“The driver, an old Irish woman, the only such cabbie I’ve ever seen, turned to us at a traffic light and said the immortal words, “Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament!” 

“We are all trained to be female impersonators.” 

“What we’re told about this country is way too limited by generalities, sound bites, and even the supposedly enlightened idea that there are two sides to every question. In fact, many questions have three or seven or a dozen sides.” 

“I've noticed that great political leaders are energized by conflict. I'm energized by listening to people's stories and trying to figure out shared solutions. That's the work of an organizer.” 

“We learn most where we know the least.” 

“I'm also now immune to politicians who say, "I've traveled the length and breadth of this great land, and I know..." I've traveled more than any of them, and I don't know.” 

“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.” 

“Always look at what people do, not who they are.” 

“In retrospect, perhaps the biggest reason my mother was cared for but not helped for twenty years was the simplest: Her functioning was not that necessary to the world.”

“On the road, I learned that the media are not reality; reality is reality.” 

“Only food and water are more important than music and privacy,” 

“The root of oppression is the loss of memory.” 

“Instead of either/or, I discovered a whole world of and.” 

“We'll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.” 

“When the past dies, there is mourning, but when the future dies our imaginations are compelled to carry it on.” 

“It’s said that the biggest determinant of our lives is whether we see the world as welcoming or hostile. Each becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.” 

“The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories—in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.” 

“Her searches after knowledge were arbitrary and without context. It was as if she were shining a small flashlight of curiosity into the dark room of the world.” 

“I wonder: If you think of someone you love, do you become a little more like them? I would like to think so.” 

“No wonder studies show that women's intellectual self-esteem tends to go down as years of education go up. We have been studying our own absence.” 

“no one ever got radicalized by being grateful” 

“Always ask the turtle.” 

“Altogether, if I'd been looking at nothing but the media all these years, I would be a much more discouraged person-especially given the notion that only conflict is news, and that objectivity means being evenhandedly negative.”