“Aging will create the music of the coming century.”

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

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.

The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.

The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.

Women, because they are not generally the principal breadwinners, can be perhaps most useful as the trail blazers, working along the bypaths, doing the unusual job that men cannot afford to gamble on.

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.

I won a really big fellowship to go straight on to get my Ph.D. And I went through agonies of indecision, and then I decided not to accept it. I just decided I didn’t want to be an academic.

Neither woman nor man lives by work, or love, alone … The human self defines itself and grows through love and work: All psychology before and after Freud boils down to that.

I never set out to write a book to change women’s lives, to change history. It’s like, ‘Who, me?’ Yes, me. I did it. And I’m not that different from other women. Maybe my power and glory was that I could speak my truth as a woman and it was the truth of every woman.

I knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like mommy.

The problem that has no name-which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities-is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.

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

When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.

Dominance is a burden. Most men who are honest will admit that.

I understood somehow my mother’s frustration. And that it was no good not only for her, but for her children or her husband, that she didn’t have a real use of her ability.

Penicillin sat on a shelf for ten years while I was called a quack.

I’m very proud of my well-earned wrinkles, so show ’em.

There will never be another Michael Jackson, a huge pop star since (the age of) 7.

My love for you is immeasurable, my respect for you immense. You’re ageless, timeless, lace and fineness, you’re beauty and elegance.

It was not by accident that the greatest thinkers of all ages were deeply religious souls.

And I’m afraid, in this day and age, trust, which I count so, you know, I love loyalty. I love trust.

I was five years old the first time I got drunk.

What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.