Democracy is about constant vigilance. It's not straightforward, there will always be setbacks and you get particular be it religious fundamentalists, Christian fundamentalism - a partly conservative approach and actually trying to put women in a more traditional role. And we have to resist that.
Mary RobinsonIt is people who go through suffering that have an empathy for the suffering of others.
Mary RobinsonSymbols give us our identity, our self image, our way of explaining ourselves to ourselves and to others. Symbols in turn determine the kinds of stories we tell, and the stories we tell determine the kind of history we make and remake.
Mary RobinsonThe UN may not be very effective but I am a fan of the idea of the United Nations. I have been there, I know the problems. To parody Winston Churchill: It is the worst system, except we don't have any other.
Mary RobinsonI'm coming to a sense of a women's movement which was extraordinarily important in the struggle for freedom in Ireland and immediately afterwards, but then some of those women who were involved in the movement got involved in representative positions and perhaps some of them got a bit distanced from the grassroots issues. But also the women's movement itself seemed to say, "No, we've got our own government, our own parties in power" and they sat back.
Mary Robinson