20 Inspiring Quotes on National Women’s Day (SA)
Here are some inspiring thoughts as South Africa celebrates National Women’s Day.
1. Wathint’Abafazi Wathint’imbokodo! (Now you have touched the women, you have struck a rock.) In the 54 years since, the phrase (or its latest incarnation: “You strike a woman, you strike a rock“) has come to represent women’s courage and strength in South Africa.1
2. “I … don’t doubt for a moment that the revolution will result in a nonracial society. I have just come from being a patient in Groote Schuur Hospital where they now have integrated wards. For the first time in my life, I have seen it working. The patients were mixed, the staff was mixed, and the medical officers were mixed; it was totally integrated. It was beautiful. White and black together. And it works. To me that is terribly exciting.” – Helen Joseph
3. Sisulu said the following in 1987, referring to Soweto, the urban area southwest of Johannesburg constructed for the settlement of black people.
“Women are the people who are going to relieve us from all this oppression and depression. The rent boycott that is happening in Soweto now is alive because of the women. It is the women who are on the street committees educating the people to stand up and protect each other.”2
4. “If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman.” – Margaret Thatcher
5. “The fastest way to change society is to mobilize the women of the world.” – Charles Malik
6. “Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size.” – Virginia Woolf
7. “If men can run the world, why can’t they stop wearing neckties? How intelligent is it to start the day by tying a little noose around your neck?” – Linda Ellerbee
8. “Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
9. “The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend.” – George Santayana
10. “A free race cannot be born of slave mothers.” – Margaret Sanger
11. “Woman is the companion of man, gifted with equal mental capacity.” – Gandhi
12. “By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacation-less class.” – Anne Morrow Lindbergh, American aviator, Gift From the Sea
13. “A charming woman doesn’t follow the crowd. She is herself.” – Loretta Young, American Actress
14. A woman’s guess is much more accurate than a man’s certainty. – Rudyard Kipling, Author
15. “The day will come when men will recognize woman as his peer, not only at the fireside, but in councils of the nation. Then, and not until then, will there be the perfect comradeship, the ideal union between the sexes that shall result in the highest development of the race.”
“There never will be complete equality until women themselves help to make laws and elect lawmakers.” – Susan B. Anthony
16. “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead
17. “In passing, also, I would like to say that the first time Adam had a chance he laid the blame on a woman.” – Nancy Astor (British Politician)
18. “For what is done or learned by one class of women becomes, by virtue of their common womanhood, the property of all women.” – Elizabeth Blackwell
(The first woman in the U.S. to become a physician)
19. “We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road—the one “less traveled by”—offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.” – Rachel Carson
20. “The family unit plays a critical role in our society and in the training of the generation to come.”
– Sandra Day O’Connor
Sources:
1 – http://quotes.dictionary.com/author/helen+joseph
2 – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albertina_Sisulu
3. Search: “Women’s Day quotes, International Women’s day Quotes, South African women”
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