“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 always had a decent sense of outrage.

Women have been trained to speak softly and carry a lipstick. Those days are over.

Maybe we weren’t at the Last Supper, but we’re certainly going to be at the next one.

Congress is a middle-aged, middle-class, white male power structure … no wonder it’s been so totally unresponsive to the needs of this country.

Abortion doesn’t belong in the political arena. It’s a private right, like many other rights concerning the family.

Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel.

Women will not simply be mainstreamed into the polluted stream. Women are changing the stream, making it clean and green and safe for all – every gender, race, creed, sexual orientation, age, and ability.

I prefer the word ‘homemaker’ because ‘housewife’ always implies that there may be a wife someplace else.

In the face of so much pain, I remain an incurable optimist. I am fueled by the passion of the women I have been privileged to meet and work with, buoyed by their hope for peace, justice, and democracy.

We are coming down from our pedestal and up from the laundry room.

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

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.

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.

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.

We are creatures that are designed for continual challenge. We must grow or we begin to die….So just standing still isn’t really an option. We have to move on. If not, disturbances will come.

Climate change does not respect border; it does not respect who you are – rich and poor, small and big. Therefore, this is what we call global challenges, which require global solidarity.

Climate change is destroying our path to sustainability. Ours is a world of looming challenges and increasingly limited resources. Sustainable development offers the best chance to adjust our course.

The challenge of warriorship is to step out of the cocoon, to step out into space, by being brave and at the same time gentle

My dad challenged every president from President [Dwight] Eisenhower and Vice President [Richard] Nixon to President [J.F] Kennedy.

You only have temporary curiosity, amusement, and challenges, but that does not necessarily mean you are really convinced that it’s necessary or that it’s not even worth to do it.

If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.

I wasn’t searching for a common denominator – I started wondering about the challenge of working in other cultures. What I reached was the sudden acknowledgment of the universal aspect of filmmaking.