Shirley Chisholm Quotes (12 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Shirley Chisholm: 12 quotes1 like

Famous Shirley Chisholm Quotes

“The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, 'It's a girl.”

Reported in Anthology : Quotations and Sayings of People of Color (1973) by Walter B. Hoard, p. 36.

“You don't make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.”

Shirley Chisholm

“Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread, and deep-seated, that it is invisible because it is so normal.”

Shirley Chisholm

“In the end anti-black, anti-female, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing: anti-humanism.”

Shirley Chisholm

“If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.”

Shirley Chisholm

“When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.”

Shirley Chisholm

Source: Unbought and Unbossed (1970), p. 108.

Shirley Chisholm Quotes

“Congress seems drugged and inert most of the time.”

Shirley Chisholm

Even when the problems it ignores build up to crises and erupt in strikes, riots, and demonstrations, it has not moved. Its idea of meeting a problem is to hold hearings or, in extreme cases, to appoint a commission.
Source: Unbought and Unbossed (1970), p. 104.

“The Constitution they wrote was designed to protect the rights of white, male citizens. As there were no black Founding Fathers, there were no founding mothers — a great pity, on both counts.”

Shirley Chisholm

For the Equal Rights Amendment (10 August 1970).
Context: The Constitution they wrote was designed to protect the rights of white, male citizens. As there were no black Founding Fathers, there were no founding mothers — a great pity, on both counts. It is not too late to complete the work they left undone. Today, here, we should start to do so.

“I don't measure America by its achievement but by its potential.”

Shirley Chisholm

Source: Unbought and Unbossed (1970), p. 175.

“The difference between de jure and de facto segregation is the difference between open, forthright bigotry and the shamefaced kind that works through unwritten agreements between real estate dealers, school officials, and local politicians.”

Shirley Chisholm

Source: Unbought and Unbossed (1970), p. 160.

“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.”

Shirley Chisholm

Source: Unbought and Unbossed (1970), p. 37.

“Of my two handicaps, being female put many more obstacles in my path than being black.”

Shirley Chisholm

Reported in "Shirley Chisholm Kicks Off Campaign for U.S. Presidency" by Ronald E. Kisner, Jet‎, Vol. 41, no. 20 (Feb. 1972), p. 12.