Role Model Quotes (7 quotes)
Former arbiters of taste must have felt (as so many apostles of traditional values and other highminded tags for restriction and conformity do today) that maintaining the social order required a concept of unalloyed heroism. Human beings so designated as role models had to embody all virtues of the paragonwhich meant, of course, that they could not be described in their truly human and ineluctably faulted form.
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I am not merely satisfied in making money for myself, for I am endeavoring to provide employment for hundreds of women of my race. ... I want to say to every Negro woman present, don't sit down and wait for the opportunities to come. Get up and make them!
Address at the annual convention of the National Negro Business League (1914). As cited in Marshall Cavendish Corporation, America in the 20th Century (2003), Vol. 12, 273.
I felt an awesome responsibility, and I took the responsibility very seriously, of being a role model and opening another door to black Americans, but the important thing is not that I am black, but that I did a good job as a scientist and an astronaut. There will be black astronauts flying in later missions
and they, too, will be people who excel, not simply who are black
who can ably represent their people, their communities, their country.
I got myself a start by giving myself a start.
In New York Times Magazine (4 Nov 1917).
I long to speak out the intense inspiration that comes to me from the lives of strong women. They have made of their lives a great adventure.
Diary entry (Jan 1917). In Margaret Mead, An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict (1959), 140.
I think it is a duty I owe to my profession and to my sex to show that a woman has a right to the practice of her profession and cannot be condemned to abandon it merely because she marries. I cannot conceive how womens colleges, inviting and encouraging women to enter professions can be justly founded or maintained denying such a principle.
(From a letter Brooks wrote to her dean, knowing that she would be told to resign if she married, she asked to keep her job. Nevertheless, she lost her teaching position at Barnard College in 1906. Dean Gill wrote that The dignity of womens place in the home demands that your marriage shall be a resignation.)
(From a letter Brooks wrote to her dean, knowing that she would be told to resign if she married, she asked to keep her job. Nevertheless, she lost her teaching position at Barnard College in 1906. Dean Gill wrote that The dignity of womens place in the home demands that your marriage shall be a resignation.)
As quoted by Margaret W. Rossiter in Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (1982).
There is no royal flower-strewn path to success. And if there is, I have not found it, for if I have accomplished anything in life it is because I have been willing to work hard.
Quoted in A'Lelia Bundles, On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker (2000). As cited in The Big Book of Business Quotations (2003), 2.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
