“I have said this many times, that there seems to be enough room in the world for mediocre men, but not for mediocre women, and we really have to work very, very hard.”

Respect for the rights of others is a lofty principle; but envy is a primal urge (p114)

Because of my parents’ love of democracy, we came to America after being driven twice from our home in Czechoslovakia – first by Hitler and then by Stalin.

McCarthy fooled as many as he did because a lot of people shared his anxieties.

Fascism, most of the students agreed, is an extreme form of authoritarian rule. Citizens are required to do exactly what leaders say they must do, nothing more, nothing less.

Bill Clinton observed that when people are uncertain, they’d rather have leaders who are strong and wrong than right and weak.

I also think it is important for women to help one another. I have a saying: There is a special place in hell for women who don’t.

Unless you can understand what is motivating them, you are never going to be able to figure out how to solve a particular problem.

We will not be intimidated or pushed off the world stage by people who do not like what we stand for, and that is, freedom, democracy and the fight against disease, poverty and terrorism.

Trump is the first anti-democratic president in modern U.S. history.

In 2016, Fascism was searched on the Merriam-Webster dictionary website more often than any other word in English except surreal, which experienced a sudden spike after the November presidential election.

The Fascist game plan: a single party, speaking with one voice, controlling every state institution, claiming to represent all people, and labeling the entire sham a triumph of the popular will.

A dictatorship by any other name is still a dictatorship, whether its symbol is the czarist two-headed eagle or the hammer and sickle.

When, at a party, a woman (half socialite, half journalist) told me how brave she thought I had been for not getting a facelift, I was tempted to comment on the courage she had shown in dealing with the results of hers.

The greatest thrill in my life was to represent the United States of America.

I once experimented with meditation, cleared my mind, and immediately remembered a phone call I had to make; that was that.

The conservatives saw the Fascist leader as someone they could hide behind, manipulate, and, when convenient, replace.

I consider the official Catholic attitude on divorce, birth control, and censorship exceedingly dangerous to mankind.

I aspire to be an old man with an old wife laughing at old jokes from a wild youth.

I have not come into this world to make men better, but to make use of their weaknesses.

The strong man is mightiest alone.

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of great fear.

Bodies are real entities. Surfaces and lines are but fictitious entities. A surface without depth, a line without thickness, was never seen by any man; no; nor can any conception be seriously formed of its existence.

Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives’ mouths.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.