Please know that I am aware of the hazards. I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail their failure must be a challenge to others.

Women like men should try to do the impossible. And when they fail their failure should be a challenge to others.

Women have no sympathy and my experience of women is almost as large as Europe.

I have been blessed in many ways and one of those is to have been born in Africa for me a great treasure house of stories. I have been researching it since my infancy reading about it talking to men and women who have spent their lives in this land living it as I have and loving it as I do. I write almost entirely from my own experience.

Although we have in theory abolished human slavery recognized women's rights and stopped child labor we continue to enslave other species who if we simply pay attention show quite clearly that they experience parental love pain and the desire for freedom just as we do.

I think women don't grow up with the harsh world of criticism that men grow up with we are more sensitively treated and when you first experience the world of film-making you have to develop a very tough skin.

I decided blacks should not have to experience the difficulties I had faced so I decided to open a flying school and teach other black women to fly.

My kids will grow up in a house knowing that it's perfectly normal for two men to be in love it's perfectly normal for two women to be in love. My kids will grow up knowing it's all about love. It doesn't matter who you're with and everyone should have that experience.

My father respected and admired my mother and was a person who was always standing by my side encouraging me to do more and believed in my capacity. So in that sense my own experience was very good in becoming an empowered woman. From early on I carried that strong message: 'You can do it.' So I never had any doubt that women can do a lot.

There's full consensus in the military that women shouldn't be in person-to-person combat. I don't know if we have enough experience to know whether this is the right approach. But women can be elsewhere. We have mandatory military service in Chile. I pushed for women in all areas.