Shirley Chisholm
Shirley Chisholm
Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholmwas an American politician, educator, and author. In 1968, she became the first African American woman elected to the United States Congress, and represented New York's 12th Congressional District for seven terms from 1969 to 1983. In 1972, she became the first major-party black candidate for President of the United States, and the first woman to run for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth30 November 1924
CityBrooklyn, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Rhetoric never won a revolution yet.
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.
When the Kerner Commission told white America what black America has always known, that prejudice and hatred built the nation’s slums, maintains them and profits by them, white America could not believe it. But it is true. Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies in our own country, poverty and racism, and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed in the eyes of the world as hypocrites when we talk about making people free - (Chapter 9).
Health is a human right, not a privilege to be purchased.
Women must become revolutionary. This cannot be evolution but revolution.
As things are now, no one can tell to whom members of Congress are responsible, except that it does not often appear to be to the people. Everyone else is represented in Washington by a rich and powerful lobby, it seems. But there is no lobby for the people.
I was well on the way to forming my present attitude toward politics as it is practiced in the United States; it is a beautiful fraud that has been imposed on the people for years, whose practitioners exchange gelded promises for the most valuable thing their victims own: their votes. And who benefits the most? The lawyers.
The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says: It's a girl.
When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.
Defeat should not be the source of discouragement, but a stimulus to keep plotting.
Tremendous amounts of talent are lost to our society just because that talent wears a skirt.
Don't list to those who say YOU CAN'T. List to the voice inside yourself that says, I CAN.
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,
I ran for the presidency, despite hopeless odds, to demonstrate the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo… to give a voice to the people the major candidates were ignoring. What I hope most is that now there will be others who will feel themselves as capable of running for high political office as any wealthy, good-looking white male.