- The truth will set you free...but first it will piss you off.
- A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle
- We badly need to raise our boys more like our girls.
- Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreamin, after all, is a form of planning.
- A woman reading Playboy is like a Jew reading Hitler's Mein Kampf.
- Men should think twice before making widowhood woman's only path to power.
- [on self-respect] Self-esteem isn't everything; it's just that there's nothing without it.
- [on sexual politics] The Golden Rule works for men as written, but for women it should go the other way around. We need to do unto ourselves as we do unto others.
- [on childhood] When pain has been intertwined with love and closeness, it's very difficult to believe that love and closeness can be experienced without pain.
- [on change] The moment we find the reason behind an emotion...the wall we have built is breached, and the positive memories it has kept from us return, too. That's why it pays to ask those painful questions. The answers can set you free.
- [From an interview, 2011] This generation of young women is actually more feminist than we ever were. If you look at the public opinion polls, they're actually much more supportive of all the issues of equality. And my question to the young woman who is dressing as you describe ['a hooker'] is: Is she doing it because she wants to? Is she body-proud? Because then I can say, great. Is she doing it because she feels she has to? That she won't be popular otherwise? Then, it's wrong.
- Politics is just unequal power. Who does the dishes is political. In the politics of commerciality, if you want to put it that way, the way women's bodies are looked at, we're supposed to be ornaments not instruments.
- [To the question of where [feminist activism] will go from here] If you look at any social movement - if you think of the suffragists, abolitionists and other movements - they had to last about a hundred years to be really absorbed into a culture. So I don't know how to break it to you, but we have, like, 60 years to go.
- We have to be careful not to have terminal gratitude, as I think of it. We need to be always looking forward. Nothing in inexorable. Nothing. It depends on what you do and I do every day, all of us here, every day. It depends on the language we use with each other. It depends on whether we tell each other our salaries, to find out who's not getting paid. All these movements are inextricably connected.
- [on children] It's clear that most children suffer too much mother and too little father.
- Listen, honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
- I'm completely happy not having children. I mean, everybody does not have to live in the same way. And as somebody said, "Everybody with a womb doesn't have to have a child any more than everybody with vocal chords has to be an opera singer.".
- If you poured water on a great poem, you would get a novel.
- [on Donald Trump] I've noticed that when people are asked why they support him, they say it's because he's a successful businessman and therefore could run the country. Actually, he is not a successful businessman, he is a successful con man.
- Mrs. America (2020) is hopelessly wrong. I don't think it's necessarily on purpose, but it is just factually, historically wrong, because the Equal Rights Amendment was defeated by the insurance industry and other people who were profiting off women's cheap labor. Phyllis Schlafly never changed one vote. I'm very disturbed that people may look at "Mrs. America" and feel that women are our own worst enemies. Because even when we disagree, we don't have the power to be our own worst enemies.
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