Nobody is my boss.

Investing for the poor requires participation from the entire community.

Let us ask ourselves, ‚What kind of people do we think we are?‘ And let us answer, ‚Free people, worthy of freedom and determined not only to remain so but to help others gain their freedom as well.‘

I mean, I never liked being told what to do. It’s one of the reasons I dropped out of school.

Injustice in the end produces independence.

I don’t want to be fake. I’m just being me. And I have the power to break stereotypes and whatever useless rules that society puts on us.

I’m interested in women’s health because I’m a woman. I’d be a darn fool not to be on my own side.

I don’t like begging money from producers.

Well I have a microphone and you don’t so you will listen to every damn word I have to say!

I got my own back.

If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.

I was raised to be an independent woman, not the victim of anything.

I can’t stand directors who try to micro-manage everything. When it happens these days I just walk off set, saying if they don’t like the way I’m doing it they can get someone else.

Although I’m only fourteen, I know quite well what I want. I know who is right and who is wrong. I have my opinions, my own ideas and principles, and although it may sound pretty mad from an adolescent, I feel more of a person than a child. I feel quite independent of anyone.

I don’t kiss nobody’s butt.

Maybe ‚loner‘ is too strong a word, but I’ve always enjoyed being on my own.

My rich dad believed we should all learn to take care of ourselves.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

You can do without a woman but not a typewriter.

To live alone is the fate of all great souls.

I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share; it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.

Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.

I want to appeal to everyone. Because I’m not saying I’m the best, but we the best.

I am an example of what is possible when girls from the very beginning of their lives are loved and nurtured by people around them. I was surrounded by extraordinary women in my life who taught me about quiet strength and dignity.

Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

We do not need the empire to give us anything.

He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has mastered himself is mightier still.

A lot of people are afraid to tell the truth, to say no. That’s where toughness comes into play. Toughness is not being a bully. It’s having backbone.

Together, we can help make sure that every family that walks into a restaurant can make an easy, healthy choice.

I’m old enough and cranky enough now that if someone tried to tell me what to do, I’d tell them where to put it.

I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me.

The proper study of mankind is woman.

I just don’t feel like I have to explain myself.

One of the things that was really an issue was I did not want to just be a woman secretary of state. I wanted to be a secretary of a state who was a woman, but not just chosen for that particular reason.

Let each become all that he was created capable of being.

Accept everything about yourself – I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end – no apologies, no regrets.

Let freedom reign. The sun never set on so glorious a human achievement.

The United Nations is designed to make possible lasting freedom and independence for all its members.

I’m just an individual who doesn’t feel that I need to have somebody qualify my work in any particular way. I’m working for me.

A girl should be two things: classy and fabulous.

I don’t believe we are supposed to go through life defeated and not having enough money to pay our bills or send our kids to college.

Charity is injurious unless it helps the recipient to become independent of it.

We all have possibilities we don’t know about. We can do things we don’t even dream we can do.

You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lines. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Although the circumstances of our lives may seem very disengaged, with me standing here as the First Lady of the United States of America and you just getting through school, I want you to know we have very much in common. For nothing in my life ever would have predicted that I would be standing here as the first African-American First Lady.

Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

The ultimate authority must always rest with the individual’s own reason and critical analysis.

There are a lot of good women in New York.

Encouragement to all women is – let us try to offer help before we have to offer therapy. That is to say, let’s see if we can’t prevent being ill by trying to offer a love of prevention before illness.

Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you. It is not dependent on some other body, some external form.

Your life must be a progression towards ownership – first mentally of your independence, and then physically of your work, owning what you produce.

I hated to be treated as a child. I thought it was the worst situation.

I’m not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they’ll have, immediately the floor will rise.

He who is brave is free.

It seems to me that terrestrial beings, as they become more autonomous, psychologically richer, shut themselves up in a way against one another, and at the same time gradually become strangers to the cosmic environment and currents, impenetrable to one another, and incapable of exteriorizing themselves.

If you’re too big to fit into fashion, then you just have to do your own fashion.

I never wanted to weigh more heavily on a man than a bird.

A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.

The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and poor parents. Later she would grow up and be called beautiful. As a grown woman she would be known as the butter-colored lady with the blowback hair.

It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.

The sexiest thing that a woman can do, wear, and say all fall under one word to me: subtlety. To be subtle in the things that she does and the things she says and the things she wears – I appreciate the details.