“Sometimes we have to do the work even though we don’t yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it’s actually going to be possible.”

What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.

Equal pay for women has always been an issue, eventhough we all know women work 10x harder than most men do.

When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison.

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo – obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

The only weapons that make me dangerous are my mind, mouth and pride, which will surely educate you.

Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of our social problems.

The campaign against the death penalty has been – while a powerful campaign, its participants have been those who attend all of the vigils, a relatively small number of people.

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.

Tories never actually talk about getting rid of their leader, then suddenly there us a flash of steel between he shoulder-blades and rigormortis sets in.

When you relate to thoughts obsessively, you are actually feeding them because thoughts need your attention to survive. Once you begin to pay attention to them and categorize them, then they become very powerful.

To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live.

There’s a reason why there’s a problem with bodies, and it’s because you never actually get to see any normal versions of them.

We say that the sun is behind the clouds, but actually it is not the sun but the city from which we view it that is behind the clouds. If we realized that the sun is never behind the clouds we might have a different attitude toward the whole thing.

There are moments when the inner life actually ‘pays,’ when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.

We actually did perform it in front of all those thousands of people. And just beforehand, we had a little dress rehearsal, and there were all these famous wrestlers going around and watching as well. Terrifying.

When I was in college, I actually had them change the starting lineup to say ‘from Robbins, Illinois’ instead of ‘Chicago, Illinois.’