Gayle Tzemach Lemmon Quotes

In Nigeria, along with its West African neighbor Ghana, women are now starting businesses in greater numbers than men.

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“Entrepreneurship isn't for everyone, and not everyone is going to be an entrepreneur, but women who turn to business, turn to economics, because there are people depending on them, I think that their creativity, their resilience, their spirit, embody what's best about entrepreneurship.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“I don't often think of Donald Trump, but his daughter is very smart. She's a woman working in real estate, which is predominantly men, and she's both savvy and articulate about her business and her business acumen.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“In Afghanistan, life is so fragile; who knows what the next week will bring? That fragility really affects the way you're able to report, and the kind of stories people will tell you.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“Because microfinance is so manageable in terms of the size of the loan, people have made it the cornerstone to lifting women out of poverty.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“Women in Afghanistan do not ask the United States to stay for the simple or sentimental reason of safeguarding their rights. They are the first ones to say that this is not enough of a reason for the world's remaining superpower to remain in their country.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“My mother never asked me whether I wanted to go to college, but told me I was going - to the University of Maryland on an academic scholarship.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“We are so used to seeing women as victims of war to be pitied rather than survivors of war to be respected.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“What I learned at journalism school and at ABC - those skills are the same no matter where you are in the world.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“When people can't feed their children, nothing else positive happens. You don't have to look farther than the United States to see that.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“A social entrepreneur finds market-based solutions for change. Because without a market-based solution, without a sustainable solution, you go nowhere.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“Certainly Afghans in general and women in particular want a country in which security is a daily reality rather than a campaign slogan or the focus of drive-by speeches from diplomats dropping in for the day.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“Microfinance does not require previous experience or loans to the same extent as a small-business loan, so it's easier for women to enter the micro sector.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“The military alone cannot end the conflict in Afghanistan. On that much nearly everyone can agree, offering a rare island of consensus among sides otherwise divided on the question of how and when America's longest-ever war should wind down.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“The lessons I learned from my mother and her friends have guided me through death, birth, loss, love, failure, and achievement, on to a Fulbright scholarship and Harvard Business School. They taught me to believe that anything was possible. They have proven to be the strongest family values I could ever have imagined.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“Women who choose to breastfeed should get as much education and support as possible.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“When the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996 after a searing, four-year civil war, they immediately instituted laws which fit their utopic vision of the time of Islam's founding more than 1,300 years earlier. Afghan women's lives offered the most visible sign of the imagined past to which Afghanistan's present was to be returned.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“The women of Afghanistan have a voice, and it needs to be heard and not forgotten.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“Educating girls just one year beyond the average fourth grade education increases their eventual earnings by 10 to 20 percent. Every additional year of secondary education can increase future wages by 15 to 25 percent.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“A lot has been said about single mothers. Most of it has been less than flattering.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

Educated mothers are 50 percent more likely to immunize their children than mothers with no schooling.

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“Giving birth to a baby does not make you an infant.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“I think for larger-scale entrepreneurship, it's true - for men and women - that people who already have capital tend to do better.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“I think that sometimes people are frightened to take the risk of entrepreneurship.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“I'm a really bad driver. When I'm in L.A. my husband always has to park the car for me, because I'm likely to hit something.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“In reality, Afghanistan has functioned as a nation-state for more than two centuries, and its army and bureaucracy reach back to the 19th century.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“No one argues with the many benefits of breastfeeding for those women who choose it.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“No woman in Afghanistan is in business without support from either her husband or her father or her uncle, someone.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

Single mothers are raising more of America's children than ever before.

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“The one thing you learn from looking at places like Afghanistan is that the power of business to do good is enormous.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“The United States will not be in Afghanistan forever.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“We do not invest in victims, we invest in survivors.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

It matters whether women sit at the table. No one speaks up for you when you are standing outside with your nose pressed up against the glass. You cannot window-shop for power.

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“The draconian prohibitions of the Taliban years and the gains Afghan women have achieved since the Taliban government was overthrown in 2001 are now well known and often cited: Today, Afghans lucky enough to live in secure regions can go to school, women may work in offices, and the burqa is no longer mandatory.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“The majority of Afghans do not see the Americans as foreign occupiers who must be defeated. Instead, they are hungry for the Americans to step up and help them make their country safer, their government cleaner and their economy stronger. They are disappointed because the international community has done too little, not too much.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“I think entrepreneurs are born and not created, and so I think you see a lot of similarities among entrepreneurs in different parts of the world. Their backdrop may be very different, but their drive to create a business and to create jobs remains very much the same, whether it's in Silicon Valley or Kandahar or Kabul.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

In Tunisia, where women have long enjoyed greater rights than many of their Arab neighbors, women pushed for and won a new electoral code that guarantees women will make up half of a candidates' list for office.

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“It is high time to declare an end to the breastfeeding dictatorship that is drowning women in guilt and worry just when they most need support: after the birth of a child.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“My mother worked at the telephone company during the day and sold Tupperware at night. Evenings, she took classes when she could at University of Maryland's University College, bringing me along to do homework while she studied to get the degree she hoped would offer her and me greater opportunities.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“Numerically speaking, half the population cannot be a minority. Yet when it comes to women, the numbers plainly show that the mathematically impossible is the socially acceptable.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“War reporters are often seen as a wild bunch of thrill-seekers who wade into danger zones simply for the sake of the adrenalin high the settings inevitably provide. But this one-dimensional explanation leaves out the core of the story, which is that reporters go to these places because they feel the tug of responsibility.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“If you're talking about entrepreneurs in conflict and post-conflict settings, then you must talk about women, because they are the population you have left.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

Microfinance is an incredibly powerful tool ... but we must move beyond micro-hopes and micro-ambitions for women.

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

“Not one country in all the world has eliminated its economic participation [gender] gap - not one.”

— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon