Great Throughts Treasury

"If every nation gets the government it deserves every generation writes the history which corresponds with its view of the world."

"Growing up human is uniquely a matter of social relations rather than biology. What we learn from connections within the family takes the place of instincts that program the behavior of animals; which raises the question, how good are these connections? "

"Power is the ability not to have to please."

"As long as mixed grills and combination salads are popular, anthologies will undoubtedly continue in favor."

"By setting the passenger seat of my car far back, and opening the glove compartment, I nestle in a very large sheet of thick fiberboard. It's big enough to hold a table easel, my big palette and a water container. Winter is not going to lock me indoors!"

"Few cultures have not produced the idea that in some past era the world ran better than it does now."

"I admire people who are suited to the contemplative life. They can sit inside themselves like honey in a jar and just be. It's wonderful to have someone like that around, you always feel you can count on them. You can go away and come back, you can change your mind and your hairdo and your politics, and when you get through doing all these upsetting things, you look around and there they are, just the way they were, just being."

"I have a problem about being nearly sixty: I keep waking up in the morning and thinking I'm thirty-one."

"Like their personal lives, women's history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others."

"We don't get offered crises, they arrive."

"The Goddamn human race deserves itself, and as far as I'm concerned it can have it."

"We older women who know we aren't heroines can offer our younger sisters, at the very least, an honest report of what we have learned and how we have grown."