“They are a very extensive minority who have suffered discrimination and who have the same right to participation in the promise and fruits of society as every other individual.”

We need laws that protect everyone – men and women, straights and gays, regardless of sexual perversion…ah, persuasion.

Women will change the nature of power, rather than power changing the nature of women.

Nixon impeached himself. He gave us Ford as his revenge.

She (a woman politician) will be challenging a system that is still wedded to militarism and that saves billions of dollars a year by underpaying women and using them as a reserve cheap labor supply

I began wearing hats as a young lawyer because it helped me to establish my professional identity. Before that, whenever I was at a meeting, someone would ask me to get coffee.

There are those who say I’m impatient, impetuous, uppity, rude, profane, brash, and overbearing. Whether I’m any of those things, or all of them, you can decide for yourself. But whatever I am — and this ought to be made very clear — I am a very serious woman.

The test for whether or not you can hold a job should not be the arrangement of your chromosomes.

The inside operation of Congress – the deals, the compromises, the selling out, the co-opting, the unprincipled manipulating, the self-serving career-building – is a story of such monumental decadence that I believe if people find out about it they will demand an end to it.

the women’s movement, not only here in the U.S., but worldwide, is bigger and stronger than ever before and in places where it has never been. It has arms. It has legs. And most importantly, it has heads.

Never go back, never apologize, and never forget we’re half the human race.

When I was a young lawyer, working women wore hats. It was the only way they would take you seriously.

I am not elevating women to sainthood, nor am I suggesting that all women share the same views, or that all women are good and all men bad.

If we get a government that reflects more of what this country is really about, we can turn the century – and the economy – around.

I’ve been described as a tough and noisy woman, a prize fighter, a man-hater, you name it. They call me Battling Bella, Mother Courage, and a Jewish mother with more complaints than Portnoy.

In Britain the government has to come down in front of Parliament every day to explain its actions, but here the President never answers directly to Congress.

All the men on my staff can type.

I certainly and deliberately introduced a great deal of variety into the people in the clamshell, which I suppose grows out of growing up in an individualistic society we profess to have.

Ancestral habits of mind can be constricting; they also confer one’s individuality.

Fashion can be bought by anybody; style takes discernment, it has to do with individuality.

Government is not a substitute for people, but simply the instrument through which they act. And if the individual fails to do his duty as a citizen, government becomes a very deadly instrument indeed.

The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole.

Only an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals.

At the core of my work there is this eternal back-and-forth between being confined to one’s own individuality and that longing to be part of the other, the outside world: the impossibility of ever being able to get beneath another person’s skin.

Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed…It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality.