Welcome to the web’s most comprehensive site of quotations by women. 43,939 quotations are searchable by topic, by author's name, or by keyword. Many of them appear in no other collection. And new ones are added continually.
Search by Topic:
Find quotations by TOPIC (coffee, love, dogs)
or search alphabetically below.
Search by Last Name:
Search by Keyword:
Helen Gahagan Douglas
-
“Such pip-squeaks as Nixon and McCarthy are trying to get us so frightened of Communism that we'll be afraid to turn out the lights at night.”
-
“... if we pursue the arms race no other problem will be solved.”
-
“... men never would share power with women willingly. If we wanted it, we would have to take it.”
-
“... to be free you must afford freedom to your neighbor, regardless of race, color, creed or national origin, and that, sometimes, for some, is very difficult.”
-
“Freedom is not won on the battlefields. The chance for freedom is won there. The final battle is won or lost in our hearts and minds.”
-
“We cannot legislate equality but we can legislate ... equal opportunity for all.”
-
“The ... irrational fear of communism is being deliberately used in many quarters to blind us to our real problems.”
-
“Democracy cannot long survive when the people permit their lives to be dominated — economically or politically — by a powerful few.”
-
“There is no danger is letting people have their say. ... There is a danger when you try to stop them from saying it.”
-
“Politicians aren't any more wicked than other citizens but the situation in which they are placed warps their judgment.”
-
“The discrepancy between American ideals and American practice — between our aims and what we actually do — creates a moral dry rot which eats away at the foundations of our democratic faith.”
-
“You cannot barter security for freedom, or freedom for security.”
-
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and this is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”
-
“In trying to make something new, half the undertaking lies in discovering whether it can be done. Once it has been established that it can, duplication is inevitable.”
-
“You can't prove you're an American by waving Old Glory.”
-
“Nothing can be controlled by one country today; nothing.”
-
“Character isn't inherited. One builds it daily by the way one thinks and acts, thought by thought, action by action.”
-
“If you tell me that there are obstacles in the way of your ambition that make it impossible to pursue, then I know it's not a real ambition. There are always obstacles. The 'perversity of events,' as someone once called it, is always ready to lick us. Events are never right for achieving what we most want to achieve. If this were not so, there would be no real fun in being 17 — or even in being alive.”
Helen Gahagan Douglas, U.S. member of Congress, actor, singer
(1900 - 1980)
Full name: Helen Mary Gahagan Douglas.