Faye Wattleton

The recognition of rights for women and minorities became a large part of my understanding of what this country is all about.

The only safe ship in a storm is leadership.

A woman who places a high priority on performance and excellence is seen as imperial. A man is seen as demanding and tough.

What can your kids teach you?' Well, I believe something different about kids. We don't own them, they have their own knowledge. From the start you have to make the choice to listen.

In 1985, I saw a tape of myself where my eyes were puffy. I looked very tired and bedraggled and not as youthful as I would like to have been.

The influence of one's parents is powerful and permanent.

Affirmative action has been generally cast in terms of race. I think women themselves are not as cognizant of the role affirmative action has played in opening the doors for women.

One of the sad commentaries on the way women are viewed in our society is that we have to fit one category. I have never felt that I had to be in one category.

My mother was from Mississippi, or is from 'Mississippi;' my father was from Alabama. He speaks about conditions in Mississippi and Alabama. They were really the poster children for the bad public laws that segregated, according to race, in our country.

My mother taught me a lot of things, but they had big presuppositions built in - like her expectation that I'd be a missionary nurse in a religious order.

This is not a country that has had a tremendous sympathy for poor people, so I think that the notion that somehow we have slipped into an era in which poor people don't matter is not quite the way our history would define it.

Being a person who has had plastic surgery and goes to the gym five days a week to work my muscles up so they don't look atrophied as a 60-year-old, I don't disparage people who want to maintain their appearance. But what I don't want is a society that tells me I have to.