Alicia Keys

A great song can pull me out of a slump and lighten my heart.

What I learned the most from Prince was putting art first, being creatively ambitious, and putting creativity at the forefront of what I do.

Kindness, love, strength and determination personified!! Madiba reminds me that everything is possible!

I want my sons to grow up in a world where they’d never think boys are better than girls or that black is better than white.

In the 80s, when I was a little girl, this whole Midtown area was a different world. These are the streets that I walked, and learned my lessons on, and heard the music, and witnessed disenfranchised people, and people who just had dreams and hopes. Every pimp, every prostitute, every drug dealer, every Broadway dreamer wishing they could be a writer, or a musician, or an actor.

On my album Here, that’s the first time that I’ve really understood how I could put all the things that were happening in the world and in my life and in our lives as just human beings into one body that was just so powerful and really had a perspective. That was an opening for me and I think that naturally, there is just so much to talk about. I don’t see me getting quiet anytime soon.

There’s something so special about a woman who dominates in a man’s world. It takes a certain grace, strength, intelligence, fearlessness, and the nerve to never take no for an answer.

Woman is the dominant sex. Men have to do all sorts of stuff to prove they are worthy of a woman’s attention.

Women have been trained to speak softly and carry a lipstick. Those days are over.

You can’t whisper magical thoughts in your daughter’s ear and go into a workplace where you tolerate [this] existence. If you are tolerating that, that’s the workplace that will be waiting for your little girl, and you have sold her a bill of goods.

I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass.

Nobody says hey, men should not drink. It’s all about women must dress differently , women must walk differently, women must drink differently. Why are we not able to hold men to account for this behavior?

To all my goddesses in the world spreading love and light, power and radiance. Never stop being brilliant!!

We can never be complacent and think that we’ve arrived now as women. Because I hear this from young women. Some of you young women who aren’t feeling the pains that many of our predecessors have felt – you think, well, there aren’t any problems, women’s rights, we’ve got this all figured out, I’m already equal, I’m good – I’m just like, oh, just you wait, you’ll feel it. So the work continues.

I think it’s a wonderful time for a woman.

The best thing you can do is to be a woman and stand before the world and speak your heart.

We are a gorgeous, infinite circle of women all shades, all styles, in all the ways we were made. Inside of us everything blooms.

I have tremendous respect for women.

I’m definitely a feminist. I’m f*cking disgusted by the way women are still treated.

As for my girls, I’ll raise them to think they breathe fire.

I’m not a feminist. If men were going through the things women are going through today, I would be fighting for them with just as much passion. I believe in equality.