If I am not good to myself, how can I expect anyone else to be good to me?
Maya AngelouRead
I'm a feminist. I've been a female for a long time now. It'd be stupid not to be on my own side.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Maya Angelou emphasizes the importance of supporting oneself as a woman and advocating for gender equality.
In this quote, Maya Angelou asserts her identity as a feminist and highlights the necessity for women to stand up for their own rights and interests. By acknowledging her long experience as a female, she underlines that it is not only logical but vital for women to support gender equality, making a powerful statement about self-advocacy and empowerment in the face of societal challenges.
Themes
FeminismEmpowermentGender EqualitySelf-AdvocacyWomen
In practice
Example use cases
In a women's rights rally to inspire attendees.
More from Maya Angelou
All quotes βI find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at commensurate speed.
Maya AngelouRead
The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn't need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder-in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.
Maya AngelouRead
I dreamt we walked together along the shore. We made satisfying small talk and laughed. This morning I found sand in my shoe and a seashell in my pocket. Was I only dreaming?
Maya AngelouRead
I know that I'm not the easiest person to live with. The challenge I put on myself is so great that the person I live with feels himself challenged. I bring a lot to bear, and I don't know how not to.
Maya AngelouRead
I think Clinton, after getting into office and into Washington, was shocked at being bludgeoned. So he spent time trying to be all things to all people - one way guaranteed not to be successful or respected in a lion's den. You can't just play around with all those big cats - you've got to take somebody on.
Maya AngelouRead
Similar quotes
There is a widespread assumption that simply because my generation of women has the good fortune to live in a world touched by the feminist movement, that means everything we do is magically imbued with its agenda, but it doesn't work that way.
Ariel LevyRead
I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women's movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history when men - insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea - have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included
Adrienne RichRead
The issues that matter to women also matter to communities... and these issues have a ripple effect all across the country. And the purist sense of the feminist tradition - feminism is not anti-man. It is pro-humanity.
Nina TurnerRead
We need a kind of feminism that aims not just to assimilate into the institutions that men have created over the centuries, but to infiltrate and subvert them.
Barbara EhrenreichRead
Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.
Joanna RussRead
I think the history of western feminism is one that is fraught with racism, and I think it's important to acknowledge that and, at the same time, to say that feminism is not the western invention, that my great-grandmother in what is now south-western Nigeria is feminist.
Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieRead