Historical Figures Quotes
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"A girl should be two things: classy and fabulous."Source: Quoted in The Gospel According to Coco Chanel : Life Lessons from the World's Most Elegant Woman (2009) | Speaker: Coco Chanel

"All her hairSource: Porphyria's Lover | Author: Robert Browning
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around"

"And they brought us whole binders full of women."Source: 2012 Presidential Debate | Speaker: Mitt Romney

"Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible."Source: The Dalai Lama's visit to Capitol Hill | Speaker: Dalai Lama

"Do not call for Black power or green power. Call for brain power."Source: Campus Speeches, Quoted in the Chicago Tribune | Author: Barbara Jordan

"Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom."Source: 1896 Letter to Booker T. Washington | Author: George Washington Carver

"Education is the most powerful weapon we can use to change the world."Source: 2003 Speech | Speaker: Nelson Mandela

"Happiness is not something ready-made. It comes from your own actions."Source: Unknown | Speaker: Dalai Lama

"Have a vision. Be demanding."Source: It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership | Author: Colin Powell

"Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become."Source: Stanford Commencement Speech (2005) | Speaker: Steve Jobs

"Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful."Source: The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci | Author: Leonardo da Vinci

"I have observed this in my experience of slavery, that whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain my freedom."Source: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass | Author: Frederick Douglass

"I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves, and I watch my daughters—two beautiful, intelligent, Black young women—playing with their dogs on the White House lawn."Source: 2016 Democratic National Convention Speech | Speaker: Michelle Obama

"In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different."Source: Quoted in Coco Chanel: Her Life, Her Secrets (1971) | Speaker: Coco Chanel

"Just don't give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don't think you can go wrong."Source: Unknown | Speaker: Ella Fitzgerald

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."Source: 1965 TV Broadcast | Speaker: J. Robert Oppenheimer

"Politics is the art of the possible."Source: St. Petersburgische Zeitung | Author: Prince Otto von Bismarck

"Struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won. You earn it and win it in every generation."Source: My Life with Martin Luther King Jr. | Author: Coretta Scott King

"The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution."Source: The New Yorker | Author: Hannah Arendt

"The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe! You have to make it fall."Source: Libération | Speaker: Che Guevara

"We should emphasize not Negro History, but the Negro in history. What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race hate, and religious prejudice."Source: "The Celebration of Negro History Week" in The Journal of Negro History | Author: Carter G. Woodson