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.”

“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.”

“I worked at ABCNews.com at a time when nobody knew what 'dot com' was.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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