1. History...tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all - it is very tiresome. -- Jane Austen (1775-1817), from Northanger Abbey

2. If it is true that men are better than women because they are stronger, why aren't our sumo wrestlers in the government? -- Kishida Toshiko, 19th Century Japanese Feminist

3. We are aware that it is said, that woman is virtually represented in Parliament, her interests being the same as those of man; but the many laws, which have been obliged to be passed to protect them from their nearest male relatives, are a sufficient answer...They are evidently the production of men legislating for their own most obvious interest...without the slightest reference to the injustice they were committing against women. -- Marion Kirkland Reid - England, 1843

4. Because man and woman are the complement of one another, we need woman's thought in national affairs to make a safe and stable government...Whiter is a nation tending when brains count for less than bullion, and clowns made laws for queens?
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton - USA, 1869

5. Ladies, we must remind ourselves that the weapon of the vote will be for us, just as it is for man, the only means of obtaining the reforms we desire. As long as we remain excluded from civic life, men will attend to their own interests rather than to our.
-- Hubertine Auclert - France, 1879

6. Extending over more than a century and including most nations of the globe, the cause of woman suffrage has been one of the great democratic forces in human history.
-- Ellen Carol DuBois - USA, 1989

7. The liberated woman is not that modern doll who wears make-up and tasteless clothes. ....The liberation woman is a person who believes that she is as human as a man. The liberated woman does not insist on her freedom so as to abuse it.
Ghada Samman, Syrian writer, 1961

8. If you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.
Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister of Britain), 1989

9. Although I am a woman and young, I have more than enough courage to suffer this death and a thousand more. -- La Pola, statement before execution in wars of independence, 1817, Colombia

10. It is not power that corrupts, but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts.
Aung San Suu Kyi, (Myanmar)

11."Pay heed to the word of your Mother as though it were the word of a God.
-- Anonymous

12. Remember the dignity of your womanhood. Do not appeal, do not beg, do not grovel. Take courage, join hands, stand beside us, fight with us.
Christabel Pankhurst, Suffragette, 1880-1950