My top priority for 2012 will be to make a renewed push for women's economic empowerment and political participation.

For me, a better democracy is a democracy where women do not only have the right to vote and to elect but to be elected.

As more and more women, men and young people raise their voices and become active in local government, and more local leaders take action for the safety of women and girls, change happens.

The respect for human rights is nowadays not so much a matter of having international standards, but rather questions of compliance with those standards.

Violence ravaged my life. I was a victim of hatred, and I have dedicated my life to reversing that hatred.

You have to be doing things that matter - responsibility, but also responsibility with epic and beautiful and noble tasks.

My message to women is: Women: We can do it. We are capable of doing almost anything, but we must learn we cannot do it all at once, we need to prioritize.

I believe that if you want to fight inequality you have to do it starting at infancy.

Given political history in Chile, it seemed to me that there was a critical task of consolidating a democracy and creating healthy civic-military and political-military relationships.

I was a woman, a divorcee, a socialist, an agnostic . . . all possible sins together.

Gender equality will only be reached if we are able to empower women.

I couldn’t help wondering what it was that made me not good enough. It was a familiar feeling. I’d had it off and on my entire life.

I stopped hating and started just being. My whole life, I had been the most defensive person you'd meet, unable to tolerate any criticism. But now I started listening and being.

We must reject dictatorship in whatever form it takes - and especially when it rears its head in our own midst on the bench.

You can't be everything to everyone

There are risks which are not acceptable: the destruction of humanity is one of them

To me, cases like that really scream out, 'Hey, it's not out there. It's in here.' There's no indication that this mother is prone to raise very feminine boys because his twin is not that way.

The book designer strives for perfection; yet every perfect thing lives somewhere in the neighborhood of dullness and is frequently mistaken for it by the insensitive.

Every artist feels alone and isolated, Friends are very important in terms of all sorts of definitions of oneself. They tell you what you are and what they are aside from the intellectual aspects.

Courage, Alexan­der,” she whis­pered. “Courage, Ta­tiana.

He's all my exercise, my mirth, my matter.