“Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.”

We broke through the feminine mystique and women who were wives, mothers and housewives began to find themselves as people. That didn’t mean they stopped, or had to stop, being mothers, wives or even liking their homes.

Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth.

A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she “adjust” to prejudice and discrimination.

American women were frustrated in just the role of housewife – but they also managed to enlarge it. And they weren’t just housewives, they were community leaders.

You have to say no to the old ways before you can begin to find the new yes you need.

No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.

If you were very bright and you became head of a department, as I did, of the psychology department, you were encouraged to go on to graduate work. But as a women you didn’t even think about discrimination.

By now, abortion should be obsolete. And I – and probably a lot of other feminists – wish it were obsolete, because abortion, in itself, is not a value – it is simply the right to chose, which is an essential value.

Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?

The situation of women and men is not comparable to worker-boss or black and white.

I realized that what I was saying was threatening, somehow, to the editors of women’s magazines. That it threatened the very world they were trying to paint, what I then called the “feminine mystique.”

It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question ‘who am I’ except the voice inside herself.

This idea that the employment of women, the movement of women outside the home into the work world, and their demand for equality is somehow responsible for increasing juvenile delinquency or the increase in divorce rate, is just so much bullshit.

If women’s role in life is limited solely to housewife/mother, it clearly ends when she can no longer bear more children and the children she has borne leave home.

Aging is not “lost youth” but a new stage of opportunity and strength.

Men weren’t really the enemy – they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.

Always meet petulance with gentleness and perverseness with kindness. A gentle hand can lead even en elephant by a hair. Reply to thine enemy with gentleness.

Among the clergy we find our most violent enemies, those most opposed to any change in woman’s position.

Two orders of mankind are the enemies of church and state; the king without clemency, and the holy man without learning.

There is an old saying which, from its truth, has become proverbial, that friendships should be immortal, enmities mortal.

Refusing to forgive is like ingesting a lethal dose of poison and hoping it kills my enemy.

Under the influence of fear, which always leads men to take a pessimistic view of things, they magnified their enemies’ resources, and minimized their own.

He who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.

What can my enemies do to me? My paradise is in my heart, it is with me wherever I go. To imprison me is to provide me with seclusion. To send me into exile is to send me away in the Path of Allah. And to kill me is to make me a martyr.