So many powerful, inspirational, insightful, hopeful and connected speeches today. It's been a joy to feel the energy of the women's marches all over the country and world. Feeling optimistic and energized.

— Scott Stabile

Still trying to figure out the dynamics of rights and responsibilities as a woman? How about striking out the word Woman and making it Human.

— Haritha Velpureddy

How odd it is that we judge a woman by her clothes and the place she eats lunch and the subjects she talks about with her colleagueson her coffee break, yet we don’t judge a man if he doesn’t grow his beard or if he works with women or speaks to them. Why do Saudi women allow subjugation to a man and adhere to men’s rules and conditions? Why did I?

— Manal Al-Sharif

The revolutionary woman knows the world she seeks to overthrow is precisely one in which love between equal human beings is well nigh impossible. We are still part of the ironical working-out of this, our own cruel contradiction. One of the most compelling facts which can unite women and make us act is the overwhelming indignity or bitter hurt of being regarded as simply ‘the other’, ‘an object’, ‘commodity’, ‘thing’. We act directly from a consciousness of the impossibility of loving or being loved without distortion. But we must still demand now the preconditions of what is impossible at the moment. It is a most disturbing dialectic, our praxis of pain.

— Sheila Rowbotham

You are not born to follow the society, you are born to inspire it - you are born to teach it - you are born to build it.

— Abhijit Naskar

No nation can ever be worthy of its existence that cannot take its women along with the men. No struggle can ever succeed without women participating side by side with men. There are two powers in the world; one is the sword and the other is the pen. There is a great competition and rivalry between the two. There is a third power stronger than both, that of the women.

— Muhammad Ali Jinnah

Real men are advocates for women's rights.

— Basia Christ

I understand. I know about the women gathering at Lourdes, the visits worldwide. You are all staying at the chateau. There are no accidents,” Lilli said.

— Karen Clark

The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled down many women — of my generation, of the up-and-coming generation we need so badly, here and in Pakistan and Bolivia and Java, not to speak of the countless women who came before me and were not allowed into the laboratory, or the library, or the conversation, or the revolution, or even the category called human.

— Rebecca Solnit

We are diamonds in the roughThrough the thrust and toil, we come out strongWe are the breath of the earth,Our wombs tell of humanity's birthWe are seeds splattered on putrid soilsStill we sprout, through every stormWe are not here to survive,We are here to live...Inward and outwardIn the incandescence of our existenceYes, our voices may sometimes be brokenBut our spirit remains indestructible. We are women, unapologetically!

— Chinonye J. Chidolue