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

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.

Goodness is not the absence of disease. It is an intentional process for health.

Peace is not absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.

Don’t mistake your discovery for the absence of yourself.

Her absence was poison to my eyes.

Death is nothing to us, because a body that has been dispersed into elements experiences no sensations, and the absence of sensation is nothing to us.

Peace is not the absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition of benevolence, confidence, justice.

I’d rather miss you in your absence then neglect in your presence.

Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.