“While Australia was the first country to give women the right to stand as well as to vote for the national parliament, Finland was the second. And Finland immediately elected nineteen women to its parliament (in 1907) while Australia had essentially given women the right to stand but not to sit. It was not until 1943 that the first women took their seats in Australia’s national parliament.”
“War is not women’s history.”
“The very essence of leadership is [ that] you have a vision. It’s got to be a vision you articulate clearly and forcefully on every occasion. You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet.”
“On March 19, 2004, President Bush asked: Who would prefer Saddam’s torture chambers still be open? Shamefully, we now learn that Saddam’s torture chambers reopened under new management, U.S. management.”
“Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”
“The women of today are the thoughts of their mothers and grandmothers, embodied, and made alive. They are active, capable, determined and bound to win. They have one thousand generations back of them … Millions of women, dead and gone are speaking through us today.”
“There is no such thing as being non-political. Just by making a decision to stay out of politics you are making the decision to allow others to shape politics and exert power over you. And if you are alienated from the current political system, then just by staying out of it you do nothing to change it, you simply entrench it.”
“If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the US does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”
“The roots of effective leadership lie in simple things, one of which is listening. Listening to someone demonstrates respect; it shows that you value their ideas and are willing to hear them.”
“Leadership is about capacity – the capacity of leaders to listen and observe, to use their expertise as a starting point to encourage dialogue between all levels of decision-making, to establish processes and transparency in decision-making, to articulate their own values and visions clearly but not impose them. Leadership is about setting and not just reacting to agendas, identifying problems, and initiating change that makes for substantial improvement rather than managing change.”
