“Taking away the good is even more lethal than pointing out the bad.” 

“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.” 

“The man who is not permitted to own is owned.”

“A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one’s life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.”

“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

“All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible”

“A habitual indulgence in the inarticulate is a sure sign of the philosopher who has not learned to think, the poet who has not learned to write, the painter who has not learned to paint, and the impression that has not learned to express itself--all of which are compatible with an immensity of genius in the inexpressible soul.”

“Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.”

“One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.”

“Consciousness is a born hermit.”

“The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.”

“The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals, but mad.”

“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.” 

“Depression is rage spread thin.”

“The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.”

“What is the part of wisdom? To dream with one eye open; to be detatched from the world without being hostile to it; to welcome fugitive beauties and pity fugitive sufferings, without forgetting for a moment how fugitive they are.”

“Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.”

“All conditions are bearable, all dignities trumpery, and wisdom simply the gift of making the best of whatever is thrust upon us.”

“The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about. Athletics don’t make anybody long-lived or useful.”

“The wisest mind hath something yet to learn.”

“We laughed at the same things, and we liked the same things. What more is needed for agreeable society?”

“Those were the two prerequisites, in my conception, to perfect friendship: capacity to worship and capacity to laugh. Modern life is not made for friendship: common interests are not strong enough, private interests too absorbing. In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.”

“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.”