“Are women human yet? If women were human, would we be a cash crop shipped from Thailand in containers into New York's brothels...? Would our genitals be sliced out to "cleanse" us...? When will women be human? When? ~ Half The Sky”

“It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls.It is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution.It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small.It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war.It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide among women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes.It is a violation of human rights when young girls are brutalized by the painful and degrading practice of genital mutilation.It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, it is that human rights are women's rights - and women's rights are human rights. Let us not forget that among those rights are the right to speak freely - and the right to be heard. [From 'Women's Rights Are Human Rights' Speech Beijing, China: 5 September 1995]”

“We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.”

“If I were king, I would redress an abuse which cuts back, as it were, one half of human kind. I would have women participate in all human rights, especially those of the mind.”

“But women grow the living dreams, the human ones." Gorbals argues. "A human being is the greatest creation of all. Each of us is a new living dream.”

“... The desecration of women indicated the failure of human beings to honor and protect life and that this failing would, if we did not correct it, be the end of us all. p. xxxii”