine the children, putting them up in a palace; if you do not have the vision and the selfless heart of a sage, all you do is in utter vanity! — C. JoyBell C.

It is convenient for the old men to blame Eve. To insist we are damned because a country girl talked to the snake one afternoon long ago. Children must starve in Somalia for that, and old women be abandoned in our greatest cities. It's why we will finally be thrown into the lakes of molten lead. Because she was confused by happiness that first time anyone said she was beautiful. Nevertheless, she must be the issue, so people won't notice that rocks and galaxies, mathematics and rust are also created in His image. — Jack Gilbert

She had abruptly flipped from the southern belle and was now putting on the extremely businesslike air of those perfectionist women who'd only worked in the professional world for two or three years before stopping to have children and were now terrified of not being taken seriously. — Rebecca Makkai

And the question is always "When are you going to have kids?" Rather than "Do you want to have kids? — Caitlin Moran

Finally, a prominent nation is taking on the homosexual agenda and rejecting it outright. A number of African nations have done the same, but third-world countries are not newsworthy to mainstream media. The irony is stunning that a Communist nation would understand that preserving the value of men and women marrying and producing children makes for demographic survival, while many American Christian leaders cower in the shadows, in fear of activist homosexuals and their leftist supporters. I say 'cheers' to the Russians on this one. That nation will probably outlive America. — Sylvia Thompson

The bomber will always get through. The only defense is in offense, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly that the enemy if you want to save yourselves. — Stanley Baldwin

Human history's greatest crime was the traffic in black flesh when the devil white man went into Africa and murdered and kidnapped to bring to the West in chains, in slave ships, millions of black men, women, and children, who were worked and beaten and tortured as slaves. — Malcolm X

I despise my own past and that of others. I despise resignation, patience, professional heroism and all the obligatory sentiments. I also despise the decorative arts, folklore, advertising, radio announcers' voices, aerodynamics, the Boy Scouts, the smell of naphtha, the news, and drunks.
I like subversive humor, freckles, women's knees and long hair, the laughter of playing children, and a girl running down the street.
I hope for vibrant love, the impossible, the chimerical.
I dread knowing precisely my own limitations. — Rene Magritte

I think women should have choices and should be able to do what they like, and I think it's a great choice to stay at home and raise kids, just as it's a great choice to have a career. But I don't entirely approve of people who get advanced degrees and then decide to stay at home. I think if society gives you the gift of one of those educations and you take a spot in a very competitive institution, then you should do something with that education to help others ... But I also don't approve of working parents who look down on stay-at-home mothers and think they smother their children. Working parents are every bit as capable of spoiling children as ones who don't work - maybe even more so when they indulge their kids out of guilt. The best think anyone can teach their children is the obligation we all have toward each other - and no one has a monopoly on teaching that. — Will Schwalbe

No tribe has the right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers ... Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Didn't the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children? The way, the only way to stop this evil is for the red man to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was first, and should be now, for it was never divided. We gave them forest-clad mountains and valleys full of game, and in return what did they give our warriors and our women? Rum, trinkets, and a grave. — Tecumseh

Women and children were slaughtered by the Taliban. You are going to sit down and negotiate with these folks? They never lived up to an agreement. The Pakistanis tried in '08, the Russians tried it when they were there. George Bush tried it in '05. It has never worked. — Mike Rogers

That said, pointing out inaccurate or unrealistic portrayals of women to younger grade school children-ages five to eight-does seem to be effective, when done judiciously:taking to little girls about body image and dieting, for example, can actually introduce them to disordered behavior rather than inoculating them against it. I may be taking a bit of a leap here, but to me all this indicated that if you are creeped out about the characters fromMonster High, it is fine to keep them out of your house. — Peggy Orenstein

The minute my child was born, I was reborn as a feminist. It's so incredible what women can do ... birthing naturally, as most women do around the globe, is a superhuman act. You leave behind the comforts of being human and plunge back into being an animal ... — Ani DiFranco

In the twenties the religious education of
children was classified as a political crime under Article 58-10 of the Code - in other words, counterrevolutionary propaganda! True, one was still permitted to renounce one's religion at one's trial: it didn't often happen but it nonetheless did happen that the father would renounce his religion and remain at home to raise the children while the mother went to the Solovetsky Islands. (Throughout all those years women manifested great firmness in their faith.) All persons convicted of religious activity received tenners, the longest term then given. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

For what St. Augustine said is true, that one can sing nothing worthy of God save what one has received from Him. Wherefore though we look far and wide we will find no better songs nor songs more suitable to that purpose than the Psalms of David, which the Holy Spirit made and imparted to him. Thus, singing them we may be sure that our words come from God just as if He were to sing in us for His own exaltation. Wherefore, Chrysostom exhorts men, women, and children alike to get used to singing them, so as through this act of meditation to become as one with the choir of angels. — William Romaine

The Vatican is an organization that excommunicates women for attempting to become priests13 but does not excommunicate male priests for raping children.14 It excommunicates doctors who perform abortions to save a mother's life - even if the mother is a nine-year-old girl raped by her stepfather and pregnant with twins15 - but it did not excommunicate a single member of the Third Reich for committing genocide. — Sam Harris

I like subversive humor, freckles, women's knees and long hair, the laughter of playing children, and a girl running down the street. — Rene Magritte

Oprah Winfrey's global influence is unparalleled. Not only has her generosity and firm belief that education is the key to a better life benefited countless women and children around the world, but her example has also inspired millions of people to give back in ways big and small. — Eli Broad

The mere mention of a witch was almost enough to frighten us out of our wits. This was natural enough, because of late years there were more kinds of witches than there used to be; in old times it had been only old women, but of late years they were of all ages - even children of eight and nine; it was getting so that anybody might turn out to be a familiar of the Devil - age and sex hadn't anything to do with it. In our little region we had tried to extirpate the witches, but the more of them we burned the more of the breed rose up in their places. — Mark Twain

They claim there's a rationale for the children, don't they, sir?"
"Yes. Those babes in arms will grow up and want revenge on the Nazis in about 1963. I suppose the rationale for the women under forty-five is that they might be pregnant. And the rationale for the older women is while we're at it. — Martin Amis

The city is always recruited from the country. The men in cities who are the centres of energy, the driving-wheels of trade, politics or practical arts, and the women of beauty and genius, are the children or grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their fathers' hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty furrows in poverty, necessity and darkness. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

On December 29, 1890, Big Foot and two hundred or more unarmed Minnecojou men, women, and children, with a few fugitives from Sitting Bull's Hunkpapa band, were slaughtered by the Seventh Cavalry at Wounded Knee. Custer's former regiment, decimated by Indians at the battle of The Greasy Grass (Little Big Horn), was avenged. For this barbarous and cowardly act, 20 soldiers received Congressional Medals of Honor. — Antoinette Nora Claypoole

As it has turned out, the whole relationship between men, women and children has tilted, to the disadvantage of women. — Fay Weldon

But later that day, the streets of Kweilin were strewn with newspapers reporting great Kuomintang victories, and on top of these papers, like fresh fish from a butcher, lay rows of people - men, women and children who had never lost hope, but had lost their lives instead. — Amy Tan

What you are witnessing is the face of war a great ruler seldom sees, my lady," Master Lo Feng said to her. Her veiled face turned his way, listening. "No matter how righteous the cause, no matter who wins, the commonfolk suffer. Without plenty, the wealthy lack compassion for the poor, hoarding without sharing. Without law, the strong bully the weak, stealing by force. People will go hungry. Some will starve. Men and women will be forced to choose between feeding their parents and their children. — Jacqueline Carey

Every year we get together and throw a big feast for the winter solstice, a festival in which every game and every confectionary you could possibly imagine suddenly become a reality. The children put on a play about the Black Bear and the Gray Bear, an age-old story that relates the Gray Bear's trip to eternity through the freezing white snow of the north. At the very end of the celebration the men and the women perform the warm dance, a giant, joyful circle dance the Shoshone invented thousands of years ago in order to send blessings to the wild animals who — Rose Christo

Contraceptives have a proven track record of enhancing the health of women and children, preventing unintended pregnancy, and reducing the need for abortion. — Louise Slaughter

The State insists that, by thus quarantining the general reading public against books not too rugged for grown men and women in order to shield juvenile innocence, it is exercising its power to promote the general welfare. Surely this is to burn the house to roast the pig ... The incidence of this enactment is to reduce the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children. — Felix Frankfurter

Let me be very blunt: the heterosexual transmission of AIDS is, in Africa, a function of truly pathological promiscuity. So this is really a violence issue - not the same violence we deal with in Boston, where teenagers stab and shoot each other, but the violence of African men who are killing themselves, and killing African women and children, with pathological promiscuity. — Eugene Rivers

My ideals told me that men and women could both go out to work and be truly equal. My children told me something more complicated, something I really didn't want to hear. Their need for me was like the need for water or light: it had a devastating simplicity to it. — Allison Pearson

I see women and children starving to death, homes destroyed and buried in rubble, the countryside a burnt landscape, its only fruit the rotting flesh of casualties. I see dead dead dead red and burgundy and maroon and the richest shade of your mother's favorite lipstick all smeared into the earth. — Tahereh Mafi

Women share with men the need for personal success, even the taste for power, and no longer are we willing to satisfy those needs through the achievements of surrogates, whether husbands, children, or merely role models. — Elizabeth Dole

As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses! — James Oppenheim

As adults we choose our own reading material. Depending on our moods and needs we might read the newspaper, a blockbuster novel, an academic article, a women's magazine, a comic, a children's book, or the latest book that just about everyone is reading. No one chastises us for our choice. No one says, 'That's too short for you to read.' No one says, 'That's too easy for you, put it back.' No one says 'You couldn't read that if you tried
it's much too difficult.'
Yet if we take a peek into classrooms, libraries, and bookshops we will notice that children's choices are often mocked, censured, and denied as valid by idiotic, interfering teachers, librarians, and parents. Choice is a personal matter that changes with experience, changes with mood, and changes with need. We should let it be. — Mem Fox

It's more pressure on women to - if they marry or partner with someone, to partner with the right person. Because you cannot have a full career and a full life at home with your children if you are also doing all of the housework and child care. — Sheryl Sandberg

America, in the eyes of the world, typifies above all else this quality of initiative. The greatest successes are nearly all the fruit of initiative. Why do we hold in such high esteem the achievements of the Wright brothers? Because they were illustrious examples of initiative and tenacity. And ideas are born of initiative, the children of men and women of initiative. Advancement is applied initiative. Don't imitate. Initiate. — B.C. Forbes

they argue that belief in a transcendent being conveys a genetic advantage: that couples who follow one of the three religions of the Book and maintain patriarchal values have more children than atheists or agnostics. You see less education among women, less hedonism and individualism. And to a large degree, this belief in transcendence can be passed on genetically. Conversions, or cases where people grow up to reject family values, are statistically insignificant. In the vast majority of cases, people stick with whatever metaphysical system they grow up in. That's why atheist humanism - the basis of any 'pluralist society' - is doomed. — Michel Houellebecq

Let's reserve judgment for people who beat their children, sell their daughters into prostitution, or deny women the right to make decisions about their bodies and their lives. — Mayim Bialik

A family of four needs to transport around 200 pounds of water each and every day to meet its most minimal drinking, cooking, and cleaning needs. To manage such an impossible weight, two trips to the well each day by mother and children are not uncommon. Carrying water for basic subsistence devours school time for children and places a dispiriting burden on the enterprising will of parents to struggle out of their material privation. That the water carrying falls traditionally on women adds the insult of gender inequity to the tragedy. — Steven Solomon

There is nothing that anyone can get past a forty-five-year-old woman." We laugh hard, the first honest sound I make that afternoon, or in many days, each of us feeling the ravages of experience, our debt to enduring. We are not to be fucked with. We rule. Even as we age and help our children push past us, as we worry about the estimate for the roof, forget things we meant to do, regard our widening bodies, we rule. We've returned again and again to our original selves for another look; we have refined our purpose. Changes we thought we'd been resisting have anyway been wrought, and they have made us unbreakable. — Susanna Sonnenberg

Black women, white women- all of them. I'm colorblind. I don't know the difference. I only know you're a human being and you're my children. — Moms Mabley

We saw the children and the women with their babies and then I heard the poouff - the flame had broken through the thatched roof and there was a yellow- brown smoke column going up into the air. It didn't hit me all that much then, but when I think of it now - I slaughtered those people. I murdered them. — John Keegan

Some of the worst abuses of government force in recent years were precipitated by technical and victimless gun-law violations. For example, the BATF claimed that the Branch Davidians possessed machine guns without paying the required federal tax and filling in the proper registration forms. So a tax case worth less than $10,000 led to a 76-man helicopter, machine gun, and grenade assault on a home in which 2/3 of the occupants were women and children. — Dave Kopel

It wasn't that dwarfs weren't interested in sex. They saw the vital need for fresh dwarfs to leave their goods to and continue the mining work after they had gone. It was simply that they also saw no point in distinguishing between the sexes anywhere but in private. There was no such thing as a Dwarfish female pronoun or, once the children were on solids, any such thing as women's work. — Terry Pratchett

Because of Columbus's exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But as word spread of the Europeans' intent they found more and more empty villages. On Haiti, they found that the sailors left behind at Fort Navidad had been killed in a battle with the Indians, after they had roamed the island in gangs looking for gold, taking women and children as slaves for sex and labor. — Howard Zinn

Advocating women's rights and greater opportunity for women in the workplace and in every avenue of public life is inconsistent with an insistence on mother taking care of children and housework. — Mary Frances Berry

Scheffer said a new ethnic underclass of immigrants had formed, and it was much too insular, rejecting the values that knit together Dutch society and creating new, damaging social divisions. There wasn't enough insistence on immigrants adapting; teachers even questioned the relevance of teaching immigrant children Dutch history, and a whole generation of these children were being written off under a pretence of tolerance. Scheffer said there was no place in Holland for a culture that rejected the separation of church and state and denied rights to women and homosexuals. He foresaw social unrest. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Fear will do one thing and one thing only: hold you back — Kya Aliana

Despite all the videos you see from the Ministry of Defence or the Pentagon, and all the sanitised language describing smart bombs and pinpoint strikes, the scene on the ground has remained remarkably the same for hundreds of years. Craters. Burned houses. Mutilated bodies. Women weeping for children and husbands. Men for their wives, mothers children. — Marie Colvin

I have never thought I could take it, not even
for the children. It is all I have wanted to do,
to stand between them and and pain. But I come from a
long line
of women
who put themselves
first. — Sharon Olds

The situation of women living in Islam-stricken
societies and under Islamic laws is the outrage
of the 21st century. Burqa-clad and veiled women
and girls, beheadings, stoning to death,
floggings, child sexual abuse in the name of
marriage and sexual apartheid are only the most
brutal and visible aspects of women's
rightlessness and third class citizen status in the Middle East — Maryam Namazie

We can offer women what they want most of all, cures for the most common ailments of this world ... When children are ailing or babies refuse to be born, when men are unfaithful, when the sky is empty of rain, when the amulets buried beneath holy wall upon instructions of the minim offer not solace and all entreaties to the priests for guidance fail, when the rituals they offer bring no comfort and no consolation, they come to us. — Alice Hoffman

Here they found themselves year after year- a group of busy, youngish women who had eased their cars impatiently through the archaic streets of Rosedale, who had complained for a week previously about the time lost, the fuss over the children's dresses, and, above all, the boredom, but who were drawn together by a rather implausible allegiance- not so much to Miss Marsalles as to the ceremonies of their childhood, to a more exacting pattern of life which had been breaking apart even then but which survived, and unaccountably still survived, in Miss Marsalles's living room. — Alice Munro

The irreducible, ultimate element in religious faith is the insistence that we are created things; male and female He created them; without God we are nothing. And yet, when men and women have children and become parents, they unmistakably become creators, incompetent, accidental and partial creators, no doubt, but creators none the less. It is their inescapable duty, and, with luck, their occasional delight to care and watch over their creations; even if this creative power is partly illusory because chromosomes and chance decide the whole business, parents cannot act as if it is illusory; they cannot sincerely believe in their ultimate helplessness. They must behave like shepherds, however clumsy, and not like sheep, however well trained.
The Sermon on the Mount is a wonderful, intoxicating sermon. But it is a sermon for bachelors. — Ferdinand Mount

In France the men all live in cafes, the children are all put out to nurse, and the women, saving the respect of mademoiselle
well, the less said about them the better. — William John Locke

To the USSR on Stalin's death: Regardless of the identity of government personalities, the prayer of us Americans continues to be that the Almighty will watch over the people of that vast country and bring them in His wisdom opportunity to live their lives in a world where all men, and women, and children, dwell in peace and comradeship. — Dwight D. Eisenhower