Faye Wattleton Quotations

I do not make any apologies for my manner or personality. I come from a long line of very strong, black African-American women who neither bend nor bow. I haven't had very good modeling in submission.

The influence of one's parents is powerful and permanent.

The only safe ship in a storm is leadership.

This is not a country that has had a tremendous sympathy for poor people, so I think that the notion that somehow we have slipped into an era in which poor people don't matter is not quite the way our history would define it.

Affirmative action has been generally cast in terms of race. I think women themselves are not as cognizant of the role affirmative action has played in opening the doors for women.

My satisfaction comes from my commitment to advancing a better world.

A woman who places a high priority on performance and excellence is seen as imperial. A man is seen as demanding and tough.

The deal is that women have entered the workforce, but they have not been relieved of the domestic responsibilities.

Being a person who has had plastic surgery and goes to the gym five days a week to work my muscles up so they don't look atrophied as a 60-year-old, I don't disparage people who want to maintain their appearance. But what I don't want is a society that tells me I have to.

'What can your kids teach you?' Well, I believe something different about kids. We don't own them, they have their own knowledge. From the start you have to make the choice to listen.

We have a very long way to go to really penetrate the power structure. Until that happens, you will not see stability among the workforce, among women - in the workforce among women.

One of the sad commentaries on the way women are viewed in our society is that we have to fit one category. I have never felt that I had to be in one category.

Many African-American men are incarcerated. And so African-American women do carry an enormous burden. And traditionally have carried a greater burden than perhaps their white counterparts.

My mother was from Mississippi, or is from 'Mississippi;' my father was from Alabama. He speaks about conditions in Mississippi and Alabama. They were really the poster children for the bad public laws that segregated, according to race, in our country.

I was raised in a very sheltered, narrow environment.

In 1985, I saw a tape of myself where my eyes were puffy. I looked very tired and bedraggled and not as youthful as I would like to have been.

The recognition of rights for women and minorities became a large part of my understanding of what this country is all about.

My mother taught me a lot of things, but they had big presuppositions built in - like her expectation that I'd be a missionary nurse in a religious order.

In my mind, the core issue has always been prevention. My views were shaped by my experiences with women who were managing and coping with unintended pregnancies and unwanted children.

Just saying no prevents teenage pregnancy the way 'Have a nice day' cures chronic depression.

Social change rarely comes about through the efforts of the disenfranchised. The middle class creates social revolutions.

Until the day arrives when all women decide that our rights are not negotiable, our future choices will not be secure.

We've consistently seen, since the late 1990s, that more than half of women believe that abortion should be severely restricted or abolished altogether.

If we can't preserve the privacy of our right to procreate, I can't imagine what rights we will be able to protect.

I have never believed in the impossible.

American teens have the worst of all worlds ... Our children are bombarded and confronted with sexual messages, sexual exploitation, and all manner of sexual criticism. But our society is by and large sexually illiterate.

Men's reproduction isn't regulated by the state -- and it shouldn't be. Neither should women's.

As we celebrate the 100th birthday of Margaret Sanger, our outrageous and our courageous leader, we will probably find a number of areas in which we may find more about Margaret Sanger than we thought we wanted to know...

Whoever is providing leadership needs to be as fresh and thoughtful and reflective as possible to make the very best fight.

My mother taught me a lot of things, but they had big presuppositions built in - like her expectation that I'd be a missionary nurse in a religious order.

I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don't know that abortion is killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus.

Reproductive freedom is critical to a whole range of issues. If we can't take charge of this most personal aspect of our lives, we can't take care of anything. It should not be seen as a privilege or as a benefit, but a fundamental human right.