"Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength."

"Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children."

"Some people think I'm saying, 'Women of the world unite -- you have nothing to lose but your men. It's not true. You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners."

"It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself."

"When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman."

"We need a new political movement of women and men toward a new society."

"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."

"It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself."

"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."

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

"Over and over again, stories in women's magazines insist that women can know fulfillment only at the moment of giving birth to a child. They deny the years when she can no longer look forward to giving birth, even if she repeats the act over and over again. In the feminine mystique, there is no other way for a woman to dream of creation or of the future. There is no other way she can even dream about herself, except as her children's mother, her husband's wife."

"Men, also, have in them enormous capacities that they have to repress and fear in themselves, living up to this obsolete and brutal man-eating, bear-killing, Ernest Hemingway, crewcut Prussian sadistic, napalm all the children in Vietnam, bang-bang you're dead, image of masculinity, the image of all powerful masculine superiority that is absolute."

"The only kind of work which permits an able woman to realize her abilities fully, to achieve identity in society in a life plan that can encompass marriage and motherhood, is the kind that was forbidden by the feminine mystique, the lifelong commitment to an art or science, to politics or profession. 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."

"The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive."

"We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: 'I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.'"

"The situation of women and men is not comparable to worker-boss or black and white."

"[Feminist:] One who believes in the liberation of that which has been suppressed as female in a man."

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

"The key to the trap is, of course, education. The feminine mystique has made higher education for women seem suspect, unnecessary and even dangerous. But I think that education, and only education, has saved, and can continue to save, American women from the greater dangers of the feminine mystique."

"We need to see men and women as equal partners, but its hard to think of movies that do that. When I talk to people, they think of movies of forty-five years ago! Hepburn and Tracy!"

"Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question-- 'Is this all?"

"I understood somehow my mother's frustration. And that it was no good not only for her, but for her children or her husband, that she didn't have a real use of her ability."

"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."

"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."

"Aging will create the music of the coming century."

"Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves."

"The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own."

"The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning [that is, a longing] that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Each suburban [house]wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries ... she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question - 'Is this all?"

"You can have it all, just not all at the same time."

"Life lived only for oneself does not truly satisfy men or women. There is a hunger in Americans today for larger purposes beyond the self. That is the reason for the religious revival and the new resonance of 'family."

"It is perhaps beside the point to remark that bowling alleys and supermarkets have nursery facilities, while schools and colleges and scientific laboratories and government offices do not."

"The feminists had destroyed the old image of woman, but they could not erase the hostility, the prejudice, the discrimination that still remained."

"Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves."

"Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves? Who knows what women's intelligence will contribute when it can be nourished without denying love?"

"The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity."

"It is wrong to keep spelling out unnecessary choices that make women unconsciously resist either commitment or motherhood--and that hold back recognition of the needed social changes."

"Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to be themselves."

"Men weren't really the enemy - they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill."

"The insult, the real reflection on our culture's definition of the role of women, is that as a nation we only noticed something was wrong with women when we saw its effects on their sons."

"Why do people say "grow some balls"? Balls are weak and sensitive. If you wanna be tough, grow a vagina. Those things can take a pounding."

"Animals don’t lie. Animals don’t criticize. If animals have moody days, they handle them better than humans do."

"If one has no sense of humor, one is in trouble."

"I'm a big cockeyed optimist. I try to accentuate the positive as opposed to the negative."

"I think older women still have a full life."

"Animal lover that I am, a cougar I am not."

"I've enjoyed the opposite sex a lot. Always have. Always will."

"I always wanted to be a zookeeper when I was growing up, and I've wound up a zookeeper! I've been working with the Los Angeles Zoo for 45 years! I'm the luckiest old broad on two feet because my life is divided absolutely in half - half animals and half show business. You can't ask for better than two things you love the most."

"I didn't know what Facebook was, and now that I do know what it is, I have to say, it sounds like a huge waste of time."

"Hot dogs and Red Vines and potato chips and French fries are my favorite foods."

"If you're walking with your lady on the sidewalk, I still like to see a man walking street-side, to protect the lady from traffic. I grew up with that, and I hate to see something like that get lost. I still like to see that a man opens the door. I like those touches of chivalry that are fast disappearing."