“I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.”

History always seems to repeat itself.

Feminism insists on methods of thought and action that urge us to think about things together that appear to be separate, and to disaggregate things that appear to naturally belong together.

It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals.

Discrimination based on skin color, sexual orientation,& gender needs to stop. We’re all humans at the end of the day.

The process of empowerment cannot be simplistically defined in accordance with our own particular class interests. We must learn to lift as we climb.

I don’t think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic. Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it’s only optimism of the will, as Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect.

The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what’s that? The freedom to starve?

Black women have had to develop a larger vision of our society than perhaps any other group.

Feminism involves so much more than gender equality and it involves so much more than gender.

Racism is a much more clandestine, much more hidden kind of phenomenon, but at the same time it’s perhaps far more terrible than it’s ever been.

To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.

Well of course I get depressed sometimes, yes I do.

The process of empowerment cannot be simplistically defined in accordance with our own particular class interests. We must learn to lift as we climb.

I decided to teach because I think that any person who studies philosophy has to be involved actively.

In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.

You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.

The power to destroy the world by the use of nuclear weapons is a power that cannot be used – we cannot accept the idea of such monstrous immorality.

It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it is based.

Truth, however bitter, can be accepted, and woven into a design for living.

Be in love with your life, every detail of it.

What interests me is the surprising enormous extent to which most people accept the fate that’s been given to them, and find some dignity.

When people told the audience that [Sam Kinison] was good, he was accepted after that.

Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted.

One must accept the fact that we have only one companion in this world, a companion who accompanies us from the cradle to the grave – our own self. Get on good terms with that companion – learn to live with yourself.