The AIDS crisis has brought us a consciousness of the immune system as the most important health-maintenance element, and a consciousness of how it is under attack.
One's enemies are always talking about 'post-feminism.' It is a word invented by people who would like to do away with feminism.
I think Hefner himself wants to go down in history as a person of sophistication and glamour. But the last person I would want to go down in history as is Hugh Hefner.
Feminism began to dawn on my brain belatedly in life.
Pearl Jam doesn't just sing about issues they care about. These guys walk it like they talk it.
Women's progress has been a collective effort.
Women tend to be conservative in youth and get more radical as they get older because they lose power with age. So if a young woman is not a feminist, I say, 'Just wait.'
Republicans may learn they can't appeal to right-wing patriarchs and most women at the same time.
There are six million female lives lost in the world every year simply because they are female.
A majority of Americans want redemption for racism - for our terrible, destructive racist past - and so see a vote for Obama as redemptive.
Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.
Fashion in the past meant conforming and losing oneself. Fashion in the present means being individual and finding oneself.
The Constitution did not mention women when it was first written, and it still doesn't.
Nothing changes the gender equation more significantly than women's economic freedom.
Female inferiority is internalised by us. Women need a lot more confidence.
There is nothing more fundamental than the idea that the government does not have a right to decide when and whether we have children.
The surest way to be alone is to get married.
Secretary of state is far superior to vice president, because it's involved in continuously solving problems and making policy and not being on standby.
The problem for all women is we're identified by how we look instead of by our heads and our hearts.
Liberation does not come from outside.
I can say whatever it is that I feel.
You can compel fear. You can even make someone feel they're in love if they're isolated and dependent for long enough. But laughter is free.
You know there is a person inside every baby, right? And anybody who has ever met a baby knows there is already a person in there.
I didn't go to school a full year until I was 11 or 12, so I lived in books. I really was an observer of life.
If you're going to have a male-dominant system, to maintain the system, you have to teach men to dominate.
The origins of violence against women by men are not biological. If that were the case, it would exist in every culture. And it doesn't exist in every culture.
Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.
The only thing I can't stand is discomfort.
Most women are one man away from welfare.
Logic is in the eye of the logician.
The Miss America Pageant reinforces a belief that women are merely how they look and how they please.
You can see the absence of women in governing bodies from Congress to state legislators, on corporate boards, in tenured positions in academia, and as forepeople in factories.
What we need to be able to do is count all human experience. So I would like to count the secretarial positions as good training places to take over the jobs of the bosses.
Because we are communal creatures, if you're with people who think you're smart, you're smart, and if they think you're dumb, you're dumb.
We must begin to shift the emphasis of teen-age pregnancy to teen-age boys.
Monotheism makes me grouchy. I don't trust any religion that makes God look like one of the ruling class. I guess I'm a pagan or an animist.
I looked up affirmative action once in Wikipedia, and it said, 'A measure by which white men are discriminated against,' and I got so mad.
To say 'radical feminist' is only a way of indicating that I believe the sexual caste system is a root of race and class and other divisions.
Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.
Children are short people. Some you like, some you don't.
Everything about aging in my experience so far has been a plus. Except the death part!
From pacifist to terrorist, each person condemns violence - and then adds one cherished case in which it may be justified.
The electoral system is not where change starts - it usually starts in communities and from the bottom up - but it is where change can be stopped.
We'll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.
Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn't know it's about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them.
Law and justice are not always the same.
I think if women are visible in the media, truly visible, in an empowered role, it empowers us to be more visible in any area of our lives.
Burnout is a way of telling you that your form of activism was perhaps not very full circle.
Men should think twice before making widow hood woman's only path to power.
All those chemicals that create empathy only work when you are in a room together.
Gerda Lerner was fierce, brilliant and unique. She lived history by her bravery, restored history by her scholarship, and democratized its study by her activism.
It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate.
If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?
It's easier to blame the person with less power.
Rich cultures, patriarchal cultures, value thin women, like ours; poor ones value fat women. But all patriarchal cultures value weak women. So for women to become physically strong is very profound.
Obviously, there is much similarity among the challenges of transgender people and all women - from health care to harassment to discrimination in the workplace.
The same way that racism is a white person's problem, violence against women is a men's problem.
The first resistance to social change is to say it's not necessary.
I'm a freelance person, and I've always been able to support myself.
Perfect is boring: Beauty is irregular.
The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.
God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there's no turning back.
The danger of the Internet is cocooning with the like-minded online - of sending an email or Twitter and confusing that with action - while the real corporate and military and government centers of power go right on.
There's a big gap between public opinion polls and the vote in Washington, in Congress.
Diane Keaton is good for women in and of herself. She's smart and funny and real.
In a way, women are a psychic immigrant group.
I started out life as a writer, and writers write in part because they don't want to talk.
Men may feel just disempowered by intimacy, by being close to a woman, and also by feeling the tender feelings that they're ashamed of.
Because women of color were more likely to be in the paid labor force, they were more likely to recognize discrimination, so they were always leading the women's movement.
Women are liked better when they lose.
I'm so happy that we're finally hearing the stories and voices of women who make America. We do what we see, not what we're told, so an incomplete story of this country damages everyone.
I always wanted to put a sign up on the road to Yale saying, 'Beware: Deconstruction Ahead.'
Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.
The mark, to me, of a constructive argument is one that looks at a specific problem and says, 'What shall we do about this?' And a nonconstructive one is one that tries to label people.
Hope is a very unruly emotion.
For much of the female half of the world, food is the first signal of our inferiority. It lets us know that our own families may consider female bodies to be less deserving, less needy, less valuable.
No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home, or in the office.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
It's an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don't try to make it posthumous.
The most hurtful thing is not what comes from our adversaries, it's what comes from our friends.
If you say, I'm for equal pay, that's a reform. But if you say. I'm a feminist, that's a transformation of society.
A parking lot attendant who's a guy makes a lot more money than a child-care attendant who's a woman.
We're never going to have democratic countries or peaceful countries until we have democratic or peaceful families.
Every social justice movement that I know of has come out of people sitting in small groups, telling their life stories, and discovering that other people have shared similar experiences.
Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.
Movements are like rivers. Dipping into them is never the same twice.
We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach.
If you ask men about their body image, they will tell you they look better than they do. And if you ask a woman, she'll tell you she looks worse.
Anger is energising. The opposite of anger is depression, which is anger turned inward.
The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day; a movement is only people moving.
Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
There's no greater gift than thinking that you had some impact on the world, for the better.
Being misunderstood by people whose opinions you value is absolutely the most painful.
Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.
A gender-equal society would be one where the word 'gender' does not exist: where everyone can be themselves.
Pop culture shapes our ideas of what is normal and what our dreams can be and what our roles are. Politics, of course, decides how the power and the money in the country is distributed. Both are equally important, and each affects the other.
Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.
I hate to generalize, but in general, both men and women suffer from ageism. Men much less because men gain power as they get older. Women lose power as they get older. Men are seen as gaining experience and being distinguished. Sons look forward to replacing their fathers.
Women don't want to exchange places with men. Male chauvinists, science-fiction writers and comedians may favor that idea for its shock value, but psychologists say it is a fantasy based on ruling-class ego and guilt.
I'm not saying that women leaders would eliminate violence. We are not more moral than men; we are only uncorrupted by power so far. When we do acquire power, we might turn out to have an equal impulse toward aggression.
The deepest change begins with men raising children as much as women do and women being equal actors in the world outside the home. There are many ways of supporting that, from something as simple as paid sick leave and flexible work hours to attributing an economic value to all caregiving and making that amount tax deductible.
Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That's their natural and first weapon. She will need her sisterhood.
