Here are some of the most enlightening quotes from Melinda Gates’ book, The Moment of Lift :
Because sometimes all that’s needed to lift women up is to stop pulling them down.
Melinda Gates
I think its great if women want to stay home. But it should be a choice, not something we do because we think we have no choice .
Melinda Gates
Being a feminist means believing that every woman should be able to use her voice and pursue her potential, and that women and men should all work together to take down the barriers and end the biases that still hold women back.
Melinda Gates
No country in the last fifty years have emerged from poverty without expanding access to contraceptives.
Melinda Gates
If you don’t set your own agenda, somebody else will
Elaine Amerland (Melinda Gates’ mother)
My worries make me work harder
Melinda Gates
As women gain rights, families flourish and so do societies…Gender equality lifts everyone.
Melinda Gates
Every wall is a door
Melinda Gates
Often in life, it’s the older males who get credit for the work that young people and women do. It isn’t right, but that’s how it works
Dr. Hans Rosling
Poverty is the most disempowering force on earth
Melinda Gates
False information is disempowering
Melinda Gates
If love were enough to save a life, no mother would ever bury her baby- we need the science as well. But the way you deliver the science is just as important as the science itself.
Melinda Gates
Their cup is not empty; you can’t just pour your ideas into it. Their cup is already full, so you have to understand what is in their cup.
Dr. Vishwajeet Kumar
The core remedy for poverty and almost any social ill (is) including the excluded, going to the margins of society and bringing everybody back in.
Melinda Gates
Overcoming the need to create outsiders is our greatest challenge as human beings.
Melinda Gates
That’s what listening does. It opens you up. It draws out your love – and love is more important than doctrine.
Melinda Gates
Majorities don’t matter on issues of conscience.
Melinda Gates
There is something empowering about being asked. It sends a message that your life matters.
Melinda Gates
Sometimes the best thing a mother can do for her children is not have another child.
Melinda Gates
It (stigma) forces people to hide in shame. The best way to fight back is speak up… it’s a direct attack on self-censorship that stigma needs to survive.
Melinda Gates
When politicians target people who can’t fight back, that’s bullying
Melinda Gates
There is no morality without empathy.
Melinda Gates
It’s a mark of backward society – or a society moving backward – when decisions are made for women by men
Melinda Gates
Let’s pick up our books and our pens, they are our most powerful weapons. One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world.
Malala Yousafzai
I learnt that I did not have to trade a part of my body to get education. I had a right.
Kakenya
I don’t have any idea how people find the guts to speak up against waves of tradition, but when they do, they always end up with followers who have the same conviction but not quite the same courage. That’s how leaders are born. They say what others want to say, and the others then join them. That’s how a young woman can change not only her life but her culture.
Melinda Gates
The most transforming force of education for women and girls is changing the self-image of the girl who goes to school. That’s where the lift is. If her self image doesn’t change, then going to school will not change the culture, because she will be using her skills to serve the social norms that keep her down.
Melinda Gates
A low self-image and oppressive social customs are inner and outer versions of the same force.
Melinda Gates
The first defense against a culture that hates you is a person who loves you.
Melinda Gates
Love is the most powerful and underused force for change in the world.
Melinda Gates
Only love can safely handle power.
Richard Rohr
..in the universal human desire to be happy, to develop our gifts, to contribute to others, to love and be loved – we’re all the same. Nobody is better than anybody else, and no one’s happiness or human dignity matters more than anyone else’s.
Melinda Gates
If there is any meaning in life greater than connecting with other human beings, I haven’t found it.
Melinda Gates
Bill Gates is driving his child to school; you can too!
Anonymous
Mary Maxwell Gates
You can’t dedicate your life to the principle that all lives have equal value if you think you’re better than others.
Melinda Gates
From those to whom much is given, much is expected.
Mary Maxwell Gates (Bill Gates Jr.’s mother)
The goal for me is not the rise of women and the fall of man. It is the rise of both women and men from a struggle for dominance to a state of partnership.
Melinda Gates
We women have to lift each other up – not to replace men at the top of the hierarchy, but to become partners with men in ending hierarchy.
Melinda Gates
Outrage can save one [girl] or two. Only empathy can change the system.
Molly Melching
When people who are bound by the rules have no role in shaping the rules, moral blind spots become law, and the powerless bear the burden.
Melinda Gates
Tradition without discussion kills moral progress.
Melinda Gates
Disrespect for women grows when religions are dominated by men
Melinda Gates
Bias against women is perhaps humanity’s oldest prejudice.
Melinda Gates
An all-male, unmarried clergy cannot be expected to have the empathy for women and families that they would have if they were married, or if they were women, or if they were raising children.
Melinda Gates
To be known without being loved is terrifying. To be loved without being known has no power to change us. But to be deeply known and deeply loved transforms us.
Killian
Every successful effort to bring in outsiders has always had help from insider activities who do the work of reform from within. Women need male allies.
Melinda Gates
By trying to fit in, I was strengthening the culture that made me feel like didn’t fit it.
Melinda Gates (trying to fit in Microsoft)
It’s not okay for women to cry at work, but it’s okay for men to YELL at work. Which is the more mature response?
Charlotte (Melinda’s close friend)
Connecting with other women and creating our own culture had payoffs beyond anything I’d dreamed of.
Melinda Gates
Men also face cultural obstacles in the workforce that keep them from being who they are. So anytime women can be ourselves at work, we’re improving the culture of both men and women.
Melinda Gates
One sign of an abusive culture is the view that members of the excluded group “don’t have what it takes”.
Melinda Gates
The rules that shape the lives of employees in the workplace today often don’t honour the lives of employees outside the workplace.
Melinda Gates
We’re quick to criticize gender injustice when we see it around the world. We also need to see it where most of us feel it and can do something about it – in the places where we work.
Melinda Gates
We don’t need your help with condoms, we’ll teach you about condoms. We need help preventing violence.
Anonymous sex worker from India
Empowerment starts with getting together.
Melinda Gates
The original definition of courage is to let ourselves be seen.
Brené Brown
Justice does not mean vengeance.
Melinda Gates
The most radical approach to resistance is acceptance – and acceptance does not mean accepting the world as it is. It means accepting our pain as it is. If we refuse to accept our pain, then we’re just trying to make ourselves feel better – and when or hidden motive is to make ourselves feel better, there is no limit to the damage we can do in the name of justice.
Melinda Gates
Great leaders never combine a call for justice with a cry for vengeance.
Melinda Gates
Leaders who can master their pain have taken self-interest off their agenda, so their voice rings with moral power. They are no longer speaking their truth. They are speaking the truth.
Melinda Gates
It is much easier to accept the inability to speak, walk, or feed oneself that it is to accept the inability to be of special value to another person.
Henri Nouwen
The supreme goal of humanity is not equality but connection.
Melinda Gates
Did you enjoy reading them? If yes, quote them often; because power is gained by sharing knowledge, not hoarding it.
Please share your favourite quote in the comment section below and hit the like button. Merci beaucoup et à bientôt ❤
Contemporology 