“There is no such thing as a perfect leader. We have to learn to lead ourselves.” 

“I was the only “girl writer,” probably because the power to make people laugh is also a power, so women have been kept out of comedy. Polls show that what women fear most from men is violence, and what men fear most from women is ridicule. Later, when Tina Fey was head writer and star of Saturday Night Live, she could still say, “Only in comedy does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity.” 

“punished people sometimes pass punishment downward, especially to members of their own devalued group.” 

“if you don’t stand up for yourselves, how can you stand up for anybody else?” 

“Forget about party labels. Just vote on the issues and for candidates who support equality.” 

“The simple right to reproductive freedom - to sexuality as an expression that is separable from reproduction - is basic to restoring women's power, the balance between women and men, and a balance between humans and nature.” 

“Home is a symbol of the self. Caring for a home is caring for one’s self.” 

“I recommend trying this kind of grassroots organizing for a week or a year, a month or a lifetime—working for whatever change you want to see in the world. Then one day you will be talking to a stranger who has no idea you played any part in the victory she or he is celebrating.” 

“The problem for all women is we're identified by how we look, instead of by our heads and hearts.” 

“If you do anything people care about, people will take care of you.” 

“I can go on the road - because I can come home. I come home - because I'm free to leave. Each way of being is more valued in the presence of the other. This balance between making camp and following the seasons is both very ancient and very new. We all need both.” 

“she is still better known than most living movie stars, most world leaders, and most television personalities. The surprise is that she rarely has been taken seriously enough to ask why that is so.” 

“When the past dies, we mourn for the dead. When the future dies, we mourn for ourselves.” 

“If I could, I would leave an open space for your story on every page.” 

“Laughter is the only free emotion-the only one that can't be compelled.p.181” 

“For sad if obvious reasons, women (especially white women who are seduced by access to the powerful) are the only discriminated-against group whose members seem to think that, if they don’t take themselves seriously, someone else will.” 

“The purpose of ass-kicking is not that your ass gets kicked at the right time or for the right reason,” she often explained. “It’s to keep your ass sensitive.” 

“After all, hope is a form of planning. If our hopes weren’t already real within us, we couldn’t even hope them.” 

“Statistically speaking, home is an even more dangerous place for women than the road.” 

“All movements need a few people who can’t be fired.” 

“Reading in the car was so much my personal journey that when my mother urged me to put down my book and look out the window, I would protest, “But I just looked an hour ago!” 

“Rhyming in itself is magic.” 

“I had wanted to escape my traveling childhood, yet I was traveling and making the discovery that ordinary people are smart, smart people are ordinary, decisions are best made by the people affected by them, and human beings have an almost infinite capacity for adapting to the expectations around us - which is both the good and the bad news” 

“Basically, I feel different from most other women. I feel I don’t have to put on an act. If I’m not feminine enough for someone, I don’t care, because femininity is different in everyone’s mind.” 

“As with all inferior things, this part of the city was given an adjective while the rest stole the noun.” 

“I had been silent and silenced about an abortion I'd had years before. Like many women, I'd been made to feel at fault, not realizing there were political reasons why female humans were not supposed to make decisions about our own bodies.” 

“I was being measured against the expectation that any feminist had to be unattractive in a conventional sense—and then described in contrast to that stereotype. The subtext was: If you could get a man, why would you need equal pay?” 

“If time is relative, doing new things actually makes us feel we’ve lived a longer life.” 

“the model for the U.S. Constitution was not ancient Greece but the Iroquois Confederacy. Then,” 

“There is history in what is dismissed as prehistory.” 

“White people should have sued for being culturally deprived in a white ghetto. When humans are ranked instead of linked, everyone loses.” 

“Will we get to the point that learning sign language is a part of literacy? That knowing both an audible and a physical language is routine?” 

“Suddenly, it seems ridiculous that we just came from a city airport named for Columbus, a terrible navigator who insisted to his dying day that he was in India—which is why people here are called Indians. As the Native women in Houston said, “It could have been worse—he could have thought he was in Turkey.” 

“I was angry about the human talent that was lost just because it was born into a female body, and the mediocrity that was rewarded because it was born into a male one. And” 

“Beware of any motto that glorifies the past. It’s code for restoring hierarchy. For example: “Make America great again.” 

“Now that being on the road was my choice, not my fate, I lost the melancholy feeling of 'everybody has a home but me'. I could leave—because I could return. I could return—because I knew adventure lay just beyond an open door. Instead of 'either/or', I discovered a whole world of 'and'.” 

“people in the same room understand and empathize with each other in a way that isn’t possible on the page or screen.” 

“IF EVERYONE HAS A full circle of human qualities to complete, then progress lies in the direction we haven’t been.” 

“Citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own conscience can transform countries, it is the basis of any real democracy.” 

“Then, as if in answer to a riddle posed years before, you will realize that this growth came from seeds you planted or watered or carried from place to place—and you’ll be rewarded in the way that we as communal beings need most: you’ll know you made a difference.” 

“You can travel without traveling, and you can not travel -- yet travel. Being on the road is a state of mind.” 

“In fact, caucus, a word derived from the Algonquin languages, better reflected the layers of talking circles and the goal of consensus that were at the heart of governance.” 

“In the words of so many daughters who don’t yet know that a female fate is not a personal fault, I told myself: I’m not going to be anything like my mother.” 

“Anybody can be with you when you’re right, but only friends are with you when you mess up.” 

“Never having seen women play chess, they assumed this game wasn't for them and without even a female teacher as role model, they dropped out.” 

“Altogether, I can't imagine technology replacing bookstores completely, any more than movies about a country replace going there.” 

“It was the first time I witnessed the ancient and modern magic of groups in which anyone may speak in turn, everyone must listen, and consensus is more important than time.” 

“In our weeks of talk, movies and friendship, I watched as Wilma turned a medical ordeal into one more event in her life, but not its definition. I believe she was teaching me an intimate form of The Way. In her words: "Every day is a good day - because we are part of everything alive.” 

“Women are always better liked if we sacrifice ourselves for something bigger—and something bigger always means including men, even though something bigger for men doesn’t usually mean including women. In” 

“The best way for us to cultivate fearlessness in our daughters and other young women is by example. If they see their mothers and other women in their lives going forward despite fear, they'll know it's possible.”