Famous Quotes

"It was easy to persecute me without people feeling ashamed. It was easy to vilify me and project me as a woman who was not following the tradition of a 'good African woman' and as a highly educated elitist who was trying to show innocent African women ways of doing things that were not acceptable to African men."

Wangari Maathai on Women

More quotes about Women

• "A woman is like a tea bag - you can't tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water."

  Eleanor Roosevelt on Women

• "I don't know who invented high heels, but all women owe him a lot."

  Marilyn Monroe on Women

• "Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent."

  Friedrich Nietzsche on Women

• "The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles."

  Ralph Waldo Emerson on Women

• "As usual, there is a great woman behind every idiot."

  John Lennon on Women

More quotes by Wangari Maathai

• "It's a matter of life and death for this country. The Kenyan forests are facing extinction and it is a man-made problem."

• "You cannot blame the mismanagement of the economy or the fact that we have not invested adequately in education in order to give our people the knowledge, the skills and the technology that they need in order to be able to use the resources that Africa has to gain wealth."

• "In a few decades, the relationship between the environment, resources and conflict may seem almost as obvious as the connection we see today between human rights, democracy and peace."

• "In Kenya women are the first victims of environmental degradation, because they are the ones who walk for hours looking for water, who fetch firewood, who provide food for their families."

• "African women in general need to know that it's OK for them to be the way they are - to see the way they are as a strength, and to be liberated from fear and from silence."