“All our silences in the face of racist assault are acts of complicity.”

Living simply makes loving simple.

Feminism is for everybody.

Forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?

Whenever women struggle with breast cancer and face better care than ever, that’s feminism.

The political core of any movement for freedom in the society has to have the political imperative to protect free speech.

Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power – not because they don’t see it, but because they see it and they don’t want it to exist.

One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library.

I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance.

Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.

The rage of the oppressed is never the same as the rage of the privileged.

Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.

The people I love, I’m committed to loving for the rest of my life.

What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.

No black woman writer in this culture can write “too much”. Indeed, no woman writer can write “too much”. No woman has ever written enough.

You can only realize change if you live simply. Once people want enormous excess, you can hardly do social change.

To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.

This is rather different from the receptions I used to get fifty years ago. They threw things at me then but they were not roses.

I remember envying the boys long before I even knew the word feminism, because I liked shop better than cooking or sewing.

Suffrage is the pivotal right.

There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.

The women of this nation in 1876, have greater cause for discontent, rebellion and revolution than the men of 1776.

There is not a woman born who desires to eat the bread of dependence, no matter whether it be from the hand of father, husband, or brother; for anyone who does so eat her bread places herself in the power of the person from whom she takes it.

It is downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government: the ballot.

The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.