“There may be women to emerge who will be able to formulate a new and possible concept that homosexual persecution and condemnation has at its roots not only social ignorance, but a philosophically active anti-feminist dogma.”

I care. I care about it all. It takes too much energy not to care.

I happen to believe that most people – and this is where I differ from many of my contemporaries, or at least as they express themselves – I think that virtually every human being is dramatically interesting. Not only is he dramatically interesting, he is a creature of stature whoever he is.

There is always something left to love. And if you haven’t learned that, you ain’t learned nothing.

I believe that one of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality, I think, emerges from truthful identity of what is.

Take away the violence and who will hear the man of peace?

Never be afraid to sit a while and think.

Obviously the most oppressed of any oppressed group will be its women

Big Walter used to say, he’d get right wet in the eyes sometimes, lean his head back with the water standing in his eyes and say, ‘Seem like God didn’t see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams – but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worth while.’

Ah, I like the look of packing crates! A household in preparation for a journey! … Something full of the flow of life, do you understand? Movement, progress…

I want to fly! I want to touch the sun!” “Finish your eggs first.

Sometimes, I can see the future stretched out in front of me – just as plain as day. The future hanging over there at the edge of my days. Just waiting for me.

I think that the human race does command its own destiny and that that destiny can eventually embrace the stars.

I was born black and female.

One cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know and read of the miseries which affect the world.

Do I remain a revolutionary? Intellectually — without a doubt. But am I prepared to give my body to the struggle or even my comforts? This is what I puzzle about.

Children see things very well sometimes and idealists even better.

The word, and the concept of feminism, was a gift because it gave me a sense of identity and a way of defining how I wished to live my life.

Let us, while never forgetting our womanhood, drop all emphasis on sex, and put it on being public servants.

Hillary Clinton was urging voters to make history, but a lot of voters, particularly women, had trouble with her history. And she was portraying herself as a feminist.

The most important thing of all, the thing that lasted, was the first feminist movement and the position of women in society. That completely changed and that was very, very important.

I wish that I had bridged the feminist movement and the anti-war movement better than I did.

There is a reason why America produced the most vigorous feminist movement in the world: We were one of the only countries in which the middle class (which is wealthy by world standards) customarily employed its own women as domestic servants.

But I really resist categories – that naming is a closing down of meaning. Women’s art, political art – those categorisations perpetuate a certain kind of marginality which I’m resistant to. But I absolutely define myself as a feminist.

Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women’s liberation… none was more alarming, from a feminist point of view, than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.