“A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of man’s advance in the professions, or by refusing to compete with man at all.”

He’s a male chauvinistic piglet.

Advice? I don’t offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.

…women who ‘adjust’ as housewives, who grow up wanting to be ‘just a housewife,’ are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps…they ate suffering a slow death of mind and spirit.

Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.

We broke through the feminine mystique and women who were wives, mothers and housewives began to find themselves as people. That didn’t mean they stopped, or had to stop, being mothers, wives or even liking their homes.

Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth.

A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she “adjust” to prejudice and discrimination.

American women were frustrated in just the role of housewife – but they also managed to enlarge it. And they weren’t just housewives, they were community leaders.

You have to say no to the old ways before you can begin to find the new yes you need.

No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.

If you were very bright and you became head of a department, as I did, of the psychology department, you were encouraged to go on to graduate work. But as a women you didn’t even think about discrimination.

By now, abortion should be obsolete. And I – and probably a lot of other feminists – wish it were obsolete, because abortion, in itself, is not a value – it is simply the right to chose, which is an essential value.

Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?

The situation of women and men is not comparable to worker-boss or black and white.

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.

I love to get behind the wheel and get competitive.

I don’t feel I have to top myself at all.

Without competition we would be clinging to the clumsy antiquated processes of farming and manufacture and the methods of business of long ago, and the twentieth would be no further advanced than the eighteenth century.

When I was a teenager, my dad used to put a lot of pressure on me to be successful, and I’d really beat myself up about things like losing martial arts competitions.

A conversation isn’t a competition.

When deciding between two competing theories, always go with the one that doesn’t involve a magic spell.

There are two powers in the world; one is the sword and the other is the pen. There is a great competition and rivalry between the two. There is a third power stronger than both, that of the women.

As an actor, I don’t feel like it’s necessary to watch a great deal of films. In fact, I think it can lead to imitation and unhealthy competition, which just isn’t needed.