Gayle Tzemach Lemmon quotes:

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The United States will not be in Afghanistan forever.

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