When I allow myself to feel all my feelings instead of numbing myself to them, they pass more quickly. I spent my entire life telling everyone I was "OK, damn it." But when you surrender to the [uncomfortable] feelings, there are gifts on the other side: Allowing yourself to feel loneliness forces you to reach out. Letting yourself get angry gives you strength, energy and motivation.

Ashley Judd

Categorized in : Loneliness Motivation Uncomfortable Feeling

Patriarchy is not men. Patriarchy is a system in which both women and men participate. It privileges, inter alia, the interests of boys and men over the bodily integrity, autonomy, and dignity of girls and women. It is subtle, insidious, and never more dangerous than when women passionately deny that they themselves are engaging in it.

Ashley Judd

girl integrity boys

The way things happen on social media is so abusive and everyone needs to take personal responsibility for what they write and not allowing this misinterpretation and shaming culture on social media to persist.

Ashley Judd

media responsibility writing

The amount of gender violence that I experience is absolutely extraordinary. And a significant part of my day today will be spent filing police reports at home about gender violence that's directed at me in social media.

Ashley Judd

police media home

Tough girls come from New York. Sweet girls, theyre from Georgia. But us Kentucky girls, we have fire and ice in our blood. We can ride horses, be a debutante, throw left hooks, and drink with the boys, all the while making sweet tea, darlin. And if we have an opinion, you know youre gonna hear it.

Ashley Judd

horse girl sweet

It doesn't matter what you've done in the past - what matters are the choices you make right now. God gives you the chance to start over with every breath.

Ashley Judd

what-matters giving past

You have so much power to bring awareness, prevention and change.

Ashley Judd

prevention youth awareness

The assault on our body image, the hypersexualization of girls and women and subsequent degradation of our sexuality as we walk through the decades, and the general incessant objectification is what this conversation allegedly about my face is really about.

Ashley Judd

objectification girl faces

I was powerless over my childhood but the coping strategies that I developed, to survive, all of which were creative and brilliant and got me through, as an adult those became my defects of character. Those became my shortcomings, control and all that kind of stuff... and that's my responsibility. I was a blameless child in what happened in the home; I take responsibility for my behaviors as an adult.

Ashley Judd

home character children

Your private relationship with yourself is a spring that will feed every other factor.

Ashley Judd

factors self spring

My first big acting performance was in the Marilyn Monroe biography piece, and it required frontal nudity. I talked to Mira Sorvino, my co-star, about how nervous I was because I didn't know how my mom would react. She said, 'Can I be completely honest with you? I've seen your mom in interviews, and she seems pretty screwed up. I don't think there's much you could do to shock a broad like that.' And from that moment on it was big nipples to the wind!

Ashley Judd

stars mom thinking

The Conversation about women’s bodies exists largely outside of us, while it is also directed at and marketed to us, and used to define and control us. The Conversation about women happens everywhere, publicly and privately. We are described and detailed, our faces and bodies analyzed and picked apart, our worth ascertained and ascribed based on the reduction of personhood to simple physical objectification. Our voices, our personhood, our potential, and our accomplishments are regularly minimized and muted.

Ashley Judd

accomplishment voice simple

I have a lot of love to give, and when I give that love and others are able to receive it and show me their vulnerability, I believe that God inhabits that space, which means I basically hang out with God a lot, and that's why I feel hopeful.

Ashley Judd

space mean believe

A wonderful pastor I know once told me, "Perfectionism is the highest order of self-abuse." So now I try to remind myself that if I engage in perfectionism, I am abusing myself. Period.

Ashley Judd

abuse self order

I have a very ecumenical faith. I have a very inclusive faith. There's a quote I love from recovery literature that says, "The realm of the spirit is roomy and broad. It is open to all." I've absolutely staked my life on that.

Ashley Judd

recovery literature spirit

It's unconscionable to breed with the number of children who are starving to death in impoverished countries.

Ashley Judd

numbers country children

She wasn't that tough on me, but I think she was often a little frightened - being a single parent. So it begets this quality of desired absoluteness that doesn't really exist. My sister could crack her up. She'd be getting into trouble and put the Steve Martin arrow through her head and mom would start to laugh. I didn't have the same sort of wiliness.

Ashley Judd

arrows mom thinking

Daily meditation keeps me sane. I memorize prayers or poems that express my highest spiritual ideals, and quietly, word for word, go through the prayer first thing in the morning. Julian of Norwich or St. Francis or the compassionate Buddha. It's called passage meditation. You internalize the perennial philosophies.

Ashley Judd

spiritual success morning

When I accept a role, I feel that as an artist I have to submit completely to the tutelage of my director. And while I expect to be heard and encouraged and honored, at the end of the day, man, it's the way the director wants it.

Ashley Judd

the-end-of-the-day artist men

The empowerment of girls and women is an essential tool to preventing the HIV/AIDS emergency from exploding any further

Ashley Judd

empowering empowerment girl

My vocation is to make my life an act of worship

Ashley Judd

vocation worship