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

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.

When one begins to think about it, America depends rather heavily on women’s passive dependence, their femininity. Femininity, if one still wants to call it that, makes American women a target and a victim of the sexual sell.

life lived only for oneself does not truly satisfy men or women. There is a hunger in Americans today for larger purposes beyond the self. That is the reason for the religious revival and the new resonance of ‘family.

Why the increasing emphasis by professional age experts and the media on – and public acceptance of – the nursing home as the locus of age when, in fact, more than ninety percent of those over sixty-five continue to live in the community?

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.

Give up all hope of peace so long as your mother-in-law is alive.

I’ve been so unhappy for years, so unhappy, I don’t understand how a human being can be so unhappy all the time and still be alive.

Be glad you’re even alive. Be furious you’re going to die.

The world is getting to be such a dangerous place, a man is lucky to get out of it alive.

It’s a funny old world. A man’s lucky if he gets out of it alive.

Hold your head high, stick your chest out. It gets dark sometimes, but morning comes. Keep hope alive.

A lot of money is spent trying to keep people alive who don’t necessarily want to be alive.

Keep hope alive!