Great Throughts Treasury

"I've yet to be on a campus where most women weren't worrying about some aspect of combining marriage, children, and a career. I've yet to find one where many men were worrying about the same thing."

"Knowing About Victoria Woodhull inspires women to be daring, outrageous and creative."

"Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before."

"Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it."

"Laughter may be the only free emotion."

"Like love and laughter, real pleasure is an emotion that can't be compelled — and thus is an expression of the authentic self."

"Logic is in the eye of the logician."

"Make dinner, not war."

"Many women feel invisible or aberrant when they are subsumed under a masculine term that is supposed to be universal; yet they are often made to feel trivial and nit-picking if they object. But look at it this way: Would a man feel included in "womankind"?"

"Most women are one man away from welfare."

"Men should think twice before making widow hood woman's only path to power."

"No one ever got radicalized by being grateful."

"Most women's magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers."

"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."

"No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin—because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names, and promise rebirth into everlasting life."

"Nobody cares about feminist academic writing. That's careerism. These poor women in academia have to talk this silly language that nobody can understand in order to be accepted... But I recognize the fact that we have this ridiculous system of tenure, that the whole thrust of academia is one that values education, in my opinion, in inverse ratio to its usefulness—and what you write in inverse relationship to its understandability... 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."

"Once we give up searching for approval we often find it easier to earn respect."

"Once men realize that the gender roles are a prison for them too, then they become really valuable allies. Because they're not just helping someone else, they're freeing themselves."

"One day an army of gray-haired women may quietly take over the Earth!"

"One of the most devastating arguments is: "Well, this is human nature, it has always been this way so it always will be." To understand that for 95% of human history it was different is very helpful to me in believing that it can be different in the future."

"Perhaps this need to use all our senses explains why a decrease in such school "extras" as music, art, dance and gym often seems to parallel the loss of student self-esteem."

"People come to esteem all living things, and thus themselves, through esteem for nature and the universe."

"One thing is sure. Women and girls will have their first vision of a female network anchor who is an authority on her own. Since we learn by example, there's no telling where that iconic image may lead."

"Oppression has no logic - just a self-fulfilling prophecy, justified by a self-perpetuating system"

"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."

"Progress lies in the direction we haven't been."

"Pornography is the instruction. Rape is the practice, battered women are the practice, and battered children are the practice."

"Perhaps we share stories in much the same spirit that explorers share maps, hoping to speed each other's journey, but knowing that the journey we make will be our own."

"Putting off an easy thing makes it hard. Putting off a hard think makes it impossible."

"Rich people plan for three generations. Poor people plan for Saturday night."

"Self-esteem isn't everything; it's just that there's nothing without it."

"Self-esteem is the basis of any democracy."

"She has become the Julia Child of sex."

"Someone asked me why women don't gamble as much as men do, and I gave the commonsensical reply that we don't have as much money. That was a true and incomplete answer. In fact, women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage."

"Since each individual is a literal microcosm of all the forces in the universe, it is not a long stretch to a view of human beings in all their infinite and irreducible variety as being part of and constantly influencing as well as responding to the larger universe."

"So whatever you want to do, just do it...Making a damn fool of yourself is absolutely essential."

"The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us."

"That is almost impossible to do -- to prove that a pregnancy would literally cause you to lose your life."

"The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizens' skin."

"The best kind of leader: one who creates independence, not dependence."

"The definition of woman's work is shit-work."

"The family is the basic cell of government: it is where we are trained to believe that we are human beings or that we are chattel, it is where we are trained to see the sex and race divisions and become callous to injustice even if it is done to ourselves, to accept as biological a full system of authoritarian government."

"The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day; a movement is only people moving."

"The main good news is that we understand now that women's subordinate position is not natural."

"The Internet can't substitute for people being in the room together."

"The first resistance to social change is to say it's not necessary."

"The media formula is always to have a pro and con, to say there are two sides to any issue, when in fact there may be 10 sides."

"The moment we find the reason behind an emotion the wall 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."

"The only thing I can't stand is discomfort."

"The premise of most media is that only conflict is newsworthy. And that's just not true."