Great Throughts Treasury

"Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself."

"It’s clear that most American children suffer too much mother and too little father."

"Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age."

"Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry."

"The art of acting morally is behaving as if everything we do matters."

"Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father."

"Pornography is about dominance… Erotica is about mutuality."

"The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn."

"Today a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle."

"Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning."

"The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off."

"The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day."

"A lot of my generation are living out the un-lived lives of our mothers."

"A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after."

"A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men."

"A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space."

"A movement is only composed of people moving. To feel its warmth and motion around us is the end as well as the means."

"A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle."

"Any form of abuse that comes from the very people who are supposed to protect us, to whom we have no choice but to make ourselves vulnerable, is the most destructive of self."

"Academics are forced to write in language no one can understand so that they get tenure. They have to say "discourse," not "talk." Knowledge that is not accessible is not helpful."

"America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people."

"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."

"As the little boy said when asked if he wanted to be a lawyer like his mother, "Oh no, that's women's work." Logic has nothing to do with oppression."

"As wise women and men in every culture tell us: The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us."

"Becoming conscious of old and unchosen patterns allows us to change them, and even so, change, no matter how much for the better, still feels cold and lonely at first."

"Any one of our human capacities, if unused out of fear or shame, leaves a small hole in the fabric of our self-esteem."

"At my graduation, I thought we had to marry what we wished to become. Now you are becoming the men you once would have wished to marry."

"Because I have work to care about, it is possible that I may be less difficult to get along with than other women when the double chins start to form."

"Blatant or subtle, pornography involves no equal power or mutuality. In fact, much of the tension and drama comes from the clear idea that one person is dominating the other."

"By the year 2000 we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God."

"But the problem is that when I go around and speak on campuses, I still don't get young men standing up and saying, “How can I combine career and family?”"

"Children who are encouraged to follow their own interests actually learn more, internalize and retain that learning better, become more creative, and have healthier and more durable self-esteem than those who are motivated by reward, punishment or competition with other children."

"Change is like a house — you can't build it from the top down, only from the bottom up."

"Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men."

"Clinging to the past is the problem. Embracing change is the answer."

"Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one."

"Dancing has been a way of lifting the human spirit since the beginning of time."

"Don't think about making women fit the world -- think about making the world fit women."

"Each of us has an inner compass that helps us to know where to go and what to do. Its signals are interest, excitement, the joy of understanding for its own sake, and the sort of fear that is a sign of being in new territory — and therefore of growth."

"Dying seems less sad than having lived too little."

"Each individual woman's body demands to be accepted on its own terms."

"Each others' lives are our best textbooks."

"Empathy is the most radical of human emotions."

"Empathy is the most revolutionary emotion."

"Evil is obvious only in retrospect."

"For me, writing is the only thing that passes the three tests of meter: (1) when I'm doing it, I don't feel that I should be doing something else instead; (2.) it produces a sense of accomplishment and, once in a while, pride; and (3) it's frightening."

"Erotica is as different from pornography as love is from rape, as dignity is from humiliation, as partnership is from slavery, as pleasure is from pain."

"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."

"Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person."

"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."