Annie Lennox Quotes

I wouldn't say that I've mellowed. I'm less mellow, perhaps.

I was born in 1954. My parents were brought up in the war years, and life was hard.

I only want to make music because I have a passion for it.

Nelson Mandela is awe inspiring - a person who really sacrificed for what he believed in. I feel truly humbled by him.

I'm not intensely private - I talk a great deal about my life and my work - I just don't play the game to excess.

I've never been a social person. When I grew up, the other girls would all be combing their hair and exchanging lipstick, and I just couldn't do that group thing.

I was never much of a one to win prizes... and certainly never placed too much value on their acquisition.

I watch 'Mad Men,' I knit scarves, I cook and am very, very normal. Honestly.

It's hard to tell how far women's individuality has come in the past twenty years.

I've thought about what is an alternative word to feminism. There isn't one. It's a perfectly good word. And it can't be changed.

I'm not really keen on comebacks. Eurythmics was an incredible thing. When I look back on that work, I feel very satisfied with it.

My issue with the state of women became incredibly stimulated when I was visiting developing countries and it became obvious that women bore the brunt of so many things in society.

Whatever you do, you do out of a passion.

I don't feel there are enough women artists out there who are saying anything of tremendous relevance.

I like where I live here, in London.

I have a calling in my soul, if you like, to try to make my life in some way worthwhile. What is the value of my existence?

I have always been a very visual person and a keen observer.

I sang a lot as a little girl and entered competitions. I loved singing in choirs, but it was as I got older that I really found my voice.

I used to be obsessed about how I presented myself. I didn't want other people dressing me because I didn't want to be treated like a clothes horse.

I want people to understand me as a person with views, not just performing songs.

Although I have lived in London, I have never really considered London my home because it was always going to be a stopping-off point for me, and it has been too.

The person who inspired me the most was a friend of mine, Anita Roddick. I know that Anita wasn't known to be an ardent feminist, but she truly was.

Men need to understand, and women too, what feminism is really about.

Music is a great vehicle for communications, and I have a certain platform. I have an opportunity and I have to take it.

Pop stars are so busy having a career that they don't really have a lot of time for activism.

We would like to see the virtual elimination of the transmission of [HIV] from mother to child by 2015. ... We believe it can be achieved with political will.

There's a lot of women's organisations, but they're all working separately. If you get people together, as a collaborative voice, it's strong.

There is a big difference between what I do onstage and what I do in my private life. I don't put my living room on magazine pages.

Motherhood was the great equaliser for me; I started to identify with everybody.

Anita Roddick was amazing. Her presence in a room was full of light, and everything she worked to achieve still resonates now.

I'm not particularly attention-seeking.

Desire, despair, desire. So many monsters.

Churches, depending on their policy, can do fantastic work with people in the community.

Every artist has to make their own statements and they have to live with them.

I'm not living my life under the spotlight for anybody.

The music industry has always been a beast, which would eat you up and spit you out.

We're all born, and if you're going to live to be elderly, you'll have gone through a life journey different than anyone else's. It's unique to you, but you'll have some common themes.

We are not consistent. We have both these dark sides and some light as well.

I wasn't trying to be a role model for anybody. I don't think that you can.

I'm very intrigued that in this culture of reality television and celebrity - which is an enormous industry and generates billions and billions of dollars - we're so resourceful.

You have a bigger view, of something bigger than you, and you have to view that and take that in mind. At times you feel like despair rises up over hope, then other times you feel hopeful again.

Bulnerable without strength is vulnerable, and being vulnerable means you can be victimized.

I'm passionate about everything, actually. I'm passionate about life.

There's always darkness around, and if you focus on the darkness, you don't know where to go. But if you direct yourself at the light - there it is! It's right there.

The contrast of the world that we live in and the world that is here in Aspen and the world inhabited by women who have no resources, little or no, very few resources - huge disparity.

To try to help people have babies in a healthy way and to celebrate the process of delivering a child which will be healthy is, I think, almost the best part of healthcare.

It's harder to get out of bed when you've failed.

Everything is illusory. You cannot label something and feel that that is the beginning, middle, and end of it.

When I look at the majority of my own songs they really came from my own sense of personal confusion or need to express some pain or beauty - they were coming from a universal and personal place.