Abbey Lincoln

I loved Billie Holiday more than any other person other than myself on the stage.

I don’t have to lay on the couch and see a therapist because my therapy is in art.

I guess that maybe breasts are the most important part of the body when you think about it, I mean without them employers just wouldn’t know who to give the smaller paychecks to.

If you look up feminist in the dictionary, it just means someone who believes men and women have equal rights …

Until we’re in those rooms as equally as men are, it can’t shift.

The sadness of the women’s movement is that they don’t allow the necessity of love. See, I don’t personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed.

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

It is by standing up for the rights of girls and women that we truly measure up as men.

I never identified with the feminist movement in a strong way. I just kind of lived it. I didn’t politicize it. I didn’t follow any written rules to what it meant to be a feminist. I had my own sense of what was right and wrong.

It’s pretty clear that if men were having babies we’d have different policies.

So early in our lives we are shushed. And not just directly shushed but sometimes in our lives we’re treated too preciously. We may have a father that loves us and treats us like a doll. They don’t treat us like real beings and equal partners.

I have tremendous respect for women.

We have become the men we wanted to marry.

I do respect them; I have great respect for women. In fact, one of the reasons ‘The Apprentice’ was such a successful show for so many years, the audience of women was fantastic.

I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I always knew the woman I wanted to be.

[on her mother] she’s a very smart, independent woman who was kind of coming into her own in the feminist movement of the 70s and 80s

It’s misogynistic in nature to try and control a woman’s sexual presentation of self. I consider this an issue that is bigger than one film.