“To protest free speech in the name of protecting women is dangerous and wrong.”

I realized that what I was saying was threatening, somehow, to the editors of women’s magazines. That it threatened the very world they were trying to paint, what I then called the “feminine mystique.”

It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question ‘who am I’ except the voice inside herself.

This idea that the employment of women, the movement of women outside the home into the work world, and their demand for equality is somehow responsible for increasing juvenile delinquency or the increase in divorce rate, is just so much bullshit.

If women’s role in life is limited solely to housewife/mother, it clearly ends when she can no longer bear more children and the children she has borne leave home.

Aging is not “lost youth” but a new stage of opportunity and strength.

Men weren’t really the enemy – they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.

When one begins to think about it, America depends rather heavily on women’s passive dependence, their femininity. Femininity, if one still wants to call it that, makes American women a target and a victim of the sexual sell.

life lived only for oneself does not truly satisfy men or women. There is a hunger in Americans today for larger purposes beyond the self. That is the reason for the religious revival and the new resonance of ‘family.

Why the increasing emphasis by professional age experts and the media on – and public acceptance of – the nursing home as the locus of age when, in fact, more than ninety percent of those over sixty-five continue to live in the community?

We need a new political movement of women and men toward a new society.

I’m my age and I feel glorious.

If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don’t blame the women’s movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based.

I wouldn’t be satisfied with a life lived solely on the barricades. I reserve my right to be frivolous.

Aging will create the music of the coming century.

I love newspapers. I’ve worked on newspapers, all my life. I’ve always loved it.

I can’t point to any major episodes of sexual discrimination in my early life. But I was so aware of the crime, the shame that there was no use of my mother’s ability and energy.

Our attitude in the face of life’s challenges determines our suffering or our freedom.

An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.

Submission is the willingness to give up our right to ourselves, to freely surrender our insistence on having our own way all the time.

O, wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, An’ foolish notion.

A world I dream where black or white, Whatever race you be, Will share the bounties of the Earth And every man is free.

I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak. I hope every woman who can write will not be silent.

The boundary to what we can accept is the boundary to our freedom.

I tire so of hearing people say, Let things take their course. Tomorrow is another day. I do not need my freedom when I’m dead. I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.