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

Regardless of your age, you will always have adventures, unexpected joys and unexpected sorrows.

He’s a male chauvinistic piglet.

Advice? I don’t offer advice. Not my business. Your life is what you make it.

…women who ‘adjust’ as housewives, who grow up wanting to be ‘just a housewife,’ are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps…they ate suffering a slow death of mind and spirit.

Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.

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.”

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

At the end of the day, we must go forward with hope and not backward by fear and division.

I think what I’ve come to now is, that fear is good; it’s what life is about. You need to be afraid because fear gives you the strength to carry on important tasks.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Fear, is a curtain telling you she’s a door walkthrough.

Sometimes it is easier to feel the veins wilted and empty than to sense the coldness of blood in fear.

Fear is the passion of slaves.

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, and I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, and in short, I was afraid.