Top 60 Shirley Chisholm Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.”

— Shirley Chisholm

2. “You don’t make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.”

— Shirley Chisholm

3. “I am and always will be a catalyst for change.”

— Shirley Chisholm

4. “Health is a human right, not a privilege to be purchased.”

— Shirley Chisholm

5. “Service is the rent that you pay for room on this earth.”

— Shirley Chisholm

6. “In the end anti-black, anti-female, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing: anti-humanism.”

— Shirley Chisholm

7. “I had met far more discrimination because I am a woman than because I am black.”

— Shirley Chisholm

8. “America has the laws and the material resources it takes to insure justice for all its people. What it lacks is the heart, the humanity...”

— Shirley Chisholm

9. “We have never seen health as a right. It has been conceived as a privilege, available only to those who can afford it. This is the real reason the American health care system is in such a scandalous state.”

— Shirley Chisholm

10. “I love America not for what she is, but for what she can become.”

— Shirley Chisholm

11. “It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality.”

— Shirley Chisholm

12. “When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.”

— Shirley Chisholm

13. “I have never cared too much what people way. What I am interested in is what they do.”

— Shirley Chisholm

14. “Tremendous amounts of talent are lost to our society just because that talent wears a skirt.”

— Shirley Chisholm

15. “The difference between de jure and de facto segregation is the difference between open, forthright bigotry and the shamefaced kind that works through unwritten agreements between real estate dealers, school officials, and local politicians.”

— Shirley Chisholm

16. “My God, what do we want? What does any human being want? Take away an accident of pigmentation of a thin layer of our outer skin and there is no difference between me and anyone else. All we want is for that trivial difference to make no difference.”

— Shirley Chisholm

17. “As there were no black Founding Fathers, there were no founding mothers – a great pity on both counts.”

— Shirley Chisholm

18. “Racism keeps people who are being managed from finding out the truth through contact with each other.”

— Shirley Chisholm

19. “Laws will not eliminate prejudice from the hearts of human beings. But that is no reason to allow prejudice to continue to be enshrined in our laws to perpetuate injustice through inaction.”

— Shirley Chisholm

20. “Women must become revolutionary. This cannot be evolution but revolution.”

— Shirley Chisholm

21. “Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread and deepseated, that it is invisible because it is so normal.”

— Shirley Chisholm

22. “We must reject not only the stereotypes that others hold of us, but also the stereotypes that we hold of ourselves.”

— Shirley Chisholm

23. “Of my two ‘handicaps,’ being female put more obstacles in my path than being black.”

— Shirley Chisholm

24. “Defeat should not be the source of discouragement, but a stimulus to keep plotting.”

— Shirley Chisholm

25. “I’d like them to say that Shirley Chisholm had guts. That’s how I’d like to be remembered.”

— Shirley Chisholm

26. “Any time things appear to be going better, you have overlooked something.”

— Shirley Chisholm

27. “That’s what’s wrong with the country. There are too many ‘good soldiers’ accepting too many bad decisions.”

— Shirley Chisholm

28. “It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts.”

— Shirley Chisholm

29. “I am not antiwhite, because I understand that white people, like black ones, are victims of a racist society. They are products of their time and place.”

— Shirley Chisholm

30. “Following along the path of her role models, Shirley knew that if she waited for permission, she’d never receive her turn.”

— Shirley Chisholm

31. “My God, what do we want? What does any human being want?”

— Shirley Chisholm

32. “The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says: It’s a girl.”

— Shirley Chisholm

33. “Liberty and justice for all” were beautiful words, but the ugly fact was that liberty and justice were only for white males.”

— Shirley Chisholm

34. “Our representative democracy is not working because the Congress that is supposed to represent the voters does not respond to their needs. I believe the chief reason for this is that it is ruled by a small group of old men.”

— Shirley Chisholm

35. “The Constitution they wrote was designed to protect the rights of white, male citizens. As there were no black Founding Fathers, there were no founding mothers – a great pity, on both counts. It is not too late to complete the work they left undone. Today, here, we should start to do so.”

— Shirley Chisholm

36. “At present, our country needs women’s idealism and determination, perhaps more in politics than anywhere else.”

— Shirley Chisholm

37. “Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies in our own country, poverty and racism, and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed in the eyes of the world as hypocrites when we talk about making people free.”

— Shirley Chisholm

38. “As a black person I am no stranger to prejudice. But the truth is that in the political world I have been far more often discriminated against because I am a woman than because I am black.”

— Shirley Chisholm

39. “Political organizations are formed to keep the powerful in power.”

— Shirley Chisholm

40. “It is incomprehensible to me, the fear that can affect men in political offices. It is shocking the way they submit to forces they know are wrong and fail to stand up for what they believe. Can their jobs be so important to them, their pres- tige, their power, their privileges so important that they will cooperate in the degradation of our society just to hang on to those jobs?”

— Shirley Chisholm

41. “We Americans have a chance to become someday a nation in which all racial stocks and classes can exist in their own selfhoods, but meet on a basis of respect and equality and live together, socially, economically, and politically.”

— Shirley Chisholm

42. “I don’t measure America by its achievement but by its potential.”

— Shirley Chisholm

43. “One distressing thing is the way men react to women who assert their equality: their ultimate weapon is to call them unfeminine. They think she is anti-male; they even whisper that she’s probably a lesbian.”

— Shirley Chisholm

44. “Lincoln didn’t just end slavery. King didn’t just dream segregation away. Parks didn’t just get tired one day. It is often the unrecognized actions of previous generations that push a society to eventually embrace mantras such as hope, equality, change, and other ideals, which transform the political landscape. Chisholm’s actions remind us that there are hundreds of forgotten foot soldiers in history that helped to bring these watershed moments to fruition. For.”

— Shirley Chisholm

45. “There is a good deal of evidence that the United States is moving to the right, and that the main force behind the movement is a resurgence, in a new form, of racial prejudice.”

— Shirley Chisholm

46. “Rhetoric never won a revolution yet.”

— Shirley Chisholm

47. “As things are now, no one can tell to whom members of Congress are responsible, except that it does not often appear to be to the people. Everyone else is represented in Washington by a rich and powerful lobby, it seems. But there is no lobby for the people.”

— Shirley Chisholm

48. “That I am a national figure because I was the first person in 192 years to be at once a congressman, black, and a woman proves, I would think, that our society is not yet either just or free.”

— Shirley Chisholm

49. “Political organizations are formed to keep the powerful in power. Their first rule is “don’t rock the boat.” If someone makes trouble and you can get him, do it. If you can’t get him, bring him in. Give him some of the action, let him have a taste of power. Power is all anyone wants, and if he has a promise of it as a reward for being good, he’ll be good. Anyone who does not play by those rules is incomprehensible to most politicians.”

— Shirley Chisholm

50. “The most tragic error into which older people can fall is one that is common among educators and politicians. It is to use youth as scapegoats for the sins of their elders.”

— Shirley Chisholm