“We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.’”

We need a new political movement of women and men toward a new society.

I’m my age and I feel glorious.

If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don’t blame the women’s movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based.

I wouldn’t be satisfied with a life lived solely on the barricades. I reserve my right to be frivolous.

Aging will create the music of the coming century.

I love newspapers. I’ve worked on newspapers, all my life. I’ve always loved it.

I can’t point to any major episodes of sexual discrimination in my early life. But I was so aware of the crime, the shame that there was no use of my mother’s ability and energy.

The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.

The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.

Women, because they are not generally the principal breadwinners, can be perhaps most useful as the trail blazers, working along the bypaths, doing the unusual job that men cannot afford to gamble on.

A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of man’s advance in the professions, or by refusing to compete with man at all.

I won a really big fellowship to go straight on to get my Ph.D. And I went through agonies of indecision, and then I decided not to accept it. I just decided I didn’t want to be an academic.

Neither woman nor man lives by work, or love, alone … The human self defines itself and grows through love and work: All psychology before and after Freud boils down to that.

I never set out to write a book to change women’s lives, to change history. It’s like, ‘Who, me?’ Yes, me. I did it. And I’m not that different from other women. Maybe my power and glory was that I could speak my truth as a woman and it was the truth of every woman.

I knew one thing. I did not want to be a mommy like mommy.

The problem that has no name-which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities-is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.

Acting is a nice childish profession – pretending you’re someone else and, at the same time, selling yourself.

A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.

Beware of letting small faults pass unnoticed under the idea it is a little one. There are no little things in training children; all are important. Little weeds need plucking up as much as any. Leave them alone and they will soon be great.

Keep your families close together, and love and honor your children.

I was quite a weird kid because I didn’t like getting presents. I don’t know why. I just went for books all the time.

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?

Success is the child of drudgery and perseverance. It cannot be coaxed or bribed; pay the price and it is yours.

Speak to yourself like you would a child whom you love.