Speech to National Women's Political Caucus (1973)

In Voices of Multicultural America: Notable Speeches Delivered by African, Asian, Hispanic and Native Americans, 1790-1995 (1995)

• different women view different segments of the women's movement agenda as priority items.

• The movement has, for the most part, been led by educated white middle-class women. There is nothing unusual about this. Reform as movements are usually led by the better educated and better off. But, if the women's movement is to be successful you must recognize the broad variety of women there are and the depth and range of their interests and concerns. To black and Chicano women, picketing a restricted club or insisting on the title Ms are not burning issues. They are more concerned about bread-and-butter items such as the extension of minimum wage, welfare reform and day care. Further, they are not only women but women of color and thus are subject to additional and sometimes different pressures.

• I did this [ran for president as a democrat instead of thrid party] because I feel that the time for tokenism and symbolic gestures is past. Women need to plunge into the world of politics and battle it out toe to toe on the same ground as male counterparts.

• for those who thought I was the best candidate but chose to work for someone else because they viewed my campaign as hopeless, they will need to reexamine their thinking for truly, no woman will ever achieve the presidency as long as their potential supporters hold this view.

Speech at Newark College of Engineering (1972)

In Voices of Multicultural America: Notable Speeches Delivered by African, Asian, Hispanic and Native Americans, 1790-1995 (1995)

• The cost of living is first on all of our minds this important year. Yet the President [Nixon] has decided that it is a year for travel. I ask–when is he going to make a "Trip to Peking" in regard to the basic problems facing us in the United States this year? He is willing to go halfway 'round the world--yet he doesn't have time to walk ten blocks from the White House in Washington and look at the lives people are living under Phase II.

• A sales tax is the enemy of the poor person. It is the enemy of the elderly couple who live on fixed income. And it is the enemy of the everyday American consumer, poor or not.

• I am completely opposed to increasing the debt ceiling without basic tax reform. What we need in this country today is leadership which has the courage to call for income tax reform to put the burden where it must be placed, on those who can afford to pay.

• I know a lot of Americans who would be glad to settle for better bus service from their home to their jobs, or from poor neighborhoods to areas of the city where jobs are to be found. Repeated studies of riots in urban ghettos show that lack of adequate transportation was a big factor in the discontent and bitterness which caused riot conditions to erupt, but President Nixon's answer is to build a space shuttle or an SST with precious public funds, to serve a tiny elite of the population or to stimulate the economy of a state or region by creating massive and useless technological publicworks projects.

Unbought and Unbossed (1970)

• 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.
  • p. 37.

• Congress seems drugged and inert most of the time. 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.
  • p. 104.

• When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.
  • p. 108.

• 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.
  • p. 160.

• I don't measure America by its achievement but by its potential.
  • p. 175.

Speech in Congress (1969)

In Voices of Multicultural America: Notable Speeches Delivered by African, Asian, Hispanic and Native Americans, 1790-1995 (1995)

• As a teacher, and as a woman. I do not think I will ever understand what kind of values can be involved in spending nine billion dollars–and more, I am sure–on elaborate, unnecessary and impractical weapons when several thousand disadvantaged children in the nation's capital get nothing.

• Mr. Nixon had said things like this: "If our cities are to be livable for the next generation, we can delay no long. er in launching new approaches to the problems that beset them and to the tensions that tear them apart." And he said, "When you cut expenditures for education, what you are doing is shortchanging the American future.” But frankly. I have never cared too much what people say. What I am interested in is what they do.

• Apparently launching those new [domestic social] programs can be delayed for a while, after all. It seems we have to get some missiles launched first.

• Two more years of fantastic waste in the Defense Department and of penny pinching on social programs

• We Americans have come to feel that it is our mission to make the world free. We believe that we are always the good guys, everywhere-in Vietnam, in Latin America, weherever we go. We believe we are the good guys at home, too. When the Kemer Commission told white Amerca what black America had always known, that prejudice and hatred built the nation's slums, maintain them and profit by them, white America would not believe it. But it is true. Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies of poverty and racism in our own country and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed as hypocrites in the eyes of the world when we talk about making other people free.