Feminists from the United States

"Whenever anyone has called me a bitch, I have taken it as a compliment. To me, a bitch is assertive, unapologetic, demanding, intimidating, intelligent, fiercely protective, in control — all very positive attributes. But it's not supposed to be a compliment, because there's that stupid double standard: When men are aggressive and dominant, they are admired, but when a woman possesses those same qualities, she is dismissed and called a bitch.These days, I strive to be a bitch, because not being one sucks. Not being a bitch means not having your voice heard. Not being a bitch means you agree with all the bullshit. Not being a bitch means you don't appreciate all the other bitches who have come before you. Not being a bitch means since Eve ate that apple, we will forever have to pay for her bitchiness with complacence, obedience, acceptance, closed eyes, and open legs."

"I wanna fuck her, but I don't want to vote for her."

"Something traumatic happened to me when I was younger. I was with this old black woman, and she was very wise, very Alice Walker, The Color Purple...she looked at me and she says, "Baby...you know I used to be able to fly but I can't fly no more, baby. But baby, you...? You too fat to fly.""

"I was working on this movie and the makeup artist was just so ugly! I just wanted to say "Physician, heal thyself!" She looked exactly like Aaron Neville, and she was trying her hardest to make me look exactly like Aaron Neville. This one time, she leaned into my face with the mascara wand almost touching my eye and she says, "Whass my name?""

"Then there was this extra on the set who runs up to me and says, "Oh, I know you! I know who you is, I seen you before. You that comedienne, Margaret Cho! I saw you at the Comedy Store. You was wearin' a kimono and you was bowin'." "No, that's the other one." "Oh, right! Now I remember. I just didn't recognize you because you've put on a little weight since your show." And it didn't piss me off that she said that, but it was that she said, "You put on a lot of *gestures* weight!" so I'll know exactly where I put it. And it pissed me off, so I just sort of talked about it to everybody for the whole day. The next day I come into work and the assistant producer comes over to me and says, "Uh, you know that lady from the other day? Well, don't worry. We took care of her." Oh my God! What did you do?! Suddenly I felt like I was running around like this tyrant, all drunk with power- "Nobody can call me fat on this set!""

"So I was drinking tequila, and I was drinking grappa, which is Italian for gasoline, and I was drinking Jägermeister, which I believe is the liquid equivalent of Wonder Woman's golden lasso, because it will make you tell anybody the truth for no reason whatsoever. "You have really bad skin. Thanks for the drink.""

"And I got so drunk, I got so drunk that I actually woke up thinking, "Should I get up and pee, or just pee in the bed?" Actually weighing the pros and the cons. "Well, it'll be warm for a minute...it's a big bed, I'll just roll over...I'll just blame it on that guy!""

"This old fellow came up to me and asked, "Excuse me, are you Japanese?" No, I'm Korean. "Oh, really, that's very interesting, because I was looking at you and I knew you were not Filipino. I have many Filipino friends and you do not look like them because you're very HUSKY!!" Is that supposed to be some kind of a compliment? "Oh, no, it's not bad, you're very strong, very HUSKY!""

"[An article about Cho] started out, "Funny, sexy, zaftig Margaret Cho..." What is "zaftig?" Isn't that German for "big fat pig?" I guess I was lucky- "zaftig" is kind of a nice word. It could have been, "Funny, sexy, OBESE Margaret Cho.""

"I love Karl Lagerfeld, and they [PETA] hate him because he showed fur in his collection, and they protested his fashion show. People were chanting outside, "KARL LAGERFELD IS A MURDERER! KARL LAGERFELD IS A MURDERER!" And I thought, "Wouldn't it be fabulous if Karl Lagerfeld actually was a murderer?" Like, what if he just fuckin' lost it one day...backstage at a show in Milan...and bludgeoned Elsa Klensch to death with a platform shoe. "I HATE THAT BLOUSE!""

"The best part of any fashion show is Karl Lagerfeld with his white hair, and the big glasses, and a fuckin' fan. Like he's some kind of Spanish lady or something. And I look at the fan and I'm like, "Bitch, it's not that hot, what'choo doin'?""

"I love the word "faggot," because it describes my kind of guy! You see, I am a fag hag. Fag hags are the backbone of the gay community. Without us, you're nothing! We have been there all through history guiding your sorry ass through the underground railroad! We went to the prom with you!"

"I love my gay male friends, but when I was a little girl, I always used to wish that I would be constantly surrounded by gorgeous guys, and I am, and I should have been more specific."

"Thank God for gay men. Thank God for gay men, because if it were not for gay men, I would not talk to men at all."

"If I'm talking to a guy who's straight and cute and single, I'm like, "Are you a unicorn?""

"One of my friends has these ideas about how we should meet men. "What we should do on Friday night is we will fucking go get fucked up and fuck yeah! We will fucking get fucked up and then we will fucking get tickets to go see the Chippendale's Dancers, fuck yeah! We will fucking get tickets to see the Chippendale's Dancers." I can get gay guys to dance in my house for free."

"The Chippendale's dancers are gay. They're gay. Because there is no such thing as a straight man with visible abdominal muscles. You have to suck cock to get that kind of muscle definition. It doesn't work for women. You know, I tried, OK?"

"[Jo from The Facts of Life] was such a lesbian. Wasn't she the biggest lesbian? I used to watch that show, like, "Oh, she gonna fuck Blair!""

"One of my first jobs was on a lesbian cruise. I was the ship comedian for the Lesbian Love Boat."

"Lesbians love whale watching! They fuckin love it! THEY LOVE IT MORE THAN PUSSY! It's any sea mammal really. Whales, manatees, dolphins. They go crazy for the dolphins. I don't know what it is- I think it's the blowhole."

"So I was on the ship, with 800 lesbians. We can't get off. So much drama. "Were you looking at her or her or her or her or her or her or her or her or her or her or her or her? WELL, WERE YOU?!" We all got on the same cycle."

"There was this really prim and proper British woman who used to run horse races for the lesbians on the ship, and the lesbians would get to name the horses, and the really prim and proper British woman would have to read out the names. "Horse number one, Galloping...Clitoris. Horse number one, Galloping Clitoris. Very well, carry on. Horse number two...No Dick for Me. Horse number two, No Dick for Me. Rather a rude name, don't you think? No Dick for Me? Should be, No Dick for Me, Thank You.""

"I slept with a woman on the ship, and afterwards I was thinking, "Am I gaaaay? Am I straaaaight?" And then I realized: I'm just slutty. Where's my parade?"

"My mom used to give me messages like this: "Ummmmmmm...Scott called...IS HE THE GAY??!!" "Well, God, mom, I don't know if he's the gay...that's a lot of pressure on just one guy. He has to do the parade all by himself! 'I'm here! I'm queer!...I guess I'm the only one.'""

"A Korean reporter once asked me, "Do you think your Korean parents are ashamed because you talk about what you talk about on stage?" I said, "I don't think they're ashamed because they're Korean. I think any parents would be ashamed.""

"The National Enquirer published this thing called the "Chow like Cho Diet," which was this fake diet that I never went on, with all these fake quotes from me, like "When I was a little girl, I was raised on rice and fish. So when I get heavy, I go back to that natural Asian way of eating." That is so Mulan. You can almost hear the mandolin in the background. "When I was a little girl, I grow up on the rice paddy... and although we have no food, I have a tendency to put on weight.""

"I was skiing in Deer Valley and there's no people of color up there, and I'm up there, skiing, trying to fit in like an asshole, and I have an instructor and he goes, "Hey, don't take this the wrong way, but you have a tendency to bow into your skis." Fuck you! And then I fell."

"It was hard for me to do the show (All-American Girl) because a lot of people didn't even understand the concept of Asian-American. I was on a morning show and the host said, "Awright, Margaret, we're changing over to an ABC affiliate! So why don't you tell our viewers in your native language that we're making that transition?" So I looked at the camera and said, "Um, they're changing over to an ABC affiliate.""

"[quoting her producer] "The network is concerned. They're concerned about the fullness of your face. They think you're really overweight and you're going to have to do something about it." I didn't know what to say to that. I always thought I was decent looking; I had no idea that I was a giant face taking over America! HERE COMES THE FACE!!"

"We were taping the episodes of the show. I guess they had decided they could now fit my face onto a TV screen, and they wouldn't have to letterbox it."

"I was on the floor in the emergency room, and the woman came up to me and said "Hi, my name is Gwen and I'm here to wash your vagina!""

"The first thing that you lose on a diet is brain mass."

"I knew I was crazy because I was watching Jesus Christ Superstar and the part where Jesus carries the cross up the mountain, I actually said to myself, "Wow! That must be a really good workout! Yeah, because you're doing arms and cardio!""

"Because I wasn't Asian enough- they decided to hire an Asian Consultant. Because I was fucking it up as an Asian. She would follow me around: "Margaret! Use chopsticks! And when you're done eating, you can put them in your hair. Now you're wearing shoes, which is something we don't do in the house. Now I'm just going to leave this abacus right here...""

"I stood in front of a hundred and one critics at a critic's convention and a critic asked me, "Miss Cho, isn't it true that your management asked you to lose weight to play the part of yourself in your own TV show?" Gail [the producer] grabbed the mike from me and said, "There is no truth in that whatsoever." I...was so...hungry."

"So they cancelled our show, and gave the time slot to Drew Carey, because he's so skinny."

"I gave a LOT of unnecessary head. And I know that guys are going to argue with me about this. "Oh, Margaret, there's no such thing as unnecessary head! All head is necessary! All head is wanted and needed in the world. I run a home for unnecessary head.""

"I am not gonna die because some network executive thought I was fat! It's so wrong! It's so wrong that women are asked to live up to this skinny ideal that is totally unattainable. For me to be ten pounds thinner is a full-time job, and I am handing in my notice and walking out the door!!"

"I am not gonna die because I failed as someone else. I am gonna succeed as myself. And I'm gonna stay here and rock the mike until the next Korean-American, fag hag, shit starter, girl comic, trash talker comes up and takes my place!"

"No matter what these terrorists do, I refuse to be terrorized. All this requires is just a few alterations in our day to day lives. For example, my first instinct when I receive an envelope full of white powder...is to snort it! I just won't do that this time!"

"There's a bar in Edinburgh called "CC Bloom's." CC Bloom is the name of the character that Bette Midler played in Beaches. That is the gayest thing I have ever heard in my entire life. That place should just be called "Fuck-Me-In-The-Ass Bar and Grill.""

"If you've ever bought drugs before, you understand that for some bizarre reason you have to feign this relationship with your dealer. It's like you're not really going to him to buy drugs. You're going for a social visit. Drugs are the surprise that just happens when you get there. "Oh, hash? I didn't know!" And he's talkin' to you and you're tryin' to be interested, you know, "Oh yeah? No, really...I love Foghat. No, seriously." And inside you're like, "Just fuckin' give it! I hate you. Your house smells like cat pee!" Why do all drug dealers' houses smell like cat pee?"

"I had a colonic irrigation in this clinic in Santa Monica, because people in Los Angeles cannot do anything for themselves, much less take a shit."

"I didn't know if I was going to mention my period on stage, but then I figured, if Richard Pryor had a period, he would talk about it."

"I do not need nobody tellin' me who I am! I know who I am!...I be walkin' down the hallway, they call me names. They call me faggot, they call me sissy, I say, 'Oh yeah? Well, you forgot, I'm also a model and a actress, so fuck you too!"

"What I love most about gay men is the way that they are about sex. There is a kind of fun and frivolity that surrounds gay men and their sexuality that is not there for straight men and sex. I think if you're oppressed over who you want to sleep with, when you actually go and do it, you're gonna have a really good time. If you are hated for who you like to fuck, you're gonna kick up your heels and fuck...and it is such an inspiration to watch."

"It's just that it's been my experience in having sex with some straight men that the sex is over when he gets off. And I don't accept that. I want to have an orgasm. Not right now! This is the Isaac Stern Auditorium! No, I want to have one. I'll put a chalk board over the bed. One...one."

"There's no real way for women to really learn about sex in our culture. There are articles about sex in women's magazines, but that's not the kind of information I'm after. There was this article in Cosmopolitan about "How to look good in bed with your lover." It was these tips like, "If you put your arm under your breasts they're higher," or "If you're laying on your back, your stomach is flat," or "If you're having anal sex, he can't see your cellulite!" That's wrong, because I get so ugly when I fuck and I don't care! And if you care what I look like when you're fucking me, you shouldn't be fucking me in the first place!!"

"I can't even look at those "women's magazines" anyway. I love fashion, but I look at the pictures of the skinny models, and they're wearing clothes I can't even fit on my fingers. And I look at that and I think, if that is what a woman is supposed to look like, then I must not be one."

"So from the age of 10, I became anorexic, and then bulimic, and then stayed that way for about 20 years, until one day I just said, "Hey, what if this is it? What if this is just what I look like and nothing I do changes that? So how much time would I save if I stopped taking that extra second every time I look in the mirror to call myself a big fat fuck? How much time would I save if I just let myself walk by a plate-glass window without sucking in my gut and throwing back my shoulders? How much time would I save?" And it turns out I save about 97 minutes a week. I can take a pottery class."

"“And I have a lot of self-esteem, which is amazing, because I’m probably somebody who wouldn’t necessarily have a lot of self esteem as I am considered a minority and if you are a woman, if you are a person of color, if you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, if you are a person of size, if you are person of intelligence, if you are a person of integrity, then you are considered a minority in this world. And it's going to be really hard to find messages of self-love and support anywhere. Especially women's and gay men's culture. It's all about how you have to look a certain way, or else you're worthless. You know, when you look in the mirror and think, ‘Ugh, I'm so ugly, I'm so fat, I'm so old.’ Don't you know that's not your authentic self? But that is billions upon billions of dollars of advertising. Magazines, movies, billboards, all geared to make you feel shitty about yourself, so that you will take your hard earned money and spend it at the mall on some turn-around crème that doesn't turn around shit. If you don't have self-esteem, you will hesitate before you do anything in your life. You will hesitate to go for the job you want to go for. You will hesitate to ask for a raise. You will hesitate to call yourself an American. You will hesitate to report a rape. You will hesitate to defend yourself when you are discriminated against because of your race, your sexuality, your size, your gender. You will hesitate to vote; you will hesitate to dream. For us to have self-esteem is truly an act of revolution, and our revolution is long overdue."

"I urge you all today, especially today in these times of terrorism and chaos to love yourselves without reservation and to love each other without restraint. Unless you're into leather; then by all means, use restraints."

"This is a very strange time we're living in, and I would feel a little bit better if George W. Bush could say the word "nuclear" correctly. You would have thought somebody would have said something by now. At the very least, Condi would have got up in his face, "Foo', it's NU-CLE-AR! Imma have'ta write it down fo'ya!...I'm makin' flash cards for the President. This is...[shaking her head] mm-mmmm.""

"Monogamy is so weird. Like when you know their name and stuff."

"I helped deliver one of my best friend's children. I just was so amazed by my friend, because she was not just a woman, she was not just a mother. At that moment she was creation; she was life; she was God. And as I looked in her eyes, BOOM! Her pussy exploded."

"I am secretly a costume drama queen. Oo, I love me some Merchant Ivory films! I do! If there is a petticoat and Helena Bonham Carter, already I can feel the tears well up in my eyes. I love me some period films! And I know that I will never be in them. I will never be in any of these movies, unless I am laying down on my side smoking some opium. And I get offered movie roles all the time, but I say, "No! No! I don't want to play a manicurist. I don't want to play a really pissed-off liquor store owner. I don't want to go nowhere with a chicken under my arm. I don't want to play an exceptionally good student, I do not want to get off a tour bus and take numerous photographs, I do not ever want to utter the phrase, 'Welcome to Japan, Mr. Bond'! I don't want to write down all my memoirs about being a geisha!" What it is, is that I cannot run up a wall!!"

"The only thing that was sort of Asian [as a role model] was Hello Kitty. I don't want to model myself after Hello Kitty. She has no mouth."

"I get nervous when people say to me, "I just can't tell any of you Asians apart!" Um, why do you have to tell us apart? Are we gonna be separated for some reason? I can't tell us apart! I was not born with a chip in my neck that would automatically identify every Asiatic person that I would come across. "beebeebeebeebeep Filipino.""

"I was on a plane, and the steward was coming down the aisle. "Asian chicken salad...Asian chicken salad...Asian chicken salad..." And he gets to me and he's like, "...chicken salad!" What does he think I'm gonna do? "Dis is not de salad of my people! In my homeland, dey use mandarin orange slices...and crispy wonton crunches!""

"Women and eating disorders have such a long history, but now I see it happening to gay men. And when it comes to anorexia, bulimia, body dysmorphia, gay men are far worse than women. They take it way more seriously. "Why diet when you can take crystal meth?""

"I think everyone should go on my diet. It's called the Fuck It Diet. Basically what it is, is if I want to eat something but it has a lot of fat or carbs, I just take a moment, and I go within, and I say "Fuck it" and I eat it. You have to do it 6 times a day. It works really well with the Fuck That Shit Exercise Program."

"I'm very inappropriate, which makes me a problem dinner guest, because at some point during the evening someone inevitably says, "OK, heh heh heh, OK, too much information! Heh heh heh. Don't go there!" I live there. I bought a house there."

"[on reacting to racism] I don't wanna be the better person. I don't wanna rise above it. I do wanna sink down to their level. I am not gonna turn the other cheek. "I'mma gonna show you what cheek I'mma turn, OK!""

"I got back from Toronto, where they had a severe outbreak of SARS- you know, Severe Asian Racism Syndrome."

"I was in the airport and there were these big snowboarder guys and they had white masks around their necks, and as soon as they saw me, they put their masks on. So I just went, "*cough, cough, cough* You wanna egg rorr?""

"I would rather have a gay child. If you have a gay son, you know he's not gonna be shooting up his high school. That would get in the way of yearbook."

"[on having a gay child] And the Three Wise Drag Queens would come, bearing gifts of 1000-thread-count sheets, hair products by Frédéric Fekkai, and a copy of the Immaculate Collection."

"I would be happy to have a gay child. He would be a Boy Scout, and he would teach all the other Boy Scouts how to build a fire with two sticks and a back-handed compliment."

"[My gay child] would be a soldier, and he would change the slogan from "Don't ask, don't tell" to "Don't fuck with me, queen!!""

"Silence equals nonexistence. If I don't give too much information, if I don't go there, it's like I was never there in the first place. I noticed this most right after September 11, when there were no gays or lesbians invited to give their opinion about what was going on. There were no women invited to give their opinion. There were hardly any people of color invited, and if they were, they were Muslim-Americans and Arab-Americans talking about the violence that they'd experienced because they shared the same skin color as the terrorists, which is heinous and dumb! That's like arresting Emmanuel Lewis because Gary Coleman punched that woman!"

"I am hurt because somebody just got called a fag, or a dyke, or a pansy, or a sissy, or a bulldyke, or a chink, or a nigger, or a kike, or a wetback, or an injun, or a jap, or a bitch, or a whore, or a cunt, and unless to you that's a term of endearment...in the right context, it is...that person is being attacked because of who they are, and I don't accept that."

"If racial minorities, sexual minorities, feminists both male and female, hell, all liberals got together and had this big "too much information," "go there," voice...that would equal power. And that power would equal change. And that change would equal a revolution."

"I think that gay people should have the right to get married by Elvis like everybody else."

"Why do Republicans hate gay marriage so much? They certainly don't hate gay prostitutes."

"If you're against same sex marriage but you laugh your ass off to Will & Grace, FUCK YOU [holds up middle finger]. You are a hypocrite [pointing], and you're not allowed to pick and choose what you like from our culture, and leave behind the burden of inequality."

"I have had enough of the Pope, the Pope who really held on, he really held on, he wasn't going anywhere, he was just fucking hanging on, and the press could not wait for him to die. They were just waiting outside that whole Saturday when he died, but he wouldn't die, all day they were just fucking waiting, like: "He's not dead yet! But he might be when we come back from this commercial!""

"The Pope was so sick he couldn't even come to the window, he was so sick all he could manage is a "BLAAARGH (vomiting)". But even that "blargh" was anti-gay."

"The Pope talks so much shit. The Pope was castigating the media for making gays look normal. YEAH, you're a real GOOD judge of normal, with your gold dress and your matching gold hat, living it up in the Vatican with 500 men surrounded by the finest antiques in the world! Queen, please! You live like Versace did!"

"The way some of these politicians talk about homosexuality is very insulting. They treat it like it's a disease, like being gay is contagious. Being gay is not contagious. And if you think that it is, YOU'RE GAY."

"Talking to John Kerry is like talking to an Ent. You know, the tree people from Lord of the Rings...[imitating an Ent] I believe that all Americans should have affordable healthcare..."

"[About Christian Groups] They have no rights to call themselves "Christians", because they have no Christianity to them; they have no kindness, no compassion, no charity. I want Jesus to come back and say: "THAT'S NOT WHAT I MEANT!""

"They need to read the Scriptures; where it says in Matthew, chapter 4, verse 17, it says: "Shut the fuck up." That's the King James version, by the way."

"George Bush blocked the availability of morning-after pills over the counter, stating that it would "promote promiscuity". ...So? You know, I never had access to morning-after pills, but that did not stop me from fucking my way through the U.S.A. like I was Lewis and Clark. And if the issue is promiscuity, then why is Viagra everywhere? Doesn't it make more sense to leave the bullets out of the gun than to just avoid being shot?"

"I want morning-after pills more than over the counter; I want morning-after pills with my check at dinner. I want morning-after pills on my hotel pillow when I go to bed at night."

"[on Arnold Schwarzenegger] That motherfucker be ORANGE. ...I am not against people of color, but that is a fucked-up color. I think that him and Donatella Versace, they gonna start a whole new race of Oompa-Loompa."

"And especially, especially, don't fuck with vegans. Do not look vegans in the eye. If you get into an argument with a vegan, say "I'm wrong" and run away as fast as you can. Do not fuck with vegans because they will fuck you up...BECAUSE THEY'RE HUNGRY."

""Do not fuck with Björk! Björk will beat your ass! … I saw Björk beat this woman's ass one time in this videotape. She was in the Bangkok airport and she was pushing her luggage cart and this woman came up and just touched her and Björk went (roaring and hissing). And it was so scary, because you didn't expect it at all, because Björk is so cute. … And Björk called the woman she attacked afterwards to apologize. 'I'm very sorry I tried to pull your eyes up over your head. Somebody must have fed me after midnight.'"

"But Björk wore the best dress ever to the Oscars, ever. She wore a swan. And I'm not talking about a dress with white feathers on it. Oh, no. She rocked the whole bird. The beak was up here and shit. And she accessorized it with an egg -- what else you gon' wear with your bird?! And all of the fashion magazines said she was the worst dressed, but when they say you're the worst, that means you're the best."

"I vowed to myself if I ever go to one of these award shows I'm gonna wear some kind of a bird. So I went to the Grammys last years I had a dress made out of peacock feathers. And I didn't win a Grammy, was named worst dressed. And that's impressive, because if you win a Grammy you had to just beat out what, three, four people? But if you're worst dressed you beat fifteen thousand people! I beat Mary J. Blige! I beat Lil' Kim!"

"I became involved with this organization called MoveOn.org, and I got into it right in the middle of some serious stuff. So when I made some anti-Bush comments, I got this flood of emails from right-wing supporters. I really wish I could say that they were productive emails, but basically it was, "Fuck you, you dirty Chink cunt bitch fag-hag. Go back to your country. Four more years! Dirty Chink dyke slut! Jesus saves!" So I posted them on my website, including the return addresses, and some of these people wrote me from their work emails. So I had their work information, their names, their addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, Blockbuster card numbers, favorite flavor of ice-cream. And the thing is, I guess I have this whole fanbase that's ready to go to bat for me. They're already pissed off, so they just need half a reason. And basically I discovered Al Gay-da. They're a sleeper cell you do not want to wake up. So suddenly these people are emailing me back: "Please take my info off of your site. I'm so sorry. Everyone is entitled to their opinion and I shouldn't have said what I said. And please make these gay people go away. Please, hurry! I think Cirque de Soleil is warming up on my front lawn!""

"Why do they think "fat dyke" is an insult? To me that means, "I'm-a eat fried chicken and pussy.""

"Do I look like a happy-ending to you?"

"I think it's very important to feel beautiful. I think it's very political to feel beautiful, especially if you're Queer, because if you're Queer you have to take on the world every single day of your life, so you have to feel beautiful to survive."

"I hate Sarah Palin, I would never vote for her, I hate her politics, but I kinda wanna fuck her. I know, it's unholy, it's so wrong. I want to eat her pussy from behind. Eskimo-style. No, you know I wouldn't eat that thing. 'Cause you know it's frozen. My tongue would stick..."

"And I have to explain what a G-spot is for all the gay men. A G-spot is basically this button in your vagina, that if you push it, it turns it on. You push it and makes a sound like... (imitates Mac start-up sound). That's if you have a Mac vagina... I don't know what noise it makes if you have a PC. ... I have a Mac sexuality. Don't touch my anus, because that is like my Force Quit. ... You will lose any unsaved changes."

"Like when Jay Leno made jokes about Koreans eating dog, but the hidden messages, our invisibility, is more harmful to us than any of those fools on "board"."

"When we never see who we are, never hear what we think about things, what we are doing as a group or what we are doing individually, then it is as if we are never there in the first place. Silence = Nonexistence."

"All I ask for is a chance to have the same kind of forum, the right to speak, the same credibility as thee wrong-ass ignant fools. But the producers of these types of shows think tht I will only talk about tai chi, where to get the best sushi on the West Side, how to feng-shui your office...the fact that the media at large look at my race before they hear my voice = fucked up shit."

"The terrible thing about invisibility is the lengths we will go to be seen."

"This land is your land, but this land isn't my land - that is what so many of us thought. This 2nd class citizenship has sunk in so deeply that we have barely an awareness of it."

"Haven't we heard enough from these ancient white guys? There is this silent agreement that everyone everywhere has made regarding old white men. They are the bottom line, the last word, no matter what. The saying "It's not over 'til the fat lady sings is erroneous, because women who are fat are never listened to"."

"My parents have lived in the United States since 1964 and they have never voted. They don't feel they have a right to. They don't feel this is their country. Even though they are citizens, they pay taxes, they watch the news and keep up with current events, they still don't feel comfortable enough with their American life to fully participate in it...Any attempt to argue is thwarted by dismissal...I guess he doesn't want to explain, because how can you explain something as intangible as invisibility?"

"I want to scream and shout, "Stop! We are all human beings!"...but I don't think anybody will hear it."

"I don't know how to find our voice. It catches in my throat when I try to use it. If I do manage to get something out, its met with very vocal opposition from all kinds of surprising sources."

"Racism is one of the biggest taboos in our culture, yet most discrimination against Asian-Americans goes largely unnoticed...its blown off by the rest of the media as a joke, as in "Look at them. They get all up in arms over nothing"."

"The dismissal of our anger as a racial minority is worse than any slur or epithet because it undermines our ability to react to it."

"I add to the culture of invisibility becoming complicit with it."

"I see evidence of my own racist brainwashing when exploring the landscape of current foreign policy. (about North Korea)"

"My association is so painfully close that avoidance is the only way I know to retain my identity. It's ridiculous and embarrassing. I hate feeling this way, because it forces me to see how deeply racism has affected me."

"Prejudice and bigotry rot me from within, and the strains of these viruses are hearty and hard to kill."

"I had always regarded the world of political humor as the exclusive domain of white men and immediately disqualified myself from participation. I know better now, its immensely pleasing when I'm referred to as a political comedian..."

"Self-hatred is a devastatingly difficult habit to break, especially when we are mostly unaware of it."

"The amount of racism, sexism, homophobia, and hatred in general that lies beneath the surface of the American dream is astounding and serious."

"People are surprised at the depth of resentment against Asian Americans, but it never shocks me. We are the object of hatred not only for the things we do but just being who we are, ching chong chinamen."

"There are still lynchings. And while we don't use ropes anymore, there are more efficient ways of doing it."

"The majority should not be allowed to rule simply because its the majority. The majority is responsible for slavery, segregation, lynching, denying women and minorities the vote, Japanese internment and a million other injustices and inhumanities."

"Then there are the laws against homosexuality. Then there is the Asian exclusion act. Then there the internment of Japanese Americans. I'm not even going to talk about Guantanamo. And then there is the first American hate crime: taking this land from the Native Americans. We can keep it up forever. Hate Crime Trivial Pursuit. There are more than enough hate crimes to play a decent round."

"No matter who you are or what you feel about homosexuality--if you are gay, lesbian, transgendered, bisexual, bicurious, metrosexual, heterosexual, celibate, hermaphrodite, a satyr, a succubus, a fucking human being-- and especially if you are a fucking human being and really want to live in a country where all people are equal--not separate, not "civil-unionized", not lied to about your rights--realize that same sex marriage will not harm you. It will not make gay people more gay, it will not make you gay unless you already are. It will not make your children gay unless they already are. It will not change your life in the least, unless you are gay and wanna marry your partner."

"What is deeply distressing is the incredible number of people who are vehemently opposed to equality, and the need for them to deny gay rights simply because they cannot bear the thought of gays having rights."

"Because even though there is all this talk about multiculturalism in television and the movie industries, I have yet to see any evidence of it."

"I actually adore that kind of hate mail, because if all you have to fight me with is prejudice then I have already won the battle, and eventually I'm gonna win this war. I wrote about hate mail on my website, and posted all that I had received, along with the names and e-mail addresses of the guilty...(this) actually prompted an incredible number of the haters to recant and apologize."

"Whenever you hear the words chink, nigger, beaner, paki, sissy, bull dyke, faggot, cunt, bitch, ho, jap...because through no fault of your own, you happen to be you, and apparently to the person saying it something is wrong with that."

"We have allowed alarmist and racist attitudes to take us hostage, and if these impulses are not kept in check they will behead us all."

"Having to remind others of your American status, fear of being connected to the enemy because of ancestral ties, the threat so prevalent that it makes you put not one but two giant flags outside is not right."

"We are the scavenger minority, picking at the carcass of civil rights, trying to get our measly share, so very far from the idea of fair...but what do you expect? We are the bottom-feeders of a multicultural fishtank, we get pushed to the back of the bus by more vocal minorities that have been there and don't want to return."

"Whenever I get hate mail, the verbal assault is always racial."

"We don't have the luxury of our own privatized civil rights movements because the crimes - the ignorance, the rage, the hate against the who/what/why of some of us, is a much much larger foe. Together we are more than the sum of our parts. In union, in communion, in joining hands, we conquer all, because we have love on our side."

"Racism is a cancer that is unstoppable if left unchecked."

"Our nation bringing slaves from Africa was the biggest hate crime of all. Then, when the slaves were freed, there wasn't anywhere for them to go. Then came the reign of terror by the KKK that never really ended. Then there is the fact that none of this stuff is taught in American History, at least not in detail."

"I have never had any desire to play a maid, a liquor store owner kicking a black person out of my store, a rude and harried waitress, a worldly-wise acupuncturist, an early-rising, loose black cotton pants wearing elderly woman practicing tai chi in the park, a manicurist, a prostitute, a student in an English as a Second Language course, a purveyor of exotic mushrooms and ginseng, an exchange student, a newscaster covering gang warfare in Chinatown, a woman drowning my newborn baby in a bowl, a daughter crying with my mom over our constant battle between East and West yet finally coming together over a particularly intense game of mahjong...a young girl being raped and killed by GIs in the Killing Fields, a woman balancing a basket of any kind on my head...committing suicide because my white lover did not come back to Japan after the war, or having him come back for me and fooling him successfully for years and years thinking I am a woman when really I'm a dude, as if my race castrates me so much this deception is completely feasible..."

"I stamp my feet and claim ignorance like a child, because its the color of my skin that says I'm supposed to know. I become the "one who refuses to see the self"."

"What is needed now is action, not hopelessness"

"We are a nation divided which is obvious. The problem is, the division is keeping this monarchy in place."

"We are supposed to be ruled by ourselves, but I have yet to see any evidence of it in our lifetime."

"Life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think. It is vital to mourn the victims of this government, but not at the expense of losing our sense of humor. Our ability to laugh directly coincides with our ability to fight. If we make fun of it, we can transcend it."

"Although it might be that we can't expect change overnight, there was really a rapid shift in the way we view politics."

"These new ways of looking at ourselves politically redefine what it means to be American. It took our until now, very passive identity and turned us all into revolutionaries."

"We are more aware and politicized than ever before. There is very little ambiguity as to which side you are on."

"Yet the powers that be haven't quite considered the strength of our sheer numbers."

"Ultimately a government cannot defeat its people, no matter how much power they assume or how corrupt they are. For us, there is only opportunity."

"The people I choose to admire are not necessarily popular, not necessarily terribly well known, but they each have something to offer me, a lesson, a cautionary tale, an idea, an inspiration."

"Might does not equal right...fortunately, the majority holds power by a very small margin. There are certain things the majority has no right to mess with, certain things that are definitely worth fighting for--worth defending and worth offending."

"We have a date to rumble with stupidity, ignorance, prejudice, laziness, hatred, and greed."

"I am fighting when I'm sleeping. In my dreams, I must slay the dragon of European heterosexual male society, then I wake up in the morning and be an activist."

"I have to watch the news and movies about the people who I am not, then translate my struggle in order to make it palatable for those people who don't have to march but are sympathetic to my voice."

"I try every day to challenge myself further, and I believe in doing this I slay the monster (within) bit by bit. That's why being political is an essential part of my life. In the end, its all I have."

"We are no longer afraid to voice our opinions, to use our power, to pool our resources, to allow our differences to unite us instead of keeping us apart."

"Just as we pull up to this place...I notice two very large American flags...It's as if there was a need to emphasize the Americanness of this place. "We are American" says the first flag. "No we really are!" says the second. It struck me as enormously sad, somehow awkward and tragic."

"I love America. I'm not moving. It's cool. I just don't like seeing dead people."

"We have no idea what our nation is doing in our name. I don't want to be anyone's captor, anyone's torturer."

"I feel 100% responsible, even though there's nothing I could do to prevent it. What good is my guilt if it's not felt by those supposedly in charge?"

"Its unacceptable to me, both as an American and as a human being."

"We justify those atrocities because, well, they're doing their best for their country, but then again, that exactly what the hooded executioners..."

"My attitude towards peace does not depend on which war we are discussing. I think that words should do the work of bombs"

"Stop the fantasy we need to be defending freedom, because we don't have freedom in our own country yet."

"They (the government) are unfazed by any amount of travesty, loss, tragedy, death, and destruction."

"Why is this all so hard? Why do these old men need it so hard?"

"It was not our right to have become the world's bully and start this war in the first place."

"Of course, we're there because of weapons of mass destruction that do not exist."

"Don't you think the soldiers look like they came straight from high school yearbooks, too young to be over in Iraq, fighting for no reason?"

"Bush is not Hitler. He would be if he applied himself."

"Of course America is responsible for the total body count. We started it, we own it, we sow, we reap, but we are also disconnected from the responsibility of our won dirty acts of war."

"The military posts vengeance on their websites, and seeks publicity for their displays of inhumanity."

"How many Americans lives have been lost in this brutal and needless war? How many Iraqi? How many names do we know on either side?"

"I am super glad about your four-hour erection, but I was wondering, where is the cure for AIDS? (regarding Viagra, Cialis, etc)"

"You will never make love, laugh, fight, eat, go to the movies, kiss, smile, dance, sing, run, skate, play the piano, buy candy for, argue jokingly, tell stories, look longingly at, jump on the bed with, pet the dogs with your faces, sing along with the song in the car and get the words wrong, share a secret, gossip, cop a feel, go hear a band that you both love, share a really good meal, carpool with people you don't like and make fun of them secretly later, cry, comfort, scratch backs, insist on pizza, catch them staring at you, put your arms around them, stay up too late, lean against warm bodies, feel safe with their feet sliding next to yours in bed, raise your children, go to boring dinner parties and get too drunk to drive home so you sleep in the car, spend alternate holidays with each others families, have uncontrollable lust with, followed by mind blowing fuck sessions lasting for hours and hours at a time, take a bath so hot one of you has to get out, all naked and wet and red and dizzy but not embarrassed because this is who you love and rarely are you shy with them, watch a TV show you both hate because the remote control is broken--merely happily, and maybe sometimes unhappily, share your life, and be with them, but you can't, because they're dead. Suddenly, unjustly,untimely, irretrievably--unconscionably dead."

"As you read their names, imagine who they loved, who loved them, and those those left behind cope now without them. They're never coming home. Never."

"Why am I political? Because society's consistent and constant disregard and lack of respect for minorities, even the title minority, is too much to bear silently. Their insistence at our invisibility, whether subtle as noninclusion, or as loud and violent as hate crimes, is contagious, and can make me hide from myself."

"If we don't talk about this epidemic we are going to die."

"Playing it safe is not productive for anyone, because safety requires gays and lesbians to be invisible, and the inhumanity engendered by making people invisible is anything but safe, rather, it puts us all in danger. When we are banned from the places we should be welcomed, where we should not only be allowed but encouraged to speak, where should we go then?"

"Trying to fault gays and lesbians for standing up for their rights is backwards and unconscionable. We have no idea how powerful we actually are. We were never considered part of the general, respectable population."

"I am not so much angry as trying to find my own voice in the world, to find enough courage to speak up in the first place, then to go forth and use it, which both are monumental tasks and require more confidence than you'd think."

"The only way to push forward instead of wasting away in the purgatorial procrastination of worry is to just not care what the outcomes. I need to just start running downhill with my eyes shut. There are no guarantees that I will be able to survive this world, where the air is rare for minorities like myself. But that suits me just fine. I'm a risk taker that way."

"If you are not a feminist, you do not deserve to live. Do you think you grew out of the ground?"

"What people need to understand is pussy is the Front Door to Life. Do you get that? Nobody ever thinks about it like that in the dusty ancient cabinet of old white men that think they know everything."

"Feminism is nonnegotiable."

"With salons all over the West serving up specialties like "Barely Legal", removing all hair from the area to replicate the genitalia of an underage girl, as statutory rape seems all the rage."

"All of them who need to tell ladies to stop talking about sports and stay on the sidelines, because we are baby-making machines."

"Body dysmorphia has got to go.Its similar to a disease called "crazy eyes" not the way others look at you, but the way you see yourself. The insanity which we use as our vision...."

"There was never a lack of reasons to hate myself, to hate my body."

"Since the unfortunate victims pay for the pleasure themselves these are HIGH CRIMES that will go UNPUNISHED because they are self-inflicted."

"The quiet messages that affect and alter the way we view ourselves are controlled by an elite group of ignant men."

"I am admittedly insecure about my racial identity, an attitude that has much improved since my younger days when I absolutely abhorred it. Any attention paid to me being different was incredibly shameful...but the mirrors became too much...what a disappointing reality check!"

"I could care less where my breasts are as long as they are on my body, ... and I'm sorry I just don't care that much about gravity....My lawless, braless ways are rather outlaw."

"When your young and hungry and nobody's ever really accepted you because of your color and class, the hurt of your own family having cast you out in the first place still inside you somewhere, you dance hard because there is no other way to live, and when opportunity knocks its more of an abduction than a housecall."

"Swept up in a grand illusion that I might be able to eat, have a roof over my head, own some pretty dresses and realize, in a vastly heady way, that I could make a living doing my art, which was the only dream I ever had, what could I say but "Yes, where do I sign?""

"San Francisco fucking rules. I am so proud of my home town for legalizing gay marriage, sending gays and lesbians down to the city by the Bay that was built on rock and roll to tie the knot."

"Ugly. Is irrelevant. It is an immeasurable insult to a woman, and then supposedly the worst crime you can commit as a woman. But ugly, as beautiful, is an illusion. A matter of taste, a whim, an eye, a beholder, an opinion, a spin, light crossing the frame, paint, projection. The moment. Context."

"We have been threatened by a local conservative group who said they will picket the show unless I am fired and taken off the bill and replaced by someone else. Sorry. I am now more excited than ever to meet y'all. Personally, if you are going to picket a show, fine, but the fact that you are picketing my show, means you are stepping up to me, which means some very bad things could possibly happen to you."

"Then there is Dick Cheney, who essentially said that if Kerry is voted in as president, terrorism will hit America again. How is that? Is Cheney going to make some calls? Apparently he has the hook up."

"This presidential race is the biggest dick contest in history. "Your dick is indecisive!" "Your dick started an unnecessary war!" "Your dick didn't get injured enough in Vietnam!" "Your dick didn't even go to Vietnam!" "Your dick is soft on terrorism!" "Your dick started terrorism!" "Your dick blamed Vietnam vets for atrocities that made all vets unable to come home to a hero's welcome." "Your dick forged its way out of military service!" Has this kind of dick-waggling happened before outside of a pro-wrestling context?"

"So when some man says to me, "Don't you wish you were beautiful?" those are like killing words. That's my death, if I don't pummel it into his soft, not-yet-completely-formed radio disc-jockey skull that I am already beautiful, and I wish for nothing, other than for him to go away. I am so beautiful, sometimes people weep when they see me. And it has nothing to do with what I look like really, it is just that I gave myself the power to say that I am beautiful, and if I could do that, maybe there is hope for them too. You can't even get to me. I got special service, boundaries like the rings of Saturn. I am protected. I am four–five faggots deep all around me, who don't see your name on the list, who will not let you in here looking like that, who will hold you in a cold, hard, unflinching stare or back hand compliment you until you cry. If you even had the courage to ask me out you would have to do it by mail, sent months in advance, on a single 5×7 sheet of eggshell vellum, signed in blood and sealed in gold and scented with a light mist of the new fragrance by Alan Cumming, just so I could throw it away without becoming repulsed."

"It is a good life, if I watch myself. Kind of like when I used to diet, but now instead of limiting calories, I will not allow negative self-talk. I cut out insults like I cut out carbs and it is hard as hell because I crave self-abuse like hot, fresh sourdough bread, but you know you have to be nice to you if you are going to live together."

"It is not a dirty word, "feminism." I just think that women belong in the human population with the same rights as everybody else. … The problem is, "A feminist looks like this, or is like that." We are taught not to like ourselves as women, we are taught what we're supposed to look like, what our measurements are supposed to be. I never hear what measurements men are supposed to be. Just women."

"on tolerance of gays: "You always have to remember - no matter what you're told - that God loves all the flowers, even the wild ones that grow on the side of the highway.""

"on Catholicism:"

"Women have been called queens for a long time, but the kingdom given them isn't worth ruling."

"The child has talent, loves music, and needs help. I can't give her money, but I can teach her; so I do, and she is the most promising pupil I have. Help one another, is part of the religion of our sisterhood, Fan."

"I believe that it is as much a right and duty for women to do something with their lives as for men and we are not going to be satisfied with such frivolous parts as you give us."

"If I can do no more, let my name stand among those who are willing to bear ridicule and reproach for the truth's sake, and so earn some right to rejoice when the victory is won."

"Is it not meningitis?"

"Far away in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead."

"I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man's soul put by some freak of nature into a woman's body...because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man."

""Suppose I broke away and left you, or made it impossible for you to stay. That I was base and false; in every way unworthy of your love, and it was clearly right for you to go, what would you do then?" "Go away and–" He interrupted with a triumphant laugh, "Die as heroines always do, tender slaves as they are." "No, live and forget you", was the unexpected reply."

"I tell you I cannot bear it! I shall do something desperate if this life is not changed soon. It gets worse and worse, and I often feel as if I'd gladly sell my soul to Satan for a year of freedom."

"'In the fitful light of the dusky hall the newcomer's face suddenly appeared fiery-eyed and menacing, and, glancing at a portrait of Mephistopheles, Rosamond exclaimed, "Why, you are the very image of Meph--""

"No, I never wish that. I don't intend to die till I've enjoyed my life. Everyone has a right to happiness and sooner or later I will have it. Youth, health and freedom were meant to be enjoyed and I want to try every pleasure before I am too old to enjoy them."

"Even at the cost of what is called honor and honesty? That is comfortable philosophy, and having preached and practiced it all my days I've no right to condemn it. But the saints would call it sinful and dangerous and tell you that life should be one long penance full of sorrow, sacrifice and psalm-singing."

"For an hour Rosamond paced up and down the deck reveling in the breezy motion of the boat, the delicious sense of freedom which possessed her, the atmosphere of romance which surrounded her. Tempest lounged beside her, watching her beautiful face, listening to her happy voice, and enjoying her innocent companionship with the relish of a man eager for novelty and skillful in the art of playing on that delicate instrument, a woman's heart."

"I was thinking what a curious thing love is; only a sentiment, and yet it has power to make fools of men and slaves of women. p. 45."

"Suppose I broke away and left you, or made it impossible for you to stay. That I was base and false; in every way unworthy of your love, and it was clearly right for you to go, what would you do then?"

"I mean that it is more natural for me to be wicked than virtuous, when I do a bad act, and I've done many, I never feel wither shame, remorse or fear, I sometimes wish it was not necessary as I don't like the trouble, but as for any moral sense of principle, I haven't a particle. Many people are like me as actions prove, but they are not so frank in owning it and insist on keeping up the humbug of virtue. You'll find that is true, Rose, when you know the world better."

"Not another day or hour would she remain, no help was possible, no atonement could retrieve the past, no love or pity, pardon or excuse should soften the sharp pang of reparation for the guilty man. To go instantly and forever was her only thought, and this gave her strength to rise and look about her."

"Back to him she would never go, but in her lonely life still lived the sweet memory of that happy time when she believed in him and he was all in all to her."

"The sin is yours, but the shame and sorrow are mine, the past I cannot retrieve, the future is still unspoiled and I will not embitter it by any willful sin. Before I was innocently guilty, now I should be doubly guilty if I went back to the 'gay free life I love.' Atone for the wrong you have done me by ceasing to tempt and trouble me. I will not yield, though you hunt me to death."

"In vain she told herself that he was unworthy any woman's trust and love, still the unconquerable sentiment that once made her happiness now remained to become her torment."

"Because in spite of this longing, I know that I shall purchase happiness at high price if I return; that new falsehood may betray me, new tyranny oppress me, and above all I feel that with this man I must lose more and more the love of all good things, so strong is his influence, so unprincipled his nature. My only hope is that I may save his soul and yet not lose my own. Can I, dare I do this?"

"I must know where you are, but I will not molest nor betray you till the time arrives. Go where you like, assume what disguise you choose, do what you please, except die or marry. I'll stand off and watch the play, but I must follow. I like the chase, it is exciting, novel and absorbing. I have tried and tried of other amusements, this satisfies me and I am in no haste to end it."

""Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug. "It's so dreadful to be poor!" sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress. "I don't think it's fair for some girls to have plenty of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all," added little Amy, with an injured sniff. "We've got Father and Mother, and each other," said Beth contentedly from her corner. The four young faces on which the firelight shone brightened at the cheerful words, but darkened again as Jo said sadly, "We haven't got Father, and shall not have him for a long time." She didn't say "perhaps never," but each silently added it, thinking of Father far away, where the fighting was."

"You think your temper is the worst in the world, but mine used to be just like it. … I've been trying to cure it for forty years, and have only succeeded in controlling it. I am angry nearly every day of my life, but I have learned not to show it; and I still try to hope not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do it. … I've learned to check the hasty words that rise to my lips, and when I feel that they mean to break out against my will, I just go away for a minute, and give myself a little shake for being so weak and wicked."

"Housekeeping ain't no joke."

"If people really want to go, and really try all their lives, I think they will get in; for I don’t believe there are any locks on that door, or any guards at the gate. I always imagine it is as it is in the picture, where the shining ones stretch out their hands to welcome poor Christian as he comes up from the river."

"It takes people a long time to learn the difference between talent and genius, especially ambitious young men and women."

"Love is a great beautifier."

"She had a womanly instinct that clothes possess an influence more powerful over many than the worth of character or the magic of manners."

"Girls are so queer you never know what they mean. They say no when they mean yes, and drive a man out of his wits just for the fun of it."

"It was not a fashionable place, but even among the pleasant people there, the girls made few friends, preferring to live for one another."

"Simple, sincere people seldom speak much of their piety. It shows itself in acts rather than in words, and has more influence than homilies or protestations. Beth could not reason upon or explain the faith that gave her courage and patience to give up life, and cheerfully wait for death. Like a confiding child, she asked no questions, but left everything to God and nature, Father and Mother of us all, feeling sure that they, and they only, could teach and strengthen heart and spirit for this life and the life to come. She did not rebuke Jo with saintly speeches, only loved her better for her passionate affection, and clung more closely to the dear human love, from which our Father never means us to be weaned, but through which He draws us closer to Himself. She could not say, "I'm glad to go," for life was very sweet for her. She could only sob out, "I try to be willing," while she held fast to Jo, as the first bitter wave of this great sorrow broke over them together."

"That's just why, because talent isn't genius, and no amount of energy can make it so. I want to be great, or nothing. I won't be a common-place dauber, so I don't intend to try any more."

"Love is the only thing that we can carry with us when we go, and it makes the end so easy."

"When women are the advisers, the lords of creation don't take the advice till they have persuaded themselves that it is just what they intended to do. Then they act upon it, and, if it succeeds, they give the weaker vessel half the credit of it. If it fails, they generously give her the whole."

"The invigorating air did them both good, and much exercise worked wholesome changes in minds as well as bodies. They seemed to get clearer views of life and duty up there among the everlasting hills. The fresh winds blew away desponding doubts, delusive fancies, and moody mists. The warm spring sunshine brought out all sorts of aspiring ideas, tender hopes, and happy thoughts. The lake seemed to wash away the troubles of the past, and the grand old mountains to look benignly down upon them saying, "Little children, love one another.""

"I love my gallant captain with all my heart and soul and might, and never will desert him, while God lets us be together. Oh, Mother, I never knew how much like heaven this world could be, when two people love and live for one another!"

"Lovely weather so far; I don't know how long it will last, but I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning how to sail my ship."

"I had a pleasant time with my mind, for it was happy."

"Stay is a charming word in a friend's vocabulary."

"When I read Alcott, I knew that these girls she was talking about were all white," Angelou told The Week in 2013. "But they were nice girls and I understood them. I felt like I was almost there with them in their living room and their kitchen."

"I was reading all of Louisa May Alcott. In her book, there is a white girl, and I suppose it's sort of daring, but she marries a Chinese guy. He has a long pigtail. He's fat, short, weird. He was mainly a character of fun and so stereotyped, although I suppose it was accurate-by that time they hadn't cut off their pigtails yet. Up to that time, I had identified with all those little women, then I saw this guy and I thought, "My God, that's who I'm supposed to be this little 'chinaman' guy." It ejected me out of literature. A few years later, I read Jade Snow Wong and she brought me back in. There were such wonderful illustrations of little kids that looked like me, and most importantly, written by a Chinese American woman. So, she gave me this great welcome and send-off, so I continued writing."

"Even today, Little Women is still widely read, though it may now seem nostalgic and old-fashioned rather than, as in 1868, innovative and sometimes almost shocking. It is impossible to know now whether the work Louisa May Alcott might have produced if she had had more free time and no practical worries would have made a more brilliant and literary volume in the Library of America; but it is unlikely that it would have been better loved by generations of children, or done more to further progressive education and women's independence."

"I was hanging out the other night with a bunch of friends I've known forever. They were saying, "Look at you. You've grown into a swan." I looked at them and said, "My awkward phase lasted about three years longer than all of yours combined." I related to the physical and emotional awkwardness Mia goes through. She has incredibly low self-esteem. A lot of my life was spent having the same thing, but I'm getting over that now."

"Taking a year off and going to school was the best thing I could have done after The Princess Diaries. It taught me that I don't need Hollywood or a job to make me happy."

"We've all done things we shouldn't, it's just I did stuff at college, when nobody knew about it, so I'm not a saint. … I wasted time doing self-destructive things but it didn't work. I found out you can only dance on so many tabletops. I got that all out of my system and now I'm healthy and I'm grounded."

"Before I met him, I wasted so much time. I was just annoying and narcissistic and smelled bad. He’s protective without being possessive, passionate without needing to show his temper."

"My entire film career's been dependent on my ability to look unattractive."

"I have a lot more respect for it as a business. I understand fashion a lot more. Style, for me, is something I still can't get right."

"When I was younger I thought about becoming a nun for a while. You know how it is when you're growing up and you're going to be a lot of different things, but I actually wanted to be an actress before I wanted to be a nun. The nun was more of a side-bar thing."

"It's easier to think about the way I'm least daring. When I meet people for the first time, I'm friendly but shy. I'm much less outwardly nervous than I used to be, but I still get anxious sometimes. I'm not very daring in my street style, usually because there's a photographer around! I am getting more daring now—I'll wear my mom jeans in public that haven't been tailored 'just so' yet, just because they feel good. For a long time I was afraid of the harsh things people would say about me, but I might as well be happy."

"I did work at Christie’s for a couple of weeks, getting ready for The Devil Wears Prada, getting people coffee and doing whatever they needed around the office. It was amazing. I got to see some wonderful art and everybody was really nice. It was great."

"I’m always hyper-aware of how not to be a you-know-what. So to actually let it go and to lean into all the ridiculous fame nonsense that I’ve been trying to side-step for all of these years just felt really, really fun. It just felt great and to play someone who had such an enormous ego and someone who takes herself so seriously, and is so insufferable, came very naturally to me."

"The true woman will not be exponent of another, or allow another to be such for her. She will be her own individual self, — do her own individual work — stand or fall by her own individual wisdom and strength... She will proclaim the "glad tidings of good news" to all women, that woman equally with man was made for her own individual happiness, to develop every power of her three fold-nature, to use, worthily every talent given to her by God, in the great work of life."

"The men and women of the North are slaveholders, those of the South slaveowners. The guilt rests on the North equally with the South."

"Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation."

"Many Abolitionists have yet to learn the ABC of woman's rights."

"I do not demand equal pay for any women save those who do equal work in value. Scorn to be coddled by your employers; make them understand that you are in their service as workers, not as women."

"Join the union, girls, and together say Equal Pay for Equal Work."

"Woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself."

"I shall work for the Republican party and call on all women to join me, precisely... for what that party has done and promises to do for women, nothing more, nothing less."

"Every discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the several States is today null and void, precisely as in every one against Negroes."

"Here, in the first paragraph of the Declaration [of Independence], is the assertion of the natural right of all to the ballot; for how can "the consent of the governed" be given, if the right to vote be denied?"

"We no longer petition Legislature or Congress to give off the right to vote, but appeal to women everywhere to exercise their too long neglected "citizen's right" … We assert the province of government to be to secure the people in the enjoyment of their unalienable rights. We throw to the winds the old dogma that governments can give rights. The Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution the constitutions of the several states … propose to protect the people in the exercise of their God-given rights. Not one of them pretends to bestow rights. … One-half of the people of this Nation today is utterly powerless to blot from the statute books an unjust law, or to write a new and just one. The women, dissatisfied as they are with this form of government, that enforces taxation without representation — that compels them to obey laws to which they have never given their consent — that imprisons and hangs them without a trial by a jury of their peers — that robs them, in marriage of the custody of their own persons, wages, and children—are this half of the people left wholly at the mercy of the other half."

"Marriage, to women as to men, must be a luxury, not a necessity; an incident of life, not all of it. And the only possible way to accomplish this great change is to accord to women equal power in the making, shaping and controlling of the circumstances of life."

"Though women, as a class, are much less addicted to drunkenness and licentiousness than men, it is universally conceded that they are by far the greater sufferers from these evils."

"I want you to understand that I never could have done the work I have if I had not had this woman at my right hand."

"The time has come when women should organize a stock company and run a newspaper on their own basis. When woman has a newspapers which fear and favor cannot touch, then it will be that she can freely writer her own thoughts...We need a daily paper edited and composed according to woman’s own thoughts, and not as a woman thinks a man wants her to think and write. As it is now, the men who control the finances control the paper. As long as we occupy our present position we are mentally and morally in the power of the men who engineer the finances. Horace Greely once said that women ought not to expect the same pay for work that men received. He advised women to go down into New Jersey, buy a parcel of ground, and go to raising strawberries. Then when they came up to New York with their strawberries the men wouldn’t dare to offer them half price for their produce. I say, my journalistic sisters, that it is high time we were raising our own strawberries on our own land."

"On bicycling: "I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. It makes her feel as if she were independent. The moment she takes her seat, she knows she can't get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle, and away she goes, the picture of free, untrammelled womanhood." On teaching: "In those days, we did not know any other way to control children. We believed in the goodness of not sparing the rod. As I got older, I abolished whipping. If I couldn't manage a child, I thought it my ignorance, my lack of ability, as a teacher. I always felt less the woman when I struck a blow." "I must have an audience to inspire me ... to save my life, I couldn't write a speech". "It all rose out of the men refusing to let me speak" at a temperance meeting. "Women were the bond slaves of men". "I know God never made a woman to be bossed by a man". "The law says that only idiots, lunatics and criminals shall be denied the right to vote. So you see with whom all women are classed." "When two people take each other on terms of perfect equality, without the desire of one to control the other to make the other subservient, it is a beautiful thing. It is the truest and highest state of life." "I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man's housekeeper and drudge. ... Once men were afraid of women with ideas and a desire to vote. Today, our best suffragists are sought in marriage by the best class of men.""

"I am delighted to have the opportunity to talk to women who are comfortably circumstanced, to those who have good fathers, kind brothers and have married the best of men, who do not believe that husband and wife are one and he is the one."

"The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball — the further I am rolled the more I gain."

"The one distinct feature of our Association has been the right of the individual opinion for every member. We have been beset at every step with the cry that somebody was injuring the cause by the expression of some sentiments that differed with those held by the majority of mankind. The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God. I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do to their fellows, because it always coincides with their own desires."

"I never saw that great woman, Mary Wollstonecraft, but I l have read her eloquent and unanswerable arguments in behalf of the liberty of womankind. I have met and known most of the progressive women who came after her — Lucretia Mott, the Grimké sisters, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone — a long galaxy of great women. I have heard them speak, saying in only slightly different phrases exactly what I heard these newer advocates of the cause say at these meetings. Those older women have gone on and most of those who work with me in the early years have gone. I am here for a little time only and then my place will be filled as theirs was filled. The fight must not cease; you must see that it does not stop. There have been others also just as true and devoted to the cause — I wish I could name every one — but with such women consecrating their lives, failure is impossible!"

"The fact is women are in chains, and their servitude is all the more debasing because they do not realize."

"I have many things to say. My every right, constitutional, civil, political and judicial has been tramped upon. I have not only had no jury of my peers, but I have had no jury at all."

"The only chance women have for justice in this country is to violate the law, as I have done, and as I shall continue to do."

"I do not ask the clemency of the court. I came into it to get justice, having failed in this, I demand the full rigors of the law."

"Even, under such circumstances, a commoner of England, tried before a jury of Lords, would have far less cause to complain than should I, a woman, tried before a jury of men."

"But, yesterday, the same man-made forms of law, declared it a crime punishable with $1,000 fine and six months' imprisonment, for you, or me, or any of us, to give a cup of cold water, a crust of bread, or a night's shelter to a panting fugitive as he was tracking his way to Canada. And every man or woman in whose veins coursed a drop of human sympathy violated that wicked law, reckless of consequences, and was justified in so doing."

"May it please your honor, I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty. All the stock in trade I possess is a $10,000 debt, incurred by publishing my paper — The Revolution — four years ago, the sole object of which was to educate all women to do precisely as I have done, rebel against your man-made, unjust, unconstitutional forms of law, that tax, fine, imprison and hang women, while they deny them the right of representation in the government; and I shall work on with might and main to pay every dollar of that honest debt, but not a penny shall go to this unjust claim. And I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old revolutionary maxim, that "Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.""

"There is not the slightest permission for the states to discriminate against the right of any class of citizens to vote. Surely to regulate cannot be to annihilate! Nor to qualify, to wholly deprive. And this principle every republican said amen, when applied to black men by Senator Sumner in his great speeches for “Equal rights to all,” from 1865 to 1869; and when, in 1871, I asked the Senator to declare the power of the United States Constitution to protect women in their right to vote, as he had done for black men, he handed me a copy of all his speeches during that reconstruction period, and said, "Miss Anthony, put sex where I have “race or color,” and you have here the best and strongest argument I can make for woman. There is not a doubt but women have the constitutional right to vote, and I will never vote for a 16th amendment to guarantee it to them. I voted for both the 14th and 15th under protest. Would never have done it but for the pressing emergency; would have insisted that the power of the original Constitution to protect all citizens in the equal enjoyment of their rights should have been vindicated through the courts. But the newly-freed men had neither the intelligence, wealth, nor the time to wait that slow process. Women possess all these, and I insist that they shall appeal to the courts, and through them establish the powers of our American magna charta to protect every citizen of the Republic." But, friends, when in accordance with Senator Sumner’s counsel, I went to the ballot-box, last November, and exercised my citizen’s right to vote, the courts did not wait for me to appeal to them — they appealed to me, and indicted me on the charge of having voted illegally."

"Does any lawyer doubt my statement of the legal status of married women? I will remind him of the fact that the old common law of England prevails in every state in this Union except where the legislature has enacted special laws annulling it. And I am ashamed that not one state has yet blotted from its statute books the old common law of marriage, by which Blackstone, summed up in the fewest words possible, declared that “The husband and wife are one, and that one is the husband!!”"

"And is all this tyranny any less humiliating and degrading to women, under our democratic republic government to-day, than it was to men, under their aristocratic, monarchical government a hundred years ago? There is not an utterance of Old John Adams, John Hancock, or Patrick Henry but finds a living response in the soul of every intelligent, patriotic woman of the nation."

"Is there a man who will not agree with me, that to talk of “freedom without the ballot” is mockery, is slavery, to the women of this republic, precisely as New England’s orator, Wendell Phillips, at the close of the late war declared it to be to the newly emancipated black men?"

"Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God."

"No matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death, but oh, thrice guilty is he who, for selfish gratification, heedless of her prayers, indifferent to her fate, drove her to the desperation that impelled her to the crime!"

"Susan B. Anthony had several significant relationships with Afro-American women, including Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, and Mary Church Terrell. Evidence suggests that Sojourner Truth especially influenced her ideas."

"In disposition Miss Anthony is very lovable. She is always good-natured and sunny tempered. Everybody loves her dearly and she never loses a friend. She has a remarkable memory and in speaking is both eloquent and witty. She keeps an audience laughing during an entire evening. Miss Anthony enjoys a good joke and can tell one. She never fails to see the funny side of things though it be at her own expense. Susan Anthony is all that is best and noblest in woman. She is ideal, and if we will have in women who vote what we have in her, let us all help to promote the cause of woman suffrage."

"Every century has produced a few men and women whose memories the world has adjudged worthy of perpetuation. The dear friend who has gone from us was one of our century’s immortals...There is today an infinitely broader field of opportunity, of happiness and of usefulness for women than when she came. There is an immeasurably sounder, healthier and more rational relationship between the sexes than when she began her work. There is a higher womanhood, a nobler manhood and a better humanity. This woman for a large part of half-a-century was the chief inspiration, counselor and guide of that movement. Few workers have been privileged to sec such large results from their labors...It was that hope which hoped on when others saw nothing to hope for; that splendid optimism which never knew despair; that faith which never forgot the eternal righteousness of her cause; that courage which never recognized disappointment, that tenacity of purpose which never permitted her to deflect in the slightest from the main object of her life, which combined to make her greater than others...her life has given to many nations a higher perception of life and duty and that it has lifted society to a higher plane, and we are grateful...There was something in her one may not describe which won our hearts as well as our devotion. Perhaps it was her simplicity, her forgetfulness of self, her thoughtfulness of others, which made us love her."

"Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Nation, and Sojourner Truth were not evolutionaries, they were revolutionaries, just as many of the young women in today’s society and more and more women must join their rank."

"Little Shirley grew up with a strong sense of her own destiny. Her early heroes were Mary McLeod Bethune, Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony. Miss Anthony, the homeliest of the suffragettes, was one of the movement's best speakers. In her Brooklyn campaign, Mrs. Chisholm would reel off a long quotation from Miss Anthony ("The hour is come when the women will no longer be the passive recipients...") when she was bothered by male hecklers on street corners. "It always stopped them cold," she reports."

"(Book editor's note: In 1880 she met Eugene V. Debs, the perennial Labor and Socialist candidate, who later wrote that Anthony impressed him "as being a wonderfully strong character, self-reliant, thoroughly in earnest, and utterly indifferent to criticism." Debs' observations of her trip to Terre Haute, Indiana, provide a bleak picture of the hostility still evident in the late 1800s.) "I can still see the aversion so unfeelingly expressed for this magnificent woman. Even my personal friends were disgusted with me for piloting such an "undesirable citizen" into the community. It is hard to understand, after all these years, how bitter and implacable the people were, especially the women, toward the leaders of this movement. As we walked along the street I was painfully aware that Miss Anthony was an object of derision and contempt, and in my heart I resented it and later I had often to defend my position, which, of course, I was ever ready to do....To all of this Miss Anthony, to all appearance, was entirely oblivious. She could not have helped noticing it for there were those who thrust their insults upon her, but she gave no sign and bore no resentment. I can see her still as she walked along, neatly but carelessly attired, her bonnet somewhat carelessly awry, mere trifles which were scarcely noticed, if at all, in the presence of her splendid womanhood. She seemed absorbed completely in her mission.""

"As part of the seventy-fifth anniversary ceremonies the Woman's Party organized a pilgrimage to the grave of Susan B. Anthony led by the Mayor and city officials of Rochester. Thousands of women joined this pilgrimage-teachers, students, lawyers, government workers, doctors, business women, musicians, nurses, artists, writers, factory-workers-women from almost every walk in life who could truly say that they owe their present status in society in some measure to the work of Susan B. Anthony. Thus is she honoured at last, that slim gallant Quaker girl, who for most of the years of her life was hounded by the mob and scorned by those in high places."

"The struggle for the right of women to vote was nationwide and growing. It had started with the first Equal Rights Convention, at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, which was addressed by Frederick Douglass, the great Negro leader. The suffragists had been ridiculed, assaulted by mobs, refused halls, arrested for attempting to vote, disowned by their families. By 1904, groups of working women, especially Socialist women, were banding together to join in the demand for the vote. Two years later, International Women's Day was born on the East Side of New York, at the initiative of these women demonstrating for suffrage. It spread around the world and is universally celebrated today, while here it is deprecated as "a foreign holiday.""

"Brave women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had been the early pioneers, facing abuse and ridicule, violence and even arrests for attempting to vote. Later, women like Dr. Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt headed the National American Women's Suffrage Association, which struggled against "the lethargy of women and the opposition of men." But by 1916 a younger, bolder and more militant group emerged, which was dissatisfied with the slower process of winning suffrage, state by state, and fought for a constitutional amendment. They organized the Women's Party in 1916, which planned to mobilize the women's vote in all suffrage states only for parties and candidates who would support national suffrage. That year a group of wealthy suffragists financed and toured in a Suffrage Special. They did not campaign directly for the Republican candidate, Charles Evans Hughes, but their slogan was anti-Wilson: "Vote against Wilson! He Kept Us Out of Suffrage!" Many voted for Eugene V. Debs, then in prison."

"We, the colored people of Rochester, join the world in mourning the loss of our true friend, Susan B. ANTHONY. Yes, a true friend of our race. Years ago, when it meant a great deal to be a friend to the poor, downtrodden race, Susan B. ANTHONY stood side by side with William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Lucy Stone, Abby Kelly Foster, Frederick Douglass and others, fighting our battles and espousing the cause of an enslaved people...we who have heard thy voice: we who have known something of thy great life work — we pledge ourselves to devote our time and energies to the work thou hast left us to do."

"Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Amelia Bloomer, Carrie Nation, Frances Willard, Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott, and the later suffragists of whom she [her mother] was one. These courageous women set a pattern not understood yet, standing in their prim strength, in their sweetness and sobriety against cruel ridicule, moral censure, charges of insanity; for there is no cruelty like that of the oppressor who feels his loss of the bit on those it has been his gain to oppress. "Pine knots as we are," Susan Anthony said. They used the only means open to them - they became orators when it was considered immoral for a woman to speak in public; if she went to meetings she was only to listen and learn. But they could use their constitutional right of petition, and they could tramp up and down, getting signatures for the right to work, to get a divorce, to speak in public, to vote."

"The women, who at the first woman's rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 declared boldly and with considerable exaggeration that "the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her," did not speak for the truly exploited and abused working woman. As a matter of fact, they were largely ignorant of her condition and, with the notable exception of Susan B. Anthony."

"most of the early feminists came to their convictions because of their interest in abolition. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Abby Kelley, and scores of others found that if they wished to work for reforms in general, they would first have to fight for their right as women to engage in public political activity."

"The History of Woman Suffrage is an incomplete, flawed and heavily biased assemblage of sources. It distorts the origins of the movement by ignoring or downplaying the role of many activists and antecedent activists in favor of stressing the leadership of a few women. The strongly secular bias of its editors and their disenchantment with the organized churches in regard to the struggle of women for their emancipation are reflected in the way they defined the movement as mostly political and constitutional, disregarding the important feminist struggles in the various churches during the century.It is also factionally biased in its downplaying of the role of the women who in 1869 split with Stanton and Anthony, a distortion which is particularly striking in regard to the role of Lucy Stone. Yet these volumes have provided the basis for over a hundred years of historiography on the subject and, in what Mary Ritter Beard called "the long history of women," represent a milestone."

"Suffragists argued that "the state is but the larger family, the nation the old homestead"; hence, by extending their nurturing functions from the family circle to the larger society, women would not abdicate their traditional domestic role. Even Susan B. Anthony, who insisted that women needed the power to control their own lives through the vote and through economic opportunity, believed that the lack of both encouraged immorality, rendering woman "utterly powerless to extract from [men] the same high moral code that she chooses for herself.""

"the original amendment, which we called the Susan B. Anthony because the women of the country, if they knew anything about the movement, had heard the name Susan B. Anthony."

"In the 1880's and '90's Susan B. Anthony's influence on the women of the country-and on the men, too-was still strong. She was over sixty, but still fighting for women's right to vote as earlier she had fought against slavery. Ridiculed and denounced as a "revolutionary firebrand" she kept right on. She and other women pioneers such as Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton traveled and lectured throughout the United States making woman suffrage a national issue."

"In the 1970s we were rediscovering women whose lives had been dropped out of history or distorted, like Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Emily Dickinson, Marie Curie, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Hannah Senesch, Ethel Rosenberg."

"Struggle brought about the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibited the government from denying women the right to vote. The amendment did not just appear: It was the fruit of the struggle of the suffragettes, led by such figures as Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the mid-nineteenth century."

"The Anthony Interview was an art form. Sometimes she paced the floor and dictated rapidly; sometimes she made a grand entrance into the hotel parlor or sitting room. But mostly she sat patiently and poised, the courtly leader answering the same questions from Maine to Oregon, beguiling some of the most hardened reporters."

"All honor to the noble women that have devoted earnest lives to the intellectual needs of mankind!...Susan had an earnest soul, a conscience tending to morbidity...In ancient Greece she would have been a Stoic; in the era of the Reformation, a Calvinist; in King Charles's time, a Puritan; but in this nineteenth century, by the very laws of her being, she is a Reformer."

"Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the greatest of the early leaders"

"I had always resented the pains that militant suffragists took to belittle the work that woman had done in the past in the world, picturing her as a meek and prostrate "doormat." They refused, I felt, to pay proper credit to the fine social and economic work that women had done in the building of America. And in 1909, after we took over the American Magazine, I burst out with a series of studies of leading American women from the Revolution to the Civil War, including such stalwarts as Mercy Warren, Abigail Adams, Esther Reed, Mary Lyon, Catharine Beecher, the fighting antislavery leaders-not omitting two for whom I had warm admiration, if I was not in entire agreement with them, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony."

"We colored women own [sic] her a two-fold debt of gratitude. Her persecutions were greater than those of Garrison or Phillips. She was never a coward, not even among pistols. She contributed her work, but while I would not attempt to try to underage her work, there is almost as much work to-day as there was fifty or sixty years ago. In many States colored men are deprived of their right to vote and are held as slaves in peonage."

"At the close of my address a young man in the audience, whom we afterward learned was a southerner, sneeringly asked, "If the colored people were so badly treated in the South, why was it that more of them didn't come North?" Before I could answer, Miss Anthony sprang to her feet and said, "I'll answer that question. It is because we, here in the North, do not treat the Negroes any better than they do in the South, comparatively speaking,"."

"Miss Anthony gave me rather the impression of a woman who was eager to hear all sides of any question, and that I am sure is one of the reasons for her splendid success in the organization which did so much to give the women of this country an equal share in all the privileges of citizenship...Such a dear good friend I found her to be, and she had many such just like her there in Rochester."

"When Miss Anthony took up the cause of women she did not know them by their color, nationality, creed or birth, she stood only for the emancipation of women from the thraldom of sex. She became an invincible champion of anti-slavery. In the half century of her unremitting struggle for liberty, more liberty, and complete liberty for negro men and women in chains and for white women in their helpless subjection to man’s laws, she never wavered, never doubted, never compromised. She held it to be mockery to ask man or woman to be happy or contented if not free. She saw no substitute for liberty. When slavery was overthrown and the work of reconstruction began she was still unwearied and watchful. She had an intimate acquaintance with the leading statesmen of the times. Her judgment and advice were respected and heard in much of the legislation that gave a status of citizenship to the millions of slaves set free."

"There is no death for such as she. There are no last words of love. The ages to come will revere her name. Unnumbered generations of the children of men shall rise up to call her blessed. Her words, her work, and her character will go on to brighten the pathway and bless the lives of all peoples. That which seems death to our unseeing eyes is to her translation. Her work will not be finished, nor will her last word be spoken while there remains a wrong to be righted, or a fettered life to be freed in all the earth."

"she taught us that the real beauty of a true life is found in the harmonious blending of diverse elements, and her life was the epitome of her teaching. She merged a keen sense of justice with the deepest love; her masterful intellect never for one moment checked the tenderness of her emotions...she demonstrated the divine principle that the truest self-development must go hand in hand with the greatest and most arduous service for others...Here was the most harmoniously developed character I have ever known — a living soul whose individuality was blended into oneness with all humanity."

"She knew that where freedom is there is the center of power. In it she saw potentially all that humanity might attain when possessed by its spirit. Hence her cause, perfect equality of rights, of opportunity, of privilege for all, civil and political, was to her the bed-rock upon which all true progress must rest."

"She was in the truest sense a reformer, unhindered in her service by the narrowness and negative destructiveness which often so sadly hampers the work of true reform...She recognized that it was immeasurably more desirable to be honestly and earnestly seeking that which in its attainment might not prove good than to be hypocritically subservient to the truth through a spirit of selfish fear or fawning at the beck of power...She was never found in the cheering crowd that follows an already victorious standard... She was truly great; great in her humility and utter lack of pretension."

"She did not gain the little bit of freedom for herself, but there is scarcely a civilized land, not even our own, in which she has not been instrumental in securing for some woman that to which our leader did not attain."

"We have followed her leadership until we stand upon the mount of vision where she today leaves us. The promised land lies just before us. It is for us to go forward and take possession...Already the call to advance is heard along the line, and one devoted young follower writes: “There are hundreds of us now, her followers, who will try to keep up the work she so nobly began and brought so nearly to completion. We will work the harder to try to compensate the world for her loss.”"

"We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them."

"I wish most sincerely there was not a slave in this province. It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me — to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have."

"How difficult the task to quench the fire and the pride of private ambition, and to sacrifice ourselves and all our hopes and expectations to the public weal! How few have souls capable of so noble an undertaking! How often are the laurels worn by those who have had no share in earning them! But there is a future recompense of reward, to which the upright man looks, and which he will most assuredly obtain, provided he perseveres unto the end."

"I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature; and that power, whether vested in many or a few, is ever grasping, and, like the grave, cries, “Give, give!” The great fish swallow up the small; and he who is most strenuous for the rights of the people, when vested with power, is as eager after the prerogatives of government. You tell me of degrees of perfection to which human nature is capable of arriving, and I believe it, but at the same time lament that our admiration should arise from the scarcity of the instances."

"The reins of government have been so long slackened, that I fear the people will not quietly submit to those restraints which are necessary for the peace and security of the community."

"I feel anxious for the fate of our monarchy, or democracy, or whatever is to take place. I soon get lost in a labyrinth of perplexities; but, whatever occurs, may justice and righteousness be the stability of our times, and order arise out of confusion. Great difficulties may be surmounted by patience and perseverance."

"I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And by the way, in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation. That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. Why, then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity? Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your sex; regard us then as Beings placed by Providence under your protection, and in imitation of the Supreme Being make use of that power only for our happiness."

"Shall we be despised by foreign powers for hesitating so long at a word?"

"I can not say that I think you very generous to the Ladies, for Whilst you are proclaiming peace and good will to men, emancipating all nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over wives. But you must remember that arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken — and notwithstanding all your wise laws and maxims we have it in our power not only to free ourselves but to subdue our masters, and without violence throw both your natural and legal authority at our feet."

"Deliver me from your cold phlegmatic preachers, politicians, friends, lovers and husbands."

"If you complain of neglect of Education in sons, what shall I say with regard to daughters, who every day experience the want of it? With regard to the Education of my own children, I find myself soon out of my depth, destitute and deficient in every part of Education. I most sincerely wish that some more liberal plan might be laid and executed for the Benefit of the rising Generation, and that our new Constitution may be distinguished for encouraging Learning and Virtue. If we mean to have Heroes, Statesmen and Philosophers, we should have learned women. The world perhaps would laugh at me and accuse me of vanity, But you I know have a mind too enlarged and liberal to disregard the Sentiment. If much depends as is allowed upon the early education of youth and the first principles which are instill'd take the deepest root, great benefit must arise from literary accomplishments in women."

"It is really mortifying, sir, when a woman possessed of a common share of understanding considers the difference of education between the male and female sex, even in those families where education is attended to... Nay why should your sex wish for such a disparity in those whom they one day intend for companions and associates. Pardon me, sir, if I cannot help sometimes suspecting that this neglect arises in some measure from an ungenerous jealousy of rivals near the throne."

"I regret the narrow contracted education of the females of my own country."

"If we do not lay out ourselves in the service of mankind whom should we serve?"

"Luxury, that baneful poison, has unstrung and enfeebled her sons."

"These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or in the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by the scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman."

"A little of what you call frippery is very necessary towards looking like the rest of the world."

"Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence."

"Patriotism in the female s*x is the most disinterested of all virtues. Excluded from honors and from offices, we cannot attach ourselves to the State or Government from having held a place of eminence. Even in the freest countries our property is subject to the control and disposal of our partners, to whom the laws have given a sovereign authority. Deprived of a voice in legislation, obliged to submit to those laws which are imposed upon us, is it not sufficient to make us indifferent to the public welfare? Yet all history and every age exhibit instances of patriotic virtue in the female sex; which considering our situation equals the most heroic of yours."

"I begin to think, that a calm is not desirable in any situation in life. Every object is beautiful in motion; a ship under sail, trees gently agitated with the wind, and a fine woman dancing, are three instances in point. Man was made for action and for bustle too, I believe."

"To be good, and to do good, is the whole duty of man comprised in a few words."

"Knowledge is a fine thing, and mother Eve thought so; but she smarted so severly for hers, that most of her daughters have been afraid of it since."

"I acknowledge myself a unitarian — Believing that the Father alone, is the supreme God, and that Jesus Christ derived his Being, and all his powers and honors from the Father. … There is not any reasoning which can convince me, contrary to my senses, that three is one, and one three."

"Do not grieve, my friend, my dearest friend. I am ready to go. And John, it will not be long."

"Men of sense in all ages abhor those customs, which treat us only as the vessels of your sex"

"Do not put such unlimited powers in the hands of the husband, Remember all men would be tyrants if they could."

"Great necessities call forth great leaders."

"In the revolution, Mrs. Adams sad to her husband, “It seems to me that while you are struggling for your own liberty, you are not applying the principle universally” — the women and the slaves had been left out. The principle was not applied then, and has not been applied since."

"I had always resented the pains that militant suffragists took to belittle the work that woman had done in the past in the world, picturing her as a meek and prostrate "doormat." They refused, I felt, to pay proper credit to the fine social and economic work that women had done in the building of America. And in 1909, after we took over the American Magazine, I burst out with a series of studies of leading American women from the Revolution to the Civil War, including such stalwarts as Mercy Warren, Abigail Adams, Esther Reed, Mary Lyon, Catharine Beecher, the fighting antislavery leaders-not omitting two for whom I had warm admiration, if I was not in entire agreement with them, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony."

"I love all those great 'f' words - feminism, folk music.."

"In any marginalized community, whether people identify themselves or not affects us all."

"I believe in that step of not just making revolutionary music but making it in a way that challenges the system, Especially in this day and age when the tools for producing and distributing are more and more accessible to the average Joe and Josephine. The possibility of emancipation and control and independence is so much greater now."

"I think I'm done gunnin to get closer. To some imagined bliss. I gotta knuckle down. And just be ok with this."

"There's this brutal imperial power, that my passport says I represent. But it will never represent where my heart lives, only vaguely where it went."

"I don't always feel lucky, but I'm smart enough to try."

"Every tool is a weapon - if you hold it right."

"They're gonna be mad at us. They're gonna be mad at me and you. They're gonna be mad at us and all the things we wanna do."

"I used to be a superhero. No one could touch me, not even myself. You are like a phone booth that I somehow stumbled into, And now look at me, I am just like everybody else."

"I am still praying for revolution."

"Some of life's best lessons are learned at the worst times."

"Because the world owes me nothing And we owe each other the world."

"I am writing graffiti on your body. I am drawing the story of how hard we tried."

"Somedays the line I walk turns out to be straight - Other days the line tends to deviate."

"And their eyes are all asking Are you in or are you out? And I think, oh man What is this about? Tonight you can't put me Up on any shelf Cuz I came here alone And I'm gonna leave by myself."

"They say that the truth will set you free But then again, so will a lie... It depends if you're trying to get to the promised land Or if you're just trying to get by."

"I’m going to go ahead and go boldly Cuz a little bird told me That jumping is easy That falling is fun Right up ‘til you hit the sidewalk Shivering and stunned."

"So we're led by denial like lambs to the slaughter Serving empires of style and carbonated sugar water And the old farm road's a four-lane that leads to the mall And our dreams are all guillotines waiting to fall."

"My distraction's my defense against this lack of inspiration Against this slow deflation Yeah the further the horizon The more it holds my gaze The foreground's out of focus but you know I kinda hope it's just a phase Just a phase."

"They can call me crazy if I fail All the chance that I need Is one in a million And they can call me brilliant If I succeed…"

"The windows of my soul are made of one way glass Don't bother looking into my eyes If there's something you want to know - just ask."

"Because I know the biggest crime Is just to throw up your hands And say "This has nothing to do with me, I just want to live as comfortably as I can."

"You've got your whole life to do something, And that's not very long. So why don't you give me a call When you're willing to fight For what you think is real, For what you think is right."

"Girl, next time he wants to know What your problem is Next time he wants to know Where the anger comes from Just tell him this time the problem's his Tell him the anger just comes It just comes."

"And God help you if you are a phoenix, and you dare to rise up from the ash. A thousand eyes will smolder with jealousy, while you're just flying past."

"Now let's get talking: reefer madness. Like some arrogant government can't, By any stretch of the imagination, outlaw a plant."

"So I walk like I'm on a mission cuz that's the way I groove. I got more and more to do, I got less and less to prove. It took me too long to realize that I don't take good pictures Cuz I have the kind of beauty that moves."

"And we hold these truths to be self-evident: Number one-- George W. Bush is not president. Number two-- America is not a true democracy. And, Number three-- the media is not fooling me."

"Now I wonder who is gonna be president: Tweedle Dumb, or Tweedle Dumber-- And who is gonna have the big block buster box office this summer."

"Maybe you don't like your job, maybe you didn't get enough sleep-- But nobody likes their job, nobody got enough sleep. Maybe you just had the worst day of your life; Well, you know, there's no escape. That's no excuse. Just suck up and be nice."

"My country tis of thee, To take swings at each other on talk-show TV."

"Art is why I get up in the morning; my definition ends there. You know it doesn't seem fair, That I'm living for something I can't even define. And there you are right there, in the mean time."

"My thighs have been involved in many accidents, And now I can't get insured, And I don't need to be lured by you. My cunt is built like a wound that won't heal, And now you don't have to ask Because you know how I feel."

"So my heart finally broke. It was so long bent. And it broke in three places when it finally went. It wanted only to say what it meant. So it suffered every punishment."

"'Course numb is an old hat, old as my oldest memories. See that one's my mother, and that one's my father, and that one in the hat, that's me. It's a skill I'd hoped to abandon, when I got out on the open road, But any more pent up emotion and I think I'm gonna explode."

"And I was shocked to see the mistakes of each generation will just fade like a radio station, if we drive out of range."

"If you're not angry, you're just stupid, or you don't care."

"There's a crowd of people harbored in every person, there are so many roles that we play. And you've decided to love me for eternity. I'm still deciding who I want to be today""

"Let's grow old and die together. Let's do it now."

"When I need to wipe my face, I use the back of my hand, And I like to take up space just because I can, And I use my dress to wipe up my drink. I care less and less what people think."

"So I’ll walk the plank and I’ll jump with a smile. If I’m gonna go down, I’m gonna do it with style, and you won't see me surrender, you won't hear me confess, 'Cuz you've left me with nothing, but i've worked with less."

"You know Taken out of context I must Seem so strange."

"And everything seems to have gone terribly wrong that can. But one breath at a time is an acceptable plan, She tells herself."

"My life may not be something special But it's never been lived before."

"We discovered we are both pleasantly furious half of the time, When we're not just toeing the line."

"I was blessed with a birth and a death, and I guess I just want some say in-between."

"Freedom and democracy, That's the word from Washington every day. Put America to sleep with warm milk and clichés, And people are expendable along the way."

"They put you in your place, and they tell you to behave But no one can be free until we're all on even grade."

"Life is a b movie. It's stupid and it's strange, A directionless story, And the dialogue is lame. But in the he said, she said, Sometimes there's some poetry, If you turn your back long enough, And let it happen naturally."

"I fight with love, and I laugh with rage. You've gotta live light enough to see the humor, And long enough to see some change."

"I remember now how our bright spring green deepened. With the years the seasons changed, And we were lush as the underside of August."

"Love sets fire to your schedule, And then calls an end to time."

"I still define myself by the places that I've been."

"I always wanted to be commander-in-chief of my one-woman army, But I can envision the mediocrity of my finest hour."

"I know there is strength in the differences between us, And I know there is comfort where we overlap."

"I think you're the least fucked-up person I've ever met, And that may be as close to the real thing as I'm ever gonna get."

"Sometimes the beauty is easy. Sometimes you don't have to try at all. Sometimes you can hear the wind blow in a handshake. Sometimes there's poetry written right on the bathroom wall."

"She says “Do I know you?” I say “Well, no, not biblically, But I've been waiting for you to come and talk to me. I have been playing too many of those boy-girl games.” She says, “Honey, you are safe here. This is a girl-girl thing.”"

"I am looking for the holes, The holes in your jeans Because I want to know: Are they worn out in the seat, Or are they worn out in the knees?"

"When we patch things up, They say a job well done. But when we ask the question why Where did the rips come from?, They say we are subversive, And extreme, of course. We are just trying to track a problem to its source."

"I always feel I have to take a stand, And there's always someone on hand To hate me for standing there. I always feel I have to open my mouth, And every time I do, I offend someone, somewhere."

"But what if no one's watching? What if when we're dead, we are just dead? What if there's no time to lose? What if there's things we gotta do, Things that need to be said?"

"We have to be able to criticize what we love, Say what we have to say, 'Cause if you're not trying to make something better, Then as far as I can tell, you are just in the way."

"People used to make records, as in the record of an event, the event of people playing music in a room, and now everything's cross-marketing, its about sunglasses and shoes, or guns and drugs that you choose.""

"First and foremost, I'm a feminist. And basically that stems from a strong belief that all people and creatures deserve equal opportunity, rights and respect."

"Kind of like the difference between making love and masturbation, I'd say."

"It's great to see people who find joy in service and don't close their eyes and aren't afraid."

"Religion is not black and white. It's much more complicated. Spirituality is much bigger than that. God is much bigger than that. I don't believe in a wrathful God. I believe he's much more forgiving and inclusive than some religions. The things that are done in her name or his name are horrible."

"Every relationship starts out with a dream of what you think it's going to be, and you either have the tool kit when you get to the hard spots where you'll make it through, or you need to move on."

"I know, Mother, you feel badly and that you would prefer to have me take some other course, if I could in conscience. Yet, Mother, I know you too well to suppose that you would wish me to turn away from what I think is my duty. I surely would not be a public speaker if I sought a life of ease, for it will be a most laborious one; nor would I do it for the sake of honor, for I know that I shall be disesteemed, even hated, by some who are now my friends, or who profess to be. Neither would I do it if I sought wealth, because I could secure it with far more ease and worldly honor by being a teacher. If I would be true to myself, true to my Heavenly Father, I must pursue that course of conduct which, to me, appears best calculated to promote the highest good of the world."

"If, while I hear the shriek of the slave mother robbed of her little ones, I do not open my mouth for the dumb, am I not guilty? Or should I go from house to house to do it, when I could tell so many more in less time, if they should be gathered in one place? You would not object or think it wrong, for a man to plead the cause of the suffering and the outcast; and surely the moral character of the act is not changed because it is done by a woman. I expect to plead not for the slave only, but for suffering humanity everywhere. Especially do I mean to labor for the elevation of my sex. I only ask that you will not withhold your consent from my doing anything that I think is my duty to do."

"This letter writing is a miserable way of communicating, after all, though I would not on any account be deprived of it. But when ones soul is full, and only a little sheet, to put it into, it is so aggravating. There are so many things I want to say, and feel with you, that I dont know where to begin."

"Women are in bondage; their clothes are a great hindrance to their engaging in any business which will make them pecuniarily independent, and since the soul of womanhood never can be queenly and noble so long as it must beg bread for its body, is it not better, even at the expense of a vast deal of annoyance, that they whose lives deserve respect and are greater than their garments should give an example by which woman may more easily work out her own emancipation?"

"We want rights. The flour merchant, the house-builder, and the postman charge us no less on account of our sex; but when we endeavor to earn money to pay all these, then, indeed, we find the interest."

"Too much has already been said and written about "women's sphere". Leave women, then, to find their sphere."

"The last speaker alluded to this movement as being that of a few disappointed women. From the first years to which my memory stretches, I have been a disappointed woman... I was disappointed when I came to seek a profession worthy an immortal being—every employment was closed to me, except those of the teacher, the seamstress, and the housekeeper. In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything, disappointment is the lot of woman. It shall be the business of my life to deepen this disappointment in every woman's heart until she bows down to it no longer."

"I know not what you believe of God, but I believe He gave yearnings and longings to be filled, and that He did not mean all our time should be devoted to feeding and clothing the body."

"All over this land women have no political existence. Laws pass over our heads that we can not unmake. Our property is taken from us without our consent. The babes we bear in anguish and carry in our arms are not ours."

"I believe that the influence of woman will save the country before every other power."

"You may talk about Free Love, if you please, but we are to have the right to vote. Today we are fined, imprisoned, and hanged, without a jury trial by our peers. You shall not cheat us by getting us off to talk about something else. When we get the suffrage, then you may taunt us with anything you please, and we will then talk about it as long as you please."

"We believe in marriage for life, and deprecate all this loose, pestiferous talk in favor of easy divorce... Be not deceived — free love means free lust."

"It is not quite the same when we are seventy-two as when we are twenty-seven; still I am glad of what is left, and wish we might both hold out till the victory we have sought is won, but all the same the victory is coming. In the aftertime the world will be the better for it."

"We have every reason to rejoice when there are so many gains and when favorable conditions abound on every hand. The end is not yet in sight, but it can not be far away. The road before us is shorter than the road behind."

"Make the world better."

"While acknowledging our mutual affection by publicly assuming the relationship of husband and wife, yet in justice to ourselves and a great principle, we deem it a duty to declare that this act on our part implies no sanction of, nor promise of voluntary obedience to such of the present laws of marriage, as refuse to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being, while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority, investing him with legal powers which no honorable man would exercise, and which no man should possess."

"We believe that personal independence and equal human rights can never be forfeited, except for crime; that marriage should be an equal and permanent partnership, and so recognized by law; that until it is so recognized, married partners should provide against the radical injustice of present laws, by every means in their power..."

"The commencement of the last fifty years is about the beginning of that great change and improvement in the condition of women which exceeds all the gains of hundreds of years before."

"In 1833, Oberlin College, in Ohio, was founded. Its charter declared its grand object, - "To give the most useful education at the least expense of health, time, and money, and to extend the benefits of such education to both sexes and to all classes; and the elevation of the female character by bringing within the reach of the misjudged and neglected sex all the instructive privileges which have hitherto unreasonably distinguished the leading sex from theirs." These were the words of Father Shippen, which, if not heard in form, were heard in fact as widely as the world. The opening of Oberlin to women marked an epoch."

"Get but a truth once uttered, and 'tis like A star new born that drops into its place; And which, once circling in its placid round, Not all the tumult of the earth can shake. Henceforth the leaves of the tree of knowledge were for women, and for the healing of the nations."

"Whatever the reason, the idea was born that women could and should be educated. It lifted a mountain load from woman. It shattered the idea, everywhere pervasive as the atmosphere, that women were incapable of education, and would be less womanly, less desirable in every way, if they had it. However much it may have been resented, women accepted the idea of their intellectual inequality. I asked my brother: "Can girls learn Greek?""

"The anti-slavery cause had come to break stronger fetters than those that held the slave. The idea of equal rights was in the air. The wail of the slave, his clanking fetters, his utter need, appealed to everybody. Women heard. Angelina and Sarah Grimké and Abby Kelley went out to speak for the slaves. Such a thing had never been heard of. An earthquake shock could hardly have startled the community more. Some of the abolitionists forgot the slave in their efforts to silence the women. The Anti-Slavery Society rent itself in twain over the subject. The Church was moved to its very foundation in opposition."

"The press, many-tongued, surpassed itself in reproaches upon these women who had so far departed from their sphere as to speak in public. But, with anointed lips and a consecration which put even life itself at stake, these peerless women pursued the even tenor of their way, saying to their opponents only: "Woe is me, if I preach not this gospel of freedom for the slave." Over all came the melody of Whittier's "When woman's heart is breaking Shall woman's voice be hushed? ""

"I think, with never-ending gratitude, that the young women of today do not and can never know at what price their right to free speech and to speak at all in public has been earned."

"Abby Kelly once entered a church only to find herself the subject of the sermon, which was preached from the text: " This Jezebel is come among us also." They jeered at her as she went along the street. They threw stones at her. They pelted her with bad eggs as she stood on the platform. Some of the advocates of the very cause for which she endured all this were ready to drive her from the field."

"The right to education and to free speech having been gained for woman, in the long run every other good thing was sure to be obtained."

"Half a century ago women were at an infinite disadvantage in regard to their occupations. The idea that their sphere was at home, and only at home, was like a band of steel on society. But the spinning-wheel and the loom, which had given employment to women, had been superseded by machinery, and something else had to take their places. The taking care of the house and children, and the family sewing, and teaching the little summer school at a dollar per week, could not supply the needs nor fill the aspirations of women. But every departure from these conceded things was met with the cry, "You want to get out of your sphere," or, "To take women out of their sphere;" and that was to fly in the face of Providence, to unsex yourself in short, to be monstrous women, women who, while they orated in public, wanted men to rock the cradle and wash the dishes. We pleaded that whatever was fit to be done at all might with propriety be done by anybody who did it well; that the tools belonged to those who could use them; that the possession of a power presupposed a right to its use."

"When Elizabeth Blackwell studied medicine and put up her sign in New York, she was regarded as fair game, and was called a "she doctor." The college that had admitted her closed its doors afterward against other women; and supposed they were shut out forever. But Dr. Blackwell was a woman of fine intellect, of great personal worth and a level head. How good it was that such a woman was the first doctor! She was well equipped by study at home and abroad, and prepared to contend with prejudice and every opposing thing."

"The first woman minister, Antoinette Brown, had to meet ridicule and opposition that can hardly be conceived to-day. Now there are women ministers, east and west, all over the country."

"In Massachusetts, where properly qualified "persons" were allowed to practice law, the Supreme Court decided that a woman was not a "person," and a special act of the legislature had to be passed before Miss Lelia Robinson could be admitted to the bar. But today women are lawyers."

"Fifty years ago the legal injustice imposed upon women was appalling. Wives, widows and mothers seemed to have been hunted out by the law on purpose to see in how many ways they could be wronged and made helpless. A wife by her marriage lost all right to any personal property she might have. The income of her land went to her husband, so that she was made absolutely penniless. If a woman earned a dollar by scrubbing, her husband had a right to take the dollar and go and get drunk with it and beat her afterwards. It was his dollar. If a woman wrote a book the copyright of the same belonged to her husband and not to her. The law counted out in many states how many cups and saucers, spoons and knives and chairs a widow might have when her husband died. I have seen many a widow who took the cups she had bought before she was married and bought them again after her husband died, so as to have them legally. The law gave no right to a married woman to any legal existence at all. Her legal existence was suspended during marriage. She could neither sue nor be sued. If she had a child born alive the law gave her husband the use of all her real estate as long as he should live, and called it by the pleasant name of "the estate by courtesy." When the husband died the law gave the widow the use of one-third of the real estate belonging to him, and it was called the "widow's encumbrance.""

"While the law dealt thus with her in regard to her property, it dealt still more hardly with her in regard to her children. No married mother could have any right to her child, and in most of the states of the Union that is the law to-day. But the law's in regard to the personal and property rights of women have been greatly changed and improved, and we are very grateful to the men who have done it."

"By what toil and fatigue and patience and strife and the beautiful law of growth has all this been wrought? These things have not come of themselves. They could not have occurred except as the great movement for women has brought them out and about. They are part of the eternal order, and they have come to stay. Now all we need is to continue to speak the truth fearlessly, and we shall add to our number those who will turn the scale to the side of equal and full justice in all things."

"I never saw that great woman, Mary Wollstonecraft, but I l have read her eloquent and unanswerable arguments in behalf of the liberty of womankind. I have met and known most of the progressive women who came after her — Lucretia Mott, the Grimké sisters, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone — a long galaxy of great women. I have heard them speak, saying in only slightly different phrases exactly what I heard these newer advocates of the cause say at these meetings. Those older women have gone on and most of those who work with me in the early years have gone. I am here for a little time only and then my place will be filled as theirs was filled. The fight must not cease; you must see that it does not stop. There have been others also just as true and devoted to the cause — I wish I could name every one — but with such women consecrating their lives, failure is impossible!"

"Mrs. R. (Ernestine Rose) and myself were talking of the know nothing organizations [the anti-immigrant American Party], when she criticized Lucy Stone and Wendell Philips with regard to their feelings toward foreigners. Said she had heard them both express themselves in terms of prejudice against granting to foreigners the rights of Citizenship."

"Lucy Stone came closest to expressing the dilemma confronting the men and women who debated this issue [the 15th Amendment], and a dilemma it was, for she could not resolve the question of priority either: "Mrs. Stanton will, of course, advocate the precedence of her sex, and Mr. Douglass will strive for the first position for his, and both are perhaps right. If it be true that the government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, we are safe in trusting that principle to the uttermost. If one has a right to say that you cannot read and therefore cannot vote, then it may be said that you are a woman and therefore can not vote. We are lost if we turn away from the middle principle and argue for one class....There are two great oceans; in the one is the black man, and in the other is woman. But I thank God for the XV Amendment, and hope that it will be adopted in every State. I will be thankful in my soul if any body can get out of this terrible pit. But I believe that the safety of the government would be more promoted by the admission of woman as an element of restoration and harmony than the negro. I believe that the influence of woman will save the country before every other power”...Precisely because passage of the Fifteenth Amendment was intended to advance the cause of Afro-American freedom, it inevitably would have rebounded to the benefit of woman, but only a class-conscious element could have seen that point in 1869. Douglass and Stone came closest to understanding it, but neither one could develop an analysis that did not rest upon making one oppression more important than the other."

"I remember always how beautiful and how heavenly sweet and splendid was our best woman, Lucy Stone, the ornament of the human race."

"One thing causes me sorrow. It is the thought that the name of Lucy Stone, so often mentioned in her Journal, is known to few persons, and that the young generation pronounce that venerable name only by heart, without understanding how great and holy it is...You have no right to leave the world without giving it the biography of your noble and beautiful mother. You have no right to rob posterity of such a treasure. Humanity is not yet too rich in beautiful examples not to show them to us as largely as possible. We need to have before us such images as can inspire us, teach us."

"On another occasion, I returned to Boston, where Cell 16 had fulfilled one of my dreams by organizing a forum in historic Fannueil Hall in old Boston. In that hall, Lucy Stone, the Grimké sisters, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, and Frederick Douglass had held antislavery and profeminist meetings during the decades before the Civil War. Their legacy had motivated me to move to Boston to launch female liberation."

"Nor let it be said that we have forgot/The women who stood with Lucretia Mott;/Nor her who to the world was known/By the simple name of Lucy Stone."

"In all action taken under her supervision, Mrs. Stone was most careful that the main issue should be constantly presented and kept in view. While welcoming every reform which gave evidence of the ethical progress of the community, she yet held to woman suffrage, pure and simple, as the first condition upon which the new womanhood should base itself. Efforts were often made to entangle suffrage with the promise of endless reforms in various directions, but firm as Cato, who always repeated his words that Carthage should be destroyed, Lucy Stone always asked for suffrage because it is right and just that women should have it...What had she to work with? A silver voice, a winning smile, the great gift of a persuasive utterance. What had she to work from? A deep and abiding faith in divine justice and in man’s ability to follow its laws and to execute its decrees...Here she was still debarred the right to cast her ballot at the polls, but lo, in the blue urn of heaven her life was received, one glowing and perfect vote for the rights of women, for the good of humanity, for the Kingdom of god on earth."

"Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Amelia Bloomer, Carrie Nation, Frances Willard, Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott, and the later suffragists of whom she [her mother] was one. These courageous women set a pattern not understood yet, standing in their prim strength, in their sweetness and sobriety against cruel ridicule, moral censure, charges of insanity; for there is no cruelty like that of the oppressor who feels his loss of the bit on those it has been his gain to oppress. "Pine knots as we are," Susan Anthony said. They used the only means open to them - they became orators when it was considered immoral for a woman to speak in public; if she went to meetings she was only to listen and learn. But they could use their constitutional right of petition, and they could tramp up and down, getting signatures for the right to work, to get a divorce, to speak in public, to vote."

"Through the Quakers, who believed in equality for women, I first came into touch with the woman suffrage movement. I began to be very much interested in the question, especially after reading about Lucy Stone, one of the earliest fighters against Negro slavery, and a leader for many years in the struggle for woman's suffrage."

"I have half-believed for a long time that you were preparing for a public speaker, though I hoped I might be mistaken. Not that I think I wrong in itself, but because I think it an employment a great many grades below, what I believe my only and dearly loved sister qualified to engage in. I don't hardly know what you mean by "laboring for the restoration and salvation of our sex" but I conclude you mean a salvation from some thralldom imposed by man. Now my sister I don't believe woman is groaning under half so heavy a yoke of bondage as you imagine. I am sure I do not feel burdened by anything man has laid upon me, be sure I can't vote, but what care I for that, I would not if I could. I know there is a distinction made in the wages of males and females when they perform the same labor, this I think is unjust, and it is the only thing in which woman is oppressed, that I know of, but women have no one to blame, but themselves in this matter. If as a general thing they had qualified themselves, as men have they would command the same price, but they have not, and the few who have are obliged to suffer on that account. I think my sister if you would spend the remainder of your life in educating our sex, you would do afar greater good than you will if you spend your noble energies in forever hurling "back the insults and indignities that men heap upon us." This I am sure you can never do "by the grace of God" for it is entirely contrary to his spirit and teachings. My sister commit your ways unto the Lord, and he will direct your steps."

"Now Miss Lucy, you will hear what Mother thinks about your Public Speaking. Mother said she had rather you would marry and have a pair [of] twin babies every year. She did not say how many years. Mother cannot bear to think of your Preaching or Lecturing. She thinks it is a wrong course for you to take, says if you go to Lecturing you will fix it so you can’t keep school. Mother wants you should Teach, she thinks you would do the most good that way. You will want to know [my] mind. I don’t know what to tell you. You know it will make much talk in our quarter of the World. You will do that which seems right in your own eyes. I suppose, to be honest, I like mother’s plan better than yours. You are of age to [do] that which you think is your duty. Mother says she cannot find no place where Christ ever sent Women to Preach. We shall want to hear from you as soon as you get this, you will write what you think about Mother’s plan."

"The Bible says, “Let your women keep silence.” It is flying in the face of Providence!"

"If you think you have got brass enough, and can do more good by giving public lectures than any other way, I say go to it. But Mother doesn’t like the idea."

"I believe Sarah said in her last letter that if you intend lecturing she hoped you would not come into this State. I wish you to do what you think is your duty. If you violate your sense of duty to please your friends, you will lose more than you will gain."

"At the low wages then paid to women, it took Lucy nine years to save up money enough to enter college. There was no difficulty as to the choice of an alma mater. There was only one college that admitted women."

"The young men had to hold debates as part of their work in rhetoric, and the young women were required to be present, for an hour and a half every week, in order to help form an audience for the boys, but were not allowed to take part."

"A few of the young women, led by Lucy, organized the first debating society ever formed among college girls. At first they held their meetings secretly in the woods, with sentinels on the watch to give warming of intruders. When the weather grew colder, Lucy asked an old colored woman who owned a small house, the mother of one of her colored pupils, to let them have the use of her parlor. At first she was doubtful, fearing that the meetings might be a cover for flirtation; but when she found that the debating society was made up of girls only, she decided that it must be an innocent affair, and gave her consent. Her house was on the outskirts of the town, and the girls came one or two at a time, so as not to attract attention. Lucy opened the first formal meeting with the following statement: "We shall leave this college with the reputation of a thorough collegiate course, yet not one of us has received any rhetorical or elocutionary training. Not one of us could state a question or argue it in successful debate. For this reason I have proposed the formation of this association.""

"It was intended to please no one and to offend everyone. The entire process of the book was to discover the repressed elements of contemporary culture, whatever they are, and palpate them. One of the main premises was to demonstrate that pornography is everywhere in major art. Art history as written is completely sex free, repressive and puritanical. I want precision and historical knowledge, but at the same time, I try to zap it with pornographic intensity."

"I have been studying it [sexuality] since before it became fashionable. At the Yale Grad School, for example, where I was from 1968 to 1972, I was literally the only person in the humanities departments doing a dissertation on sex — hard to believe now, but I was a real pioneer and I took the career hit for it. It was considered tacky, low, not serious — my dears, I was absolutely scouring the Yale archives for every bit of dirt on homosexuality, sadomasochism, transvestism — you name it. That is the basis of the research for my first book, Sexual Personae, which was my dissertation."

"Men are run ragged by female sexuality all their lives. From the beginning of his life to the end, no man ever fully commands any woman. It's an illusion. Men are pussy-whipped. And they know it. That's what the strip clubs are about; not woman as victim, not woman as slave, but woman as goddess."

"The feminist line is, strippers and topless dancers are degraded, subordinated, and enslaved; they are victims, turned into objects by the display of their anatomy. But women are far from being victims — women rule; they are in total control … the feminist analysis of prostitution says that men are using money as power over women. I'd say, yes, that's all that men have. The money is a confession of weakness. They have to buy women's attention. It's not a sign of power; it's a sign of weakness."

"The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words."

"As texting has become the default discourse for an entire generation, the ability to read real-life facial expressions and body language is alarmingly atrophying."

"Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist."

"Let's get rid of Infirmary Feminism, with its bedlam of bellyachers, anorexics, bulimics, depressives, rape victims, and incest survivors. Feminism has become a catch-all vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses."

"She is a brittle, relentless manipulator with few stable core values who shuffles through useful personalities like a card shark ("Cue the tears!"). Forget all her little gold crosses: Hillary's real god is political expediency. Do Americans truly want this hard-bitten Machiavellian back in the White House? Day one will just be more of the same."

"I plan to vote for Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania primary because he is a rational, centered personality who speaks the language of idealism and national unity. Obama has served longer as an elected official than Hillary. He has had experience as a grass-roots activist, and he is also a highly educated lawyer who will be a quick learner in office. His international parentage and childhood, as well as his knowledge of both Christianity and Islam, would make him the right leader at the right time. And his wife Michelle is a powerhouse. The Obamas represent the future, not the past."

"Popular culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperial sex theater, supreme temple of the western eye. We live in the age of idols. The pagan past, never dead, flames again in our mystic hierarchies of stardom."

"Sexual Personae seeks to demonstrate the unity and continuity of western culture — something that has inspired little belief since the period before World War I."

"My stress on the truth in sexual stereotypes and on the biologic basis of sex differences is sure to cause controversy."

"In the beginning was nature. The background from which and against our ideas of God were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem. We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our attitude toward nature. Sex is a subset to nature. Sex is the natural in man."

"Society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature. We may alter these forms, slowly or suddenly, but no change in society will change nature."

"Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements."

"Sexuality and eroticism are the intricate intersection of nature and culture. Feminists grossly oversimplify the problem of sex when they reduce it a matter of social convention: readjust society, eliminate sexual inequality, purify sex roles, and happiness and harmony will reign. Here feminism, like all liberal movements of the past two hundred years, is heir to Rousseau."

"Society is not the criminal but the force which keeps crime in check. When social controls weaken, man’s innate cruelty bursts forth. The rapist is created not by bad social conditioning influences but by a failure of social conditioning. Feminists, seeking to drive power relations out of sex, have set themselves against nature. In western culture, there are no nonexploitative relationships. Everyone has killed in order to live. Nature’s universal law of creation from destruction operates in mind as in matter. As Freud, Nietzsche’s heir, asserts, identity is conflict. Each generation drives its plow over the bones of the dead."

"Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate."

"Sexual freedom, sexual liberation. A modern delusion. We are hierarchical animals. Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first."

"Modern liberalism suffers unresolved contradictions. It exalts individualism and freedom and, on its radical wing, condemns social orders as oppressive. On the other hand, it expects governments to provide materially for all, a feat manageable only by an expansion of authority and a swollen bureaucracy. In other words, liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother. Feminism has inherited these contradictions."

"The search for freedom through sex is doomed to failure."

"Sex cannot be understood because nature cannot be understood. Science is a method of logical analysis of nature’s operations. It has lessened human anxiety about the cosmos by demonstrating the materiality of nature’s forces, and their frequent predictability. But science is always playing catch-up ball. Nature breaks its own rules whenever it wants. Science cannot avert a single thunderbolt. Western science is a product of the Apollonian mind: its hope is that by naming and classification, by the cold light of intellect, archaic night can be pushed back and defeated."

"Our focus on the pretty is an Apollonian strategy. The leaves and flowers, the birds, the hills are a patchwork pattern by which we map the known. What the West represses in its view of nature is the chthonian, which means "of the earth"—but earth's bowels, not its surface. Jane Harrison uses the term for pre-Olympian Greek religion, and I adopt it as a substitute for Dionysian, which has become contaminated with vulgar pleasantries. The Dionysian is no picnic. It is the chthonian realities which Apollo evades, the blind grinding of subterranean force..., the dehumanizing brutality of biology and geology, the Darwinian waste and bloodshed, the squalor and rot we must block from consciousness to retain our Apollonian integrity as persons. Western science and aesthetics are attempts to revise this horror into imaginatively palatable form."

"The moral ambivalence of the great mother goddesses has been conveniently forgotten by those American feminists who have resurrected them. We cannot grasp nature's bare blade without shedding our own blood."

"Western culture from the start has swerved from femaleness. The last western society to worship female powers was Minoan Crete. And significantly, that fell and did not rise again."

"Judaism, Christianity’s parent sect, is the most powerful of protests against nature. The Old Testament asserts that a father god made nature and that the differentiation into objects and gender was after the fact of his maleness. Judeo-Christianity, like Greek worship of the Olympian gods, is a sky-cult. It is an advanced stage in the history of religion, which everywhere began as earth-cult, veneration of fruitful nature."

"The evolution of earth-cult to sky-cult shifts woman into the nether realm. Her mysterious procreative powers and the resemblance of her rounded breasts, belly, and hips to earth’s contours put her at the center of early symbolism. She was the model for the Great Mother figures who crowded the birth of religion worldwide. But the mother cults did not mean freedom for women. On the contrary […] cult objects are prisoners of their own symbolic inflation. Every totem lives in taboo."

"Woman was an idol of belly-magic. She seemed to swell and give birth by her own law. From the beginning of time, woman has seemed an uncanny being. Man honored but feared her. She was the black maw that had spat him forth and would devour him anew. Men, bonding together, invented culture as a defense against female nature. Sky-cult was the most sophisticated step in this process, for its switch of the creative locus from earth to sky is a shift from belly-magic to head-magic. And from this defensive head-magic has come the spectacular glory of male civilization, which has lifted woman with it. The very language and logic modern woman uses to assail patriarchal culture were the invention of men."

"All the genres of philosophy, science, high art, athletics and politics were invented by men. But by the Promethean law of conflict and capture, woman has a right to seize what she will and vie with man on her own terms."

"The female body is a chthonian machine, indifferent to the spirit who inhabits it."

"We have an evolutionary revulsion from slime, the site of our biologic origins. Every month, it is woman's fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself."

"The Bible has come under fire for making woman the fall guy in man's cosmic drama. But in casting a male conspirator, the serpent, as God's enemy, Genesis hedges and does not take its misogyny far enough. The Bible defensively swerves from God's true opponent, chthonian nature. The serpent is not outside Eve but in her. She is the garden and the serpent."

"The Devil is a woman."

"In every premenstrual woman struggling to govern her temper, sky-cult wars again with earth-cult."

"Most of western culture is a distortion of reality. But reality should be distorted; that is, imaginatively amended. The Buddhist acquiescence to nature is neither accurate about nature nor just to human potential."

"Metaphorically, every vagina has secret teeth, for the male exits as less than when he entered. The basic mechanics of conception require action in the male but nothing more than passive receptivity in the female."

"Nature is a Darwinian spectacle of the eaters and the eaten. All phases of procreation are ruled by appetite: sexual intercourse, from kissing to penetration, consists of movements of barely controlled cruelty and consumption. The long pregnancy of the human female and the protracted childhood of her infant, who is not self-sustaining for seven years or more, have produced the agon of psychological dependency that burdens the male for a lifetime. Man justifiably fears being devoured by woman, who is nature’s proxy."

"Repression is an evolutionary adaptation permitting us to function under the burden of our expanded consciousness. For what we are conscious of could drive us mad."

"The mystique of the femme fatale cannot be perfectly translated into male terms."

"Mind is a captive of the body."

"Every man harbors an inner female territory ruled by his mother, from whom he can never entirely break free."

"Love for all means coldness to something or someone. Even Jesus, let us recall, was unnecessarily rude to his mother at Cana."

"Not until all babies are born from glass jars will the combat cease between mother and son."

"Every fetus becomes female unless it is steeped in male hormone, produced by a signal from the testes. Before birth, therefore, a male is already beyond the female. But to be beyond is to be exiled from the center of life. Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content. There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy."

"An erection is a thought and the orgasm an act of the imagination. The male has to will his sexual authority before the woman who is a shadow of his mother and of all women. Failure and humiliation constantly wait in the wings. No woman has to prove herself a woman in the grim way a man has to prove himself a man. He must perform, or the show does not go on. Social convention is irrelevant. A flop is a flop."

"Women have conceptualized less in history not because men have kept them from doing so but because women do not need to conceptualize in order to exist. […] Fetishism, for instance, a practice which like most of the sex perversions is confined to men, is clearly a conceptualizing or symbol-making activity. Man’s vastly greater commercial patronage of pornography is analogous."

"The female body’s unbearable hiddenness applies to all aspects men’s dealings with women. What does it look like in there? Did she have an orgasm? Is it really my child? Who was my real father? Mystery surrounds women’s sexuality. This mystery is the main reason for the imprisonment man has imposed on women. Only by confining his wife in a locked harem guarded by eunuchs could he be certain that her son was also his."

"The reform of a college English department cuts no ice down at the corner garage."

"That nature acts differently upon the sexes is proved by the test case of modern male and female homosexuality, illustrating how the sexes function separately outside social conventions. The results, according to statistics of sexual frequency: male satyriasis and female nesting. The male homosexual has more sex than his heterosexual counterpart; the female homosexual less often than hers, a radical polarization of the sexes along a single continuum of shared sexual nonconformity. Male aggression and lust are the energizing factors in culture. They are men’s tools of survival in the pagan vastness of female nature."

"The old “double standard” gave men a sexual liberty denied to women. Marxist feminists reduced the historical cult of woman’s virginity to her property value, her worth on the male marriage market. I would argue instead that there was and is a biological basis to the double standard. The first medical reports on the disease killing male homosexuals [i.e., AIDS] indicated men most at risk were those with a thousand partners over their lifetime. Incredulity. Who could such people be? Why, it turns out, everyone one knew. Serious, kind, literate men, not bums or thugs."

"Freud says, “Man fears that his strength will be taken from him by woman, dreads becoming infected with her femininity and then proving himself a weakling.” Masculinity must fight off effeminacy day by day. Woman and nature stand ever ready to reduce the male to boy and infant."

"Everything great in western culture has come from the quarrel with nature."

"Only utopian liberals could be surprised that the Nazis were art connoisseurs."

"The artist makes art not to save mankind but to save himself. Every benevolent comment by an artist is a fog to cover his tracks, the bloody trail of his assault against reality and others."

"The English language was created by poets, a five-hundred year enterprise of emotion and metaphor, the richest dialogue in world literature. French rhetorical models are too narrow for the English tradition. Most pernicious of French imports is the notion that there is no person behind a text. Is there anything more affected, aggressive, and relentlessly concrete than a Parisian intellectual behind his/her turgid text? The Parisian is a provincial when he pretends to speak for the universe."

"Pornography’s male-born explicitness renders visible what is invisible, woman’s chthonic internality. It tries to shed Apollonian light on woman’s anxiety-provoking darkness. The vulgar contortionism of pornography is the serpentine tangle of Medusan nature. Pornography is human imagination in tense theatrical action; its violations are a protest against the violations of our freedom by nature. The banning of pornography, rightly sought by Judeo-Christianity, would be a victory over the west’s stubborn paganism. But pornography cannot be banned, only driven underground, where its illicit charge will be enhanced."

"The idea that emotion can be separated from sex is a Christian illusion, one of the most ingenious but finally unworkable strategies in Christianity’s ancient campaign against pagan nature."

"In the past fifteen years, Marxist approaches towards literature have enjoyed increasing vogue. To be conscious of the social context of art seems to automatically entail a leftist orientation. But a theory is possible that is both avant-garde and capitalist. Marxism was one of Rousseau’s nineteenth-century progeny, energized by faith in the perfectabilty of man. Its belief that economic forces are the primary dynamic force in history is Romantic naturism in disguise. … Marxism is the bleakest of anxiety-formations against the power of cthonian mothers."

"Marxism is a flight from the magic of the person and the mystique of hierarchy. It distorts the character of western culture, which is based on the charismatic power of person. Marxism can work only in pre-industrial societies of homogeneous populations. Raise the standard of living, and the rainbow riot of individualism will break out. Personality and art, which Marxism fears and censors, rebound from every effort to oppress them."

"We could make an epic catalog of male achievements, from paved roads, indoor plumbing, and washing machine to eyeglasses, antibiotics and disposable diapers. We enjoy safe, fresh milk and meat, and vegetables and tropical fruits heaped in snowbound cities. When I cross the George Washington Bridge or any of America’s great bridges, I think: men have done this. Construction is a sublime male poetry. When I see a giant crane passing on a flatbed truck, I pause in awe and reverence as would for a church processions."

"Capitalism, gaudy and greedy, has been inherent in western aesthetics from ancient Egypt on. It is the mysticism and glamour of things, which take on a personality of their own. As an economic system, it is in the Darwinian line of Sade, not Rousseau."

"The capitalist distribution network, a complex chain of factory, transport, warehouse and retail outlet, is one of the greatest male accomplishments in the history of culture."

"One of feminism’s irritating reflexes is its fashionable disdain for “patriarchal society,” to which nothing good is ever attributed. But it is patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman. It is capitalism that has given me the leisure to sit at this desk writing this book. Let us stop being small-minded about men and freely acknowledge what treasures their obsessiveness has poured into culture."

"If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts."

"Capitalism is an art form."

"The book of Genesis is a male declaration of independence from the ancient mother-cults. Its challenge to nature, so sexist to modern ears, marks one of the crucial moments in western history. Mind can never be free of matter. Only by mind imagining itself free can culture advance. The mother-cults, by reconciling man to nature, entrapped him in matter. Everything great in western civilization has come from struggling against our origins. Genesis is rigid and unjust, but it gave man hope as a man. It remade the world by male dynasty, canceling the power of mothers."

"Not a shred of evidence supports the existence of matriarchy anywhere in the world at any time. [...] The matriarchy hypothesis, revived by American feminism, continues to flourish outside the university"

"The toothed vagina is no sexist hallucination: every penis is made less by every vagina, just as mankind, male and female, is devoured by mother nature. The vagina dentata is part of the Romantic revival of pagan myth. It is subliminally present in Poe’s voracious maelstrom and dank, scythe-swept pit. It overtly appears in the bible of French Decadence, Huysmans’s A Rebours (1884), where a dreamer is magnetically drawn towards mother nature’s open thighs, the “bloody depths” of a carnivorous flower rimmed by “swordblades.”"

"Male mastery in marriage is a social illusion, nurtured by women exhorting their creations to play and walk. At the emotional heart of every marriage is a pietà of mother and son."

"Art advances by self-mutilation of the artist."

"The Nefertiti bust is one of the most popular art works in the world. It is printed on scarves and molded in necklace pendants and coffee-table miniatures. But never in my experience is the bust exactly reproduced. The copyist softens it, feminizes it and humanizes it. The actual bust is intolerably severe. It is too uncanny an object for domestic display. Even art books lie. The bust is usually posed in profile or at an angle, so that the missing left pupil is hidden or shadowed. What happened to the eye?"

"Nefertiti is like Athena born from the brow of Zeus, a head-heavy armored goddess. She is beautiful but desexed."

"Homeric mind is ingenuity, practical intelligence. There is no Rodin-like deep thinking, no mathematical or philosophical speculation. Odysseus thinks with his hands."

"At the opening of the Odyssey, Telemachus, inspired by the male-born Athena, searches for his father by turning against his mother. Jesus too publicly spurns his mother to be about his father’s business. Male adulthood begins with the breaking of female chains."

"Male tumescence is an assertion of the separateness of objects. An erection is architectural, sky-pointing. Female tumescence, through blood or water, is slow, gravitational, amorphous. In the war for human identity, male tumescence is an instrument, female tumescence an obstruction. The fatty female body is a sponge. At peak menstrual and natal moments, it is locked passively in place, suffering wave after wave of Dionysian power."

"The Apollonian and Dionysian, two great western principles, govern sexual personae in life and art. My theory is this: Dionysus is identification, Apollo objectification. Dionysus is the empathic, the sympathetic, emotion transporting us into other people, other palaces, other times. Apollo is the hard, cold separation of western personality and categorical thought. Dionysus is energy, ecstasy, hysteria, promiscuity, emotionalism -- heedless indiscriminateness of idea or practice. Apollo is obsessiveness, voyeurism, idolatry, fascism -- frigidity and aggression of the eye, petrification of objects. … The quarrel between Apollo and Dionysus is the quarrel between the higher cortex and the older limbic and reptilian brains."

"Women played no part in Athenian high culture. They could not vote, attend the theatre, or walk in the stoa talking philosophy. But the male orientation of Greek culture was inseparable of its genius. Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny."

"The Orestia shows that society is a defense against nature. Everything intelligible -- institutions, objects, persons, ideas -- is the result of Apollonian clarification, adjudication, and action. Western politics, science, psychology and art are creations of arrogant Apollo. Through every century, winning or losing, western mind has struggled to keep nature at bay. The Orestia’s sexist transition from matriarchy to patriarchy records the rebellion every imagination must make against nature. Without that rebellion, we as a species are condemned to regression or stasis. Even rebelling, we cannot get far. But vying with fate is godlike."

"Greek pederasty honored the erotic magnetism of male adolescence in a way that today brings police to the door. Children are more conscious and perverse than parents like to think."

"Visionary idealism is a male art form. The lesbian aesthete does not exist. But if there were one, she would have learned from the perverse male mind."

"Women have ironically enjoyed a greater symbolic, if not practical freedom. Thus it is that male and not female homosexuality has been harshly punished by law. A debater in Lucian declares, “Far better that a women, in the madness of her lust, should usurp the nature of man, than that man’s noble nature should be so degraded as to play the woman.” Similarly today, lesbian interludes are a staple of heterosexual pornography. Ever since man emerged from the dominance of nature, masculinity has been the most fragile and problematic of psychic states."

"Effeminate men have suffered a bad press the world over."

"Judaism’s campaign to make divinity invisible has never fully succeeded. Images are always eluding moral control, creating the brilliant western art tradition. Idolatry is fascism of the eye. The western eye will be served, with or without the consent of conscience."

"What is Mona Lisa thinking? Nothing, of course. Her blankness is her menace and our fear. [...] Walter Pater is to call her a 'vampire,' coasting through history on her secret tasks."

"Oil painting and color, said Michelangelo, are for “women and the lazy.” His sharp-edged Apollonian style is the only way to beat back mother nature."

"I cannot be convinced that great artists are moralists. Art is first appearances, then meaning."

"The Fairie Queene makes cinema out of the west's primary principle: to see is to know; to know is to control. The Spenserian eye cuts, wounds, rapes."

"The Faerie Queene is the most extended and extensive meditation on sex in the history of poetry. It charts the entire erotic spectrum, a great chain of being rising from matter to spirit, from the coarsest lust to chastity and romantic idealism. The poem’s themes of sex and politics are parallel: the psyche, like society, must be disciplined by good government. Spenser agrees with the classical and Christian philosophers on the primacy of reason over animal appetites. He looks forward to the Romantic poets, however, in the way that he shows the sex impulse as ultimately daemonic and barbaric, breeding witches and sorcerers of evil allure. Like the Odyssey, The Faerie Queene is a heroic epic in which the masculine must evade female traps or delays."

"The sixteenth century transformed Middle English into modern English. Grammar was up for grabs. People made up vocabulary and syntax as they went along. Not until the eighteenth century would rules of English usage appear. Shakespearean language is a bizarre super-tongue, alien and plastic, twisting, turning, and forever escaping. It is untranslatable, since it knocks Anglo-Saxon root words against Norman and Greco-Roman importations sweetly or harshly, kicking us up and down rhetorical levels with witty abruptness. No one in real life ever spoke like Shakespeare’s characters. His language does not “make sense,” especially in the greatest plays. Anywhere from a third to a half of every Shakespearean play, I conservatively estimate, will always remain under an interpretive cloud. Unfortunately, this fact is obscured by the encrustations of footnotes in modern texts, which imply to the poor cowed student that if only he knew what the savants do, all would be as clear as day. Every time I open Hamlet, I am stunned by its hostile virtuosity, its elusiveness and impenetrability. Shakespeare uses language to darken. He suspends the traditional compass points of rhetoric, still quite firm in Marlowe, normally regarded as Shakespeare’s main influence. Shakespeare’s words have “aura.” This he got from Spenser, not Marlowe."

"The idea that the stars literally influence men (by a falling fluid, an influenza) is plainly untenable. But that the movements of the constellations are a clock by which earthly changes can be measured is less easy to dismiss."

"I subscribe to Jung's theory of synchronicity."

"Romanticism, like the Rousseauist Swinging Sixties, misunderstands the Dionysian as the pleasure principle, when it is in fact the gross continuum of pleasure-pain. Worshiping nature and seeking political and sexual freedom, Romanticism ends in imaginative entrammelment of every kind. Perfect freedom is intolerable and therefore impossible."

"We remain in the Romantic cycle initiated by Rousseau: liberal idealism canceled by violence, barbarism, disillusionment and cynicism."

"In Romanticism, unlike the Renaissance, Amazons retain their power. Rousseau wants it both ways. Idolizing women is natural and right, a cosmic law. On the other hand, male recessiveness is blamed on female coercion. Either way, sadomasochistic dominance and submission are inherent in Rousseausism from the start."

"Sade has barely made a dent on American academic consciousness. It is his violence far more than his sex which is so hard for liberals to accept. For Sade, sex is violence. Violence is the authentic spirit of mother nature."

"Simply follow nature, Rousseau declares. Sade, laughing grimly, agrees."

"Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egoism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper."

"Every male copulating with a woman returns to his origins in the womb. Goethe postponed intercourse until he was forty. This must be related to his self-imposed distance from his forceful mother. To refuse phallic penetration is to refuse surrender to the female matrix."

"The Gothic tradition was begun by Ann Radcliffe, a rare example of a woman creating an artistic style."

"The thrill of terror is passive, masochistic, and implicitly feminine. It is imaginative submission to overwhelming superior force."

"Butchery is not the point of vampirism. Sex - domination and submission - is."

"Woman's flirtatious arts of self-concealment mean man's approach must take the form of rape."

"Personality maintains its discreetness by an act of will. Otherwise one person will flow helplessly into another."

"In 'A Room of One's Own', Virginia Woolf satirically describes her perplexity at the bulging card catalog of the British Museum: why, she asks, are there so many books written by men about women but none by women about men? The answer to her question is that from the beginning of time men have been struggling with the threat of woman's dominance."

"Gautier says, “Baudelaire abhorred philanthropy, progressivists, utilitarians, humanitarians and utopianists.” In other words, Baudelaire condemned Rousseausism in all its forms. Today, Rousseausism has so triumphed that the arts and the avant-garde are synonymous with liberalism, an error enforced by literature teachers, with their humanist bias. I follow the Decadents in trying to drive Rousseauist benevolence out of the discourse in art and literature. The Decadents satirized the liberal faith in progress with sizzling prophecies of catastrophe and cultural collapse."

"Tranvestism is far more common among men, I noted, because it originates in the primary relation of mother and son."

"Charisma is the radiance produced by the interaction of male and female elements in a gifted personality. The charismatic woman has a masculine force and severity. The charismatic man has an entrancing female beauty. Both are hot and cold, glowing with presexual self-love."

"The reason Wilde did his best work after turning homosexual is that women simply reinforced his own feminine sentimentality. … Heterosexuality inhibited his imagination because woman is physically and psychologically internal."

"[Henry] James’s repressions and evasions are many, varied and exhausting. Why more people are not seen rushing shrieking from libraries, shredding James novels in their hands, I cannot say. I used to wonder whether enthusiasm for him was based on identification, since his passive, tentative heroes resemble many academics. Perhaps what is intolerable is his enshrinement in a soporific criticism. So much must be overlooked to crown him with laurel."

"Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility."

"Emily Dickinson is the female Sade, and her poems are the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated, sadomasochistic imaginist. When she is rescued from American Studies departments and juxtaposed with Dante and Baudelaire, her barbarities and diabolical acts of will become glaringly apparent. Dickinson inherits through Blake the rape cycle of The Faerie Queene. Blake and Spenser are her allies in helping pagan Coleridge defeat Protestant Wordsworth."

"Richard Chase declares, "No great poet has written so much bad verse as Emily Dickinson." He blames the Victorian cult of little women for the fact that "two thirds of her work" is seriously flawed: "Her coy and oddly childish poems of nature and female friendship are products of a time when one of the careers open to women was perpetual childhood." Dickinson's sentimental feminine poems remain neglected by embarrassed scholars. I would maintain, however, that her poetry is a closed system of sexual reference and that the mawkish poems are designed to dovetail with those of violence and suffering."

"Women have been discouraged from genres such as sculpture that require studio training or expensive materials. But in philosophy, mathematics, and poetry, the only materials are pen and paper. Male conspiracy cannot explain all female failures. I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant. Genius is not checked by social obstacles: it will overcome. Men's egotism, so disgusting in the talentless, is the source of their greatness as a sex. [...] Even now, with all vocations open, I marvel at the rarity of the woman driven by artistic or intellectual obsession, that self-mutilating derangement of social relationship which, in its alternate forms of crime and ideation, is the disgrace and glory of the human species."

"It is no coincidence that while some major female artists have married, very few have borne children. The issue is not conservation of energy but imaginative integrity. Art is its own self-swelling, proof that the mind is greater than the body."

"Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson stand alone above women poets, because poetry's mystical energies are ruled by a hierach requiring the sexual subordination of her petitioners. Women have achieved more as novelists than as poets because the social novel operates outside the ancient marriage of myth and eroticism."

"In today's impoverished dialogue, critiques of liberalism are often naively called "conservative," as if twenty-five hundred years of Western intellectual tradition presented no other alternatives."

"Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy."

"We do not need French post-structuralism, whose pedantic jargon, clumsy convolutions, and prissy abstractions have spread throughout academe and the arts and are now blighting the most promising minds of the next generation. This is a major crisis if there ever was one, and every sensible person must help bring it to an end."

"Academic Marxists, with their elitist sense of superiority to popular taste, are the biggest snobs in America."

"When in doubt, I read Oscar Wilde."

"Madonna won my undying loyalty by reviving and re-creating the hard glamour of the studio-era Hollywood movie queens, figures of mythological grandeur. Contemporary feminism cut itself off from history and bankrupted itself when it spun its paranoid fantasy of male oppressors and female sex-object victims. Woman is the dominant sex. Woman’s sexual glamour has bewitched and destroyed men since Delilah and Helen of Troy."

"Incompetent amateurs have given prostitution a bad name."

"For me, the Profumo affair symbolizes the evanescence of male government compared to women’s cosmic power."

"Feminism has tried to dismiss the femme fatale as a misogynist libel, a hoary cliche. But the femme fatale expresses woman's ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm. The specter of the femme fatale stalks all of men's relationships with women."

"Meryl Streep, in her Protestant way, is stuck on words; she flashes clever accents as a mask for her deeper failures. (And she cannot deliver a Jewish line; she destroyed Nora Ephron’s snappy dialogue in Heartburn.) Streep’s work doesn’t travel. Try dubbing her for movie houses in India: there’d be nothing left, just that bony, earnest horse face moving its lips. Imagine, on the other hand, lesser technicians like Hedy Lammarr, Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner: these women have an international and universal appeal, crossing the centuries. They would have been beautiful in Egypt, Greece, Rome, medieval Burgundy, or eighteenth-century Paris. Susan Hayward played Bathsheba. Try to picture Streep in a Bible epic! Streep is incapable of playing the great legendary or mythological roles. She has no elemental power, no smouldering sensuality."

"Gay and straight men have much more in common than do gay men with lesbians or straight men with straight women. Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he he just falls back into her and is swallowed up. This is the agonizing myth-pattern in the comic, matricidal Psycho (1960), one of the hauntingly emblematic films of our time."

"Contemporary feminists, who are generally poor or narrowly trained scholars, insist on viewing history as a weepy scenario of male oppression and female victimization. But it is more accurate to see men, driven by sexual anxiety away from their mothers, forming group alliances by male bonding to create complex structures of society, art, science and technology."

"When women cut themselves off from men, they sink backward into psychological and spiritual stagnancy."

"In insisting, for political purposes, on a sharp division between gay and straight, gay activism, like much of feminism, has become as rigid and repressive as the old order it sought to replace."

"When feminism and gay activism set themselves against organized religion, they have the obligation to put something better in its place."

"The saints, many of them women, warred with themselves as well as God. The body has its own animal urges, just as there are attractions and repulsions in sex that modern liberalism cannot face."

"I think it is one of the greatest pictures ever taken of a woman."

"What troubles me about the “hostile workplace” category of sexual harassment policy is that women are being returned to their old status of delicate flowers who must be protected from assault by male lechers. It is anti-feminist to ask for special treatment for women."

"A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt from woman, and is confirmed only by other men. Feminist fantasies about the ideal “sensitive” male have failed. Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all."

"Minerva save us from the cloying syrup of coercive compassion! What feminism does not need, it seems to me, is an endless recycling of Doris Day Fifties clichés about noble womanhood."

"Feminism was always wrong to pretend that women could “have it all.” It is not male society but mother nature who lays the heaviest burden on woman. No husband or day care can adequately substitute for a mother’s attention. My feminist heroes are the boldly independent and childless Amelia Earhart and Katherine Hepburn, who has been outspoken in her opposition to the delusion of “having it all.”"

"If you want to see what’s wrong with Ivy League education, look at The Beauty Myth, that book by Naomi Wolf. This is a woman who graduated from Yale magna cum laude, is a Rhodes scholar, and she cannot write a coherent paragraph. This is a woman who cannot do historical analysis, and she is a Rhodes scholar? If you want to see the damage done to intelligent women today in the Ivy League, look at that book. It's a scandal. Naomi Wolf is an intelligent woman. She has been ill-served by her education. But if you read Lacan, this is the result. Your brain turns to pudding. She has a case to make. She cannot make it. She’s full of paranoid fantasies about the world. Her education was completely removed from reality."

"[W]omen will never be taken seriously until they accept full responsibility for their sexuality."

"The idea that feminism is the first group that has ever denounced rape is a gross libel to men. Throughout history, rape has been condemned by honorable men. Honorable men do not murder; honorable men do not steal; honorable men do not rape. It goes all the way back through history. Tarquin’s rape of Lucretia caused the fall of the tyrants and the beginning of the Roman Republic. The idea that somehow suddenly feminism miraculously found out that women were being exploited and raped throughout history is ridiculous."

"[T]here’s a lot to be said for celibacy, for the concentration of your mental and physical energy."

"My position on date rape is partly based on my study of The Faerie Queen, as detailed in a full chapter in Sexual Personae: in 1590, the poet Edmund Spencer already sees that passive, drippy, naive women constantly get themselves into rape scenarios, while talented, intelligent, alert women, his warrior heroines, spot trouble coming and boldly trounce their male assailants. My feminism stresses courage, independence, self-reliance, and pride."

"Rape is an outrage that cannot be tolerated in a civilized society. Yet feminism, which has waged a crusade for rape to be taken more seriously, has put young women in danger by hiding the truth about sex from them."

"For a decade, feminists have drilled their disciples to say, “Rape is a crime of violence but not of sex.” This sugar-coated Shirley Temple nonsense has exposed young women to disaster. Misled by feminism, they do not expect rape from the nice boys from good homes who sit next to them in class."

"Feminism, coveting social power, is blind to women’s cosmic sexual power."

"Running to Mommy and Daddy on the campus grievance committee is unworthy of strong women."

"A male student makes vulgar remarks about your breasts? Don't slink off to whimper with the campus shrinking violets. Deal with it. On the spot. Say, "Shut up, you jerk! And crawl back to the barnyard where you belong!" In general, women who project this take-charge attitude towards life get harassed less often. I see too many dopey, immature, self-pitying young women walking around like melting sticks of butter."

"Beware of the manipulativeness of rich students who were neglected by their parents. They love to turn the campus into hysterical psychodramas of sexual transgression, followed by assertions of parental authority and concern. And don’t look for sexual enlightenment from academe, which spews out mountains of books but never looks at life directly."

"I am saying that many of the problems between the sexes are coming from something prior to socialization, a turbulence that has to do with every boy’s origin in a woman’s body, and the way he is overwhelmed by this huge, matriarchal shadow of a goddess figure from his childhood. And I feel, after so many decades of studying this, that men are suffering from a sense of dependence on women, their sense that at any moment they could be returned to that slavery and servitude they experienced under a woman’s thumb, when they were a boy in the shadow of the mother. I got this from studying all world culture, and comparing and noticing how often there were these similar patterns in many different cultures. Many things that erupt in rape or violence, or battery and so on, are happening when a woman is pushing that button of fear and dependency."

"I am being vilified by feminists for merely having a common-sense attitude about rape. I loathe this thing about date rape. Have twelve tequilas at a fraternity party and a guy asks you to go up to his room, and then you're surprised when he assaults you? Most women want to be seduced or lured. The more you study literature and art, the more you see it. Listen to Don Giovanni. Read The Faerie Queene. Pursuit and seduction are the essence of sexuality. It’s part of the sizzle. Girls hurl themselves at guitarists, right down to the lowest bar band here. The guys are strutting. If you live in rock and roll, as I do, you see the reality of sex, of male lust and women being aroused by male lust. It attracts women. It doesn't repel them. Women have the right to freely choose and to say yes or no. Everyone should be personally responsible for what happens in life. I see the sexual impulse as egotistical and dominating, and therefore I have no problem understanding rape. Women have to understand this correctly and they'll protect themselves better. If a real rape occurs, it's got to go to the police. The business of having a campus grievance committee decide whether or not a rape is committed is an outrageous infringement of civil liberties. Today, on an Ivy League campus, if a guy tells a girl she's got great tits, she can charge him with sexual harassment. Chickenshit stuff. Is this what strong women do?"

"It’s these guys in the Ivy League schools who get used to obeying women. They’re sedentary guys. It’s ironic that you’re getting the biggest bitching about men from the schools where the men are just eunuchs and bookworms."

"I’ve watched therapy getting more and more mushy in the past fifteen years in America.... It’s become what I call coercive compassion. It’s disgusting, it’s condescending, it’s insulting, it’s coddling, it keeps everyone in an infantile condition rather than in the adult condition that was the ultimate goal of Freudian analysis."

"Feminists have no idea that some women like to flirt with danger because there is a sizzle in it. You know what gets me sick and tired? The battered-woman motif. It’s so misrepresented, the way we have to constantly look at it in terms of male oppression and tyranny, and female victimization. When, in fact, everyone knows throughout the history of the world that many of these working-class relationships where women get beat up have hot sex. They ask why won’t she leave him? Maybe she won’t leave him because the sex is very hot. I say we should start looking at the battered-wife motif in terms of sex. If gay men go down to bars and like to get tied up, beaten up, and have their asses whipped, how come we can’t allow that a lot of wives like the kind of sex they are getting in these battered wife relationships? We can’t consider that women have kinky tastes, can we? No, because women are naturally benevolent and nurturing, aren’t they? Everything is so damn Mary Poppins and sanitized."

"What women have to realize is their own dominance as a sex. That women’s sexual powers are enormous. All cultures have seen it. Men know it. Women know it. The only people who don’t know it are feminists. Desensualized, desexualized, neurotic women. I wouldn’t have said this twenty years ago because I was a militant feminist myself. But as the years have gone on, I began to see more and more that the perverse, neurotic psychodramas projected by these women is coming from their own problems with sex."

"I feel that the moment a date happens that it’s a social encounter that is potentially a sexual encounter. And the question of sex needs to be negotiated from the first moment on."

"Men knew that if they devirginized a woman, they could end up dead within twenty-four hours. These controls have been removed."

"Feminism’s claim that it discovered rape is simply false."

"The truth is that Foucault knew very little about anything before the seventeenth century and, in the modern world, outside France. His familiarity with the literature and art of any period was negligible. His hostility to psychology made him incompetent to deal with sexuality, his own or anybody else’s. The elevation of Foucault to guru status by American and British academics is a tale that belongs to the history of cults."

"The more you know, the less you are impressed by Foucault."

"Many, perhaps most, very learned people prefer the company of their books to sitting in a crowd listening to history and art being mangled; furthermore, it is unlikely that the venerable scholars will stand up afterward to declare, “This lecture was a load of crap.” The more profound a professor’s distaste with the proceedings, the more likely he is to melt away at the end of the talk."

"Not since the Black Panthers sailed into their Upper East Side tea party has there been so daffy an exercise in radical chic."

"In 1974 I nearly got into a fistfight with some early academic feminists in a restaurant when I casually alluded to a hormonal element in sex differences. It was utterly unacceptable at that time to think or say such a thing. … If you have any doubts about the effect of hormones on emotion, libido and aggression, have a chat with a transexual, who must take hormones medically. He or she will set you straight."

"As a philosopher sympathetic to Foucault recently remarked to me, Foucault failed in each of his major inquiries and, in desperation, went further afield from his areas of expertise. The History of Sexuality is a disaster. Page after page is sheer fantasy, unsupported by the ancient or modern historical record."

"Foucault, like David Letterman, made smirking glibness an art form."

"The born-yesterday French-besotted faddists, addicted sniffers of wet printer’s ink, think they’re starting on the ground floor; so they’re condemned to another hundred years of trial and error. The rest of us can safely ignore them."

"Sappho and Emily Dickinson are the only woman geniuses in poetic history."

"Feminism, in all fields, has yet to produce a single scholar of the intellectual rank of scores of these learned men [e.g., Bruno Snell, Albin Lesky, Denys Page] in the German and British academic tradition."

"I am a passionate admire of Sappho, but that has to be one of the stupidest sentences I have ever seen in a scholarly book."

"In high school in the early Sixties, I dreamed of intellectual work by women that would match the highest male standards and set men on their ear. A lot of women have done a lot of academic work since then, but most of them fall short of that standard."

"The number one problem in academia today is not ignorant students but ignorant professors, who have substituted narrow “expertise” and “theoretical sophistication” (a preposterous term) for breadth and depth of learning in the world history of art and thought. … Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Overconcentration on any one point is a distortion. This is one of the primary reasons for the dullness and ineptitude of so much twentieth-criticism, as compared to nineteenth-century belles-lettres."

"Hollywood movies of the Fifties, like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, with their epic clash of pagan and Judeo-Christian cultures, tell more about art and society than the French-infatuated ideologues who have made a travesty of the “best” American higher criticism."

"The spiritual history of the Sixties has yet to be written."

"Lacan, Derrida and Foucault are the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality, trapped in verbal formulas and perennially defeated by circumstances. They offer a self-exculpating cosmic explanation for the normal professorial state of resentment, alienation, dithering passivity and inaction."

"Lacan is a tyrant who must be driven from our shores. Narrowly trained English professors who know nothing of art history or popular culture think they can just wade in with Lacan and trash everything in sight."

"I realize now how lucky I was, in the total absence of role models, to have only men to rebel against. Today's women students are meeting their oppressors in dangerously seductive new form, as successful congenial female professors who view themselves as victims of a rigid foreign ideology."

"The followers of Derrida are pathetic, snuffling in French pockets for bits of pieces of a deconstructive method already massively and coherently presented — and with a mature sense of the sacred — in Buddhism and Hinduism."

"Robert Caserio recently said to me, “The whole profession has become a vast mimicry. The idea that there is open debate is an absolute fiction. There is only the Foucault monologue, the Lacan monologue, the Derrida monologue. There is no room for creative disagreement. No deviation from what is approved is tolerated.” These monologues are really one, the monotonous drone of the School of Saussure, which has cast its delusional inky cloud over modern academic thought. Never have so many been wrong about so much. It is positively idiotic to imagine that there is no experience outside of language. … It has been a truism of basic science courses for decades in America that the brain has multiple areas of function and that language belongs only to specific areas, injured by trauma and restored by surgery or speech therapy."

"The Sixties attempted a return to nature that ended in disaster."

"Everyone of my generation who preached free love is responsible for AIDS."

"The Seventies theory explosion [i.e., Literary theory, deconstruction, etc.] was a panic reaction by headlocked pedants unable to cope with the emotional and sensory flux of the Sixties. It was a desperate search for new authority, new dogma."

"The smouldering eroticism of great European actresses like Jeanne Moreau demonstrated to my generations women's archetypal mystery and glamour, completely missing from the totalitarian world-view of the misogynist Foucault. For me, the big French D is not Derrida, but Deneuve."

"Sedgwick has managed to convert pedestrian critical skills and little discernible knowledge in history, philosophy, psychology, art or even pre-modern literature into a lucrative academic career."

"The junk-bond era has also spawned something that calls itself New Historicism. This seems to be a refuge for English majors without critical talent or broad learning in history or political science. [...] To practice it, you must apparently lack all historical sense."

"There is a constant rush to judgment in Foucault. He is filled with specious generalizations, false categories, distortions, fudging, pretenses to knowledge in areas where he was ignorant. He had no ability whatsoever to distinguish among historical sources, where he makes terrible blunders."

"Foucault is the Cagliostro of our time."

"The most serious flaw of Foucault's system is in the area of sex. I view his hurried, compulsive writing as a massive rationalist defense-formation to avoid thinking about (a) woman, (b) nature, (c) emotion, and (d) the sexual body. His attempt to make the body passive property of male society is an evasion of the universal fact so intolerable to him: that we are all born of human mothers. By turning women into ciphers, he miniaturizes and contains them."

"It was in reading Tristam Shandy that I noticed how it is primarily men who gravitate towards the game-playing self-reflexive style. There is an alienation from emotion in it, a Nervous Nelly fear of letting go and being “exposed.” As an attitude towards life, it betrays a perpetual adolescence. Those who hurled themselves after Derrida were not the most sophisticated but the most pretentious, and least creative members of my generation of academics."

"The post-war "publish or perish" tyranny must end. The profession has become obsessed with quantity rather than quality. [...] One brilliant article should outweigh one mediocre book."

"The piddling ignoramuses who deny that there is a distinct, discernible, objective western tradition are just woozy literati."

"Imperialism and slavery are no white male monopoly, but are everywhere from Egypt, Assyria, and Persia to India, China and Japan."

"Modernization means Westernization."

"Women's studies is institutionalized sexism."

"Women's studies is a comfy, chummy morass of unchallenged groupthink. It is, with rare exception, totally unscholarly. Academic feminists have silenced men and dissenting women."

"Women's studies needed a syllabus and so invented a canon overnight. It puffed up clunky, mundane contemporary women authors into Oz-like, skywriting dirigibles. Our best women students are being force-fed an appalling diet of cant, drivel and malarkey."

"American feminism’s nose dive began when Kate Millet, that imploding beanbag of poisonous self-pity, declared Freud a sexist. Trying to build a sex theory without studying Freud, women have made nothing but mud pies."

"Great women scholars like Jane Harrison and Gisela Richter were produced by the intellectual discipline of the masculine classical tradition, not the wishy-washy sentimentalism of clingy, all-forgiving sisterhood, from which no first-rate book has yet emerged. Every year, feminists provide more and more evidence for the old charge that women can neither think nor write."

"Academic Marxism is a fantasy world, and unctuous compassion-sweepstakes, into which real workers or peasants never penetrate."

"The signal failure of the academic Marxists is in their obliviousness to the transformation of modern labor. In the age of mass media, power has shifted its meaning and loci. Capitalism, whatever its problems, remains the most efficient economic mechanism yet to bring the highest quality of life to the greatest number. Because I have studied the past, I know that, in America and under capitalism, I am the freest woman in history. Union blue-collar jobs now routinely pay higher salaries than are earned by most teachers. Physical labor, as a concrete skill occupation, is free of the soul-destroying office politics suffers by the Marxists' demonized managerial class, who take their jobs home with them and are in a continual funk of anxiety and neurosis. … Unharried weekend leisure time is the center of working-class American life in ways the academic Marxists, resentfully marking papers and endlessly pressed for time, simply don't see."

"Hitchcock finds women captivating but dangerous. She allures by nature but she is chief artificer in civilisation, a magic fabricator of persona whose very smile is an arc of deception."

"Ten thousand years ago, when man the nomad took root in one place, he brought animals with him into human service. But domestication was to be his fate too, as he fell under architecturally reinforced female control."

"I want a revamped feminism. Putting the vamp back means the lady must be a tramp. My generation of Sixties rebels wanted to smash the bourgeois codes that had become the authoritarian totems of the Fifties. The 'nice' girl with her soft, sanitized speech and decorous manners had to go. Thirty years later, we're still stuck with her — in the official spokesmen and the anointed heiresses of the feminist establishment... Equal opportunity feminism, which I espouse, demands the removal of all barriers to woman's advance in the political and professional world — but not at the price of special protections for women which are infantilizing and anti-democratic."

"Women will never succeed at the level or in the numbers they deserve until they get over their genteel reluctance to take abuse in the attack and counterattack of territorial warfare. The recent trend in feminism, notably in sexual harassment policy, has been to overrely on regulation and legislation rather than to promote personal responsibility. Women must not become wards and supplicants of authority figures. Freedom means rejecting dependency."

"I admire hard-bitten, wisecracking realism of Ida Lupino and the film noir heroines. I’m sick of simpering white girls with their princess fantasies."

"Just released in 1994 is Christina Hoff Sommers’s landmark study, Who Stole Feminism?, which uses ingenious detective work to unmask the shocking fraud and propaganda of establishment feminism and the servility of American media and academe to Machiavellian feminist manipulation. This bracingly precise, fact-based book should be required reading for every journalist. Sommers is a courageous academic philosopher who was one of the very first to systematically critique current feminist ideology and who took tremendous abuse for it. … Sommers has done a great service for women and for feminism, whose fundamental precepts she has clarified and strengthened."

"Economic analysis is the first principle of Marxism. Professors who were genuine leftists would have challenged the entire economics-driven machinery of American academe — the wasteful multidepartmental structure, the divisive pedantry of overspecialization, the cronyism and sycophancy in recruitment and promotion, the boondoggling ostentation of pointless conferences, the exploitation of graduate students and part-time teachers, the subservience of faculty to overpaid administrators, the mediocrity and folly of the ruling cliques of the Modern Language Association."

"Most professors know that American higher education in the humanities is in a deplorable state. Yet many remain silent, perhaps through prudent self-preservation, which is starting to look a lot like moral cowardice. They have put loyalty to their colleagues before loyalty to their students, ostensibly the raison d'être for educational institutions. How many more minds must be distorted or destroyed before the faculty decides to defend the Western intellectual values of free inquiry and orderly acquisition of knowledge?"

"The venerable emeritus professors still at Yale when I entered graduate school [in the 1960s] may have been reserved, puritanical WASPs, but they were men of honor who had given their lives to scholarship. Today in the elite schools, honor and ethics are gone."

"I do not believe in God, but I believe God is man’s greatest idea. Those incapable of religious feeling or those (like hard-core gay activists) who profane sacred ground do not have the imagination to educate the young. … Until the left comes to its senses about the cultural power of religion, the right will continue to broaden its appeal."

"Is there intellectual life in America? At present, the answer is no."

"I hate dogma in any form. I hated it in the Catholic Church and Girl Scout troops of the 1950s, and I hate in in gay activism and established feminism today."

"In the summer camp mentality of American universities, the ferocity of genuine intellectual debate would just seem like spoiling everyone’s fun. Ambitious humanities professors go about the business behind a brick wall of “theory,” which they imagine is the dernier cri, but which has long been out of fashion, even in Paris. Drab, uncultivated philistines, without broad knowledge of the arts, have seized the top jobs in the Ivy League, simply because they have the right opinions and know the right people. In the past twenty years, conferences became the infernal engine driving the academic profession. The conference crowd, an international party circuit of literary luminaries ever on the move, was put together by the new humanities centers. These programs had the initially laudable aim of fostering interdisciplinary exchanges outside the repressive framework of the conservative, static and over-tenured university departments. But the epidemic of French theory was abroad in the world. The humanities centers quickly became careerist stockyards, where greedy speculation and insider trading were as much the rules of the game as on Wall Street."

"Even the most morbid of the rape ranters have a childlike faith in the perfectibility of the universe, which they see as blighted solely by nasty men. They simplistically project outward onto a mythical "patriarchy" their own inner conflicts and moral ambiguities."

"What feminism calls patriarchy is simply civilization, an abstract system designed by men but augmented and now co-owned by women."

"White middle-class girls at the elite colleges and universities seem to want the world handed to them on a platter. They have been sheltered, coddled and flattered. Having taught at a wide variety of institutions over my ill-starred career, I have observed that working-class or lower-middle-class girls, who are from financially struggling families and must take a patchwork of menial jobs to stay in school, are usually the least hospitable to feminist rhetoric. They see life as it is and have fewer illusions about sex. It is affluent, upper-middle class students who most spout the party line — as if the grisly hyperemotionalism of feminist jargon satisfies their hunger for meaningful experiences outside their eventless upbringing. In the absence of war, invent one."

"Women are not in control of their bodies; nature is. Ancient mythology, with its sinister archetypes of vampire and Gorgon, is more accurate than feminism about the power and terror of female sexuality."

"Man has traditionally ruled the social sphere; feminism tells him to move over and share his power. But woman rules the sexual and emotional sphere, and there she has no rival. Victim ideology, a caricature of social history, blocks women from recognition of their dominance in the deepest, most important realm."

"Ambitious young women today are taught to ignore or suppress every natural instinct, if it conflicts with the feminist agenda posed on them. All literary and artistic works, no matter how great, that document the ambivalence of female sexuality they are trained to dismiss as “misogynous.” In other words, their minds are being programmed to secede from their bodies … there is a huge gap between feminist rhetoric and women’s actual sex lives, where feminism is of little help except with a certain stratum of deferential, malleable, white middle-class men."

"All men — even, I have written, Jesus Christ — began as flecks of tissue inside a woman's womb. Every boy must stagger out of the shadow of a mother goddess, whom he never fully escapes."

"The dishonesty and speciousness of the feminist rape analysis are demonstrated by its failure to explore, or even mention, man-on-man sex crimes. If rape were really just a process of intimidation of women by men, why do men rape and kill other men? The deceptively demure persona of the soft-spoken, homosexual serial-murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, like that of the handsome, charming Ted Bundy, should warn everyone that we still live in a sexual jungle."

"When feminist discourse is unable to discriminate the drunken fraternity brother from the homicidal maniac, women are in trouble."

"Following the sexual revolution of the Sixties, dating has become a form of Russian roulette. Some girls have traditional religious values and mean to remain virgins until marriage. Others are leery of AIDS, unsure of what they want, but can be convinced. For others, anything goes: they’ll jump into bed on the first date. What’s a guy to do?"

"Films of the mating behavior of most other species — a staple of public television of America — demonstrate that the female chooses. Males pursue, show off, brawl, scuffle, and make general fools of themselves for love. A major failing of most feminist ideology is its dumb, ungenerous stereotyping of men as tyrants and abusers, when in fact — as I know full well from my own mortifying lesbian experience — men are tormented by women’s flirtatiousness and hemming and hawing, their manipulations and changeableness, their humiliating rejections. Cock teasing is a universal reality. It is part of women’s merciless testing and cold-eyed comparison shopping for potential mates. Men will do anything to win the favor of women."

"As a teacher, I have seen time and again a certain kind of American middle-class girl who projects winsome malleability, a soft, unfocused help-me-please persona that, in adult life, is a recipe for disaster. These are the ones who end up with a string of abusive boyfriends or in sticky situations with overfamiliar male authority figures who call them “honey.”"

"Shocked disbelief greets suggestions that many women may take pleasure in rape fantasies, established long ago by Nancy Friday in her pioneering 1973 study, My Secret Garden, and dramatized today by the staggering mass-market popularity of Harlequin Romances, where heroines are overwhelmed by passionate, impetuous men."

"Patriarchy, routinely blamed for everything, produced the birth control pill, which did more to free contemporary women than feminism itself."

"With their propagandistic frame of mind, feminist leaders never admitted that their opponents could be equally motivated by ethics."

"We must philosophically strengthen feminist theory so that it can admit that abortion is an aggressive act, that it is a form of extermination. Modern woman has become an agent of Darwinian triage. It is or should be ethically troubling: abortion pits the stronger against the weaker, and only one survives. The feminist coat-hanger symbol, prophesying the return of back-alley butchery if abortion is regulated or banned, is dishonest. A small number of women may die in botched procedures, but in successful abortions, the fetus death rate is 100 percent."

"Feminists had an astoundingly naive view of the mutual exclusiveness of sex and aggression, which, Freud demonstrates, are fused in the amoral unconscious, as revealed to us through dreams. That rape is simply what used to be called “unbridled lust,” like gluttony a sin of insufficient self-restraint, seems to be beyond the feminist ken."

"In the Seventies, women runners, developing amenorrhea and calcium-related shin splints, were the first to realize that nature is hovering over us, ready to shut down our systems if our fetus-feeding fat reserve drops below a certain percentage of body weight. In other words, in nature's eyes we are nothing but milk sacs and fat deposits."

"The Bobbit case, which brought to life the ancient mythic archetype of woman as castrator, demonstrated that women are as aggressive as men and that sex is a dark, dangerous force of nature. But of course the feminist establishment, stuck in its battered-woman blinders, learned nothing as usual from this lurid refutation of its normal views. Classic art works like Bizet’s Carmen tell us more about the irrationality of love, jealousy and revenge than do all the pat formulas of the counseling industry."

"The polemical tactic of exhibiting garish mugshot photos of women’s bruised faces evades the real issue. What led up to that moment in the emergency room? A video camera recording episode before and after the assault would upset the received black-and-white view of male ogres and female martyrs. This is not to excuse men for their scurrilous behavior; it is to awaken women their equal responsibility in dispute and confrontation."

"Any woman who stays with her abuser beyond the first incident is complicitous with him."

"In pondering why a battered woman does not leave, we must remember that gay men with a taste for violent “rough trade” have always paid for this kind of sex. Are women so perfect and angelic that we cannot imagine them having sadomasochistic impulses? When they are genuinely victimized, women deserve our pity. But victimization alone cannot explain everything in the tragicomedy of love."

"Much violence against women originates in emotional territory that they already command. By midlife and early old age, as the hormones of both genders change, women are in total, despotic control of their marriages."

"[W]earisome as it may seem, women must realize that, in making a commitment to a man, they have merged in his unconscious with his mother and have therefore inherited the ambivalence of that relationship."

"What I see is not a world of male oppression and female victimization but an international conspiracy by women to keep from men the knowledge of men's own frailty. A strange maternal protectiveness is at work."

"In negotiating with rejected lovers or husbands, women must stop thinking they can make everyone happy. In many cases of harassment and stalking, it is clear that the woman never learned how to terminate the fantasy — which requires resolution and decisiveness on their part. Wavering, dithering, or passive hysterical fear will only intensify or prolong pursuit."

"The [sexual harassment] situation has gotten so out of hand that, in 1993, in one of the first British cases, a plumber was fired for continuing to use the traditional term "ballcock" for the toilet flotation unit, instead of the new politically correct term, sanitized of sexual suggestiveness. This is insane. We are back to the Victorian era, when table legs had to be draped lest they put the thought of ladies' legs into someone's dirty mind."

"Campus speech codes, that folly of the navel-gazing left, have increased the appeal of the right. Ideas must confront ideas. When hurt feelings and bruised egos are more important than the unfettered life of the mind, the universities have committed suicide."

"Woman's sexuality is disruptive of the dully mechanical workaday world, in which efficiency means uniformity. The problems of woman's entrance into the career system spring from more than male chauvinism. She brings nature into the social realm, which may be too small to contain it."

"In America, the best model yet for the first woman president can be found among the Texas feminists, notably Governor Ann Richards. East Coast feminists, like Gloria Steinem, who created the smug, superior feminist smirk (done to an unctuous turn by NOW president Patricia Ireland), have failed to produce a credible persona for national leadership, partly because of their juvenile, jeering attitude towards men. The irony is that the legal and media world inhabited by Steinem and her cronies is filled with bookish white-collar men who are the only ones in the world who actually listen to feminists rhetoric and can be guilt-tripped into trying to obey it. … In Texas, unlike the urban Northeast, men are men. Women politicians in that state have the toughness and grit to handle men at their most macho. Southern women, particularly those of the plantation-belt, “iron magnolia” school, are able to get what they want and still retain their graceful femininity."

"My prescription for women entering the war zone of the professions: study football. . . . Women who want to remake the future should look for guidance not to substitute parent figures but to the brash assertions of pagan sport."

"Men, gay or straight, can get beauty and lewdness into one image. Women are forever softening, censoring, politicizing."

"Idiotic statements like “porn degrades women” or “pornography is the subordination of women” are only credible if you never look at pornography. Preachers, senators and feminist zealots carry on about material they have no direct contact with. They usually rely on a few selectively culled inflammatory examples that bear little resemblance to the porn market as a whole. Most pornography shows women in as many dominant as subordinate positions, with the latter usually steamily consensual."

"Despite hundreds of studies, cause-and-effect relationship between pornography and violence has never been satisfactorily proved."

"Feminist anti-porn discourse virtually always ignores the gigantic gay male porn industry, since any mention of the latter would bring crashing to the ground the absurd argument that pornography is by definition the subordination of women."

"Far from poisoning the mind, pornography shows the deepest truth about sexuality, stripped of romantic veneer."

"From Stonewall to the first AIDS alert was only twelve short years. In the Eighties and early Nineties, displaced anxiety over the horror of AIDS turned gay activists into raging nihilists and monomaniacs, who dishonestly blamed the disease on the government and trampled on the rights of the gay majority, and whose errors of judgement materially aided the rise and consolidation of the far right. AIDS did not appear out of nowhere. It was a direct result of the sexual revolution, which my generation unleashed with the best intentions, but whose worst effects were to be suffered primarily by gay men."

"The gargantuan promiscuity of the Seventies gay male world was a pagan phenomenon, unequaled in scale since the Roman empire."

"I believe that the shocking toll of AIDS on gay men in the West was partly due to their Seventies delusionism that a world without women was possible. All-male energies, unbalanced and ravenous, literally tore the body apart."

"Pornography is art, sometimes harmonious, sometimes dissonant. Its glut and glitter are a Babylonian excess. Modern middle-class women cannot bear the thought that their hard-won professional achievements can be outweighed in an instant by a young hussy flashing a little tits and ass. But the gods have given her power, and we must welcome it. Pornography forces a radical reassessment of sexual value, nature’s bequest of our tarnished treasure."

"Homosexuality is not “normal.” On the contrary, it is a challenge to the norm; therein resides its eternally revolutionary character. Note I do not call it a challenge to the idea of a norm. Queer theorists — that wizened crew of flimflamming free-loaders — have tried to take the poststructuralist tack of claiming that there is no norm, since everything is relative and contingent. This is the kind of silly bind that word-obsessed people get into when they are deaf, dumb and blind to the outside world. Nature exists, whether academics like it or not. And in nature, procreation is the single, relentless rule. That is the norm. Our sexual bodies were designed for reproduction. Penis fits vagina: no fancy linguistic game-playing can change that biologic fact."

"There is no gay leader anywhere near the stature of Martin Luther King, because black activism drew on the profound spiritual tradition of the church, to which gay political rhetoric is childishly hostile."

"No one is “born gay.” The idea is ridiculous, but it is symptomatic of our overpoliticized climate that such assertions are given instant credence by gay activists and their media partisans. I think what gay men are remembering is that they were born different."

"I have found few lesbians with whom I can discourse for more than five minutes without hitting some tiresome barrier of resentment or ideology. … Again and again over the decades, as I did my time, in frustrated boredom, in lesbian bars, trying with spectacular lack of success to make friends or just converse, I would end up gabbing for hours with some stray gay man. He might have dropped out of school at fourteen, but he had opinions, tastes, energy, wit. Is there something innately different about the gay male brain?"

"When I meet gay men anywhere in the world, there is a spontaneity and a spirit of fun and mischief that lesbians seem incapable of."

"Men who shrink from penetration of the female body are paralyzed by justifiable apprehension, since they are returning to our uncanny site of origin."

"It is not male hatred of women but male fear of women that is the great universal."

"Lesbian feminists, for all their ideals of sisterhood and solidarity, can treat each other with a fickleness, a parasitic exploitativeness, and vicious spite that have to be seen to be believed."

"One of the most startling discoveries of my career was when I realized that the strongest women in the world are not lesbians but heterosexual women, who know how to handle men."

"The real butches are straight … dealing with and controlling men makes you stronger."

"I want to cry out to these young girls: Stop! Think! . . . For heaven's sake, don't fall down the rabbit hole of the lesbian scene. You will never escape, and your talent will wither on the vine. Your energy will be wasted and absorbed in repetition without progression. Women alone are Spenser's Bower of Bliss, enclosed, comfortable, and dangerous."

"Lesbians, said a lesbian friend wearily to me, are "program heads": "They need the structure. They have all the answers." Hence lesbians' omnipresence in the social welfare industry. Rejecting the father's competitive system, they substitute another that they imagine is based on female "caring" and "compassion" but is, in dismal effect, repressive, totalitarian, and hostile to art and dissent. The same friend memorably said to me long ago that lesbianism is caused by either "too much tit or not enough.""

"Because boys lack a biological marker like menstruation, to be man is to be not female. Contemporary feminism called this "misogyny," but it was wrong. Masculine identity is embattled and fragile. In the absence of opportunity for heroic physical action, as in the modern office world, women's goodwill is crucial for preserving the male ego, which requires, alas, daily maintenance. It is in the best interests of the human race, and of women themselves, for men to be strong."

"The unhappy truth is that male homosexuality will never be fully accepted by the heterosexual majority, who are obeying the dictates not of bigoted society or religion but of procreative nature."

"Gay activism has been naive in its belligerent confidence that “homophobia” will eventually disappear with proper “education” of the benighted. Reeducation of fractious young boys on the scale required would mean fascist obliteration of all individual freedoms. Furthermore, no truly masculine father would ever welcome an feminine or artistic son at the start, since the son’s lack of virility not only threatens but liquidates that father’s identity, dissolving husband into wife. Later there may be public rituals of acceptance, but the damage will already have been done. Gay men are aliens, cursed and gifted, the shamans of our time."

"It would be ridiculous to claim that gay men are interested only on other gay men and would never ogle straight men in barracks showers. When I heard this one on TV, I burst out laughing. Anyone who belongs to a health club knows better. Sexual tension and appraisal are constants, above all among gay men, who never stop cruising everything in sight. Seduction of straight studs is a highly erotic motif in gay porn."

"Middle-class men, neutered by office life and daunted by feminist rhetoric, are shrinking. Lesbianism is increasing, since anxious, unmasculine men have little to offer. Women are simply more interesting to them. Male homosexuality is increasing, because masculinity is in crisis and because maternal consciousness, severed from the support network of the extended family, has become a psychotic system, forcing the young to struggle for life against clinging personal fantasy."

"A pagan education would sharpen the mind, steel the will, and seduce the senses. Our philosophy should be both contemplative and pugilistic, admitting aggression (as Christianity does not) as central to our mythology. The beasts of passion must be confronted, and the laws of nature understood. Conflict cannot be avoided, but perhaps it can be confined to a mental theater."

"My own proposals for reform [in academia] include the abolition of all literary conferences and the replacement of women's studies with sex studies, based on the rigorous study of world history, anthropology, psychology, and science. Today, in politically correct America, questions of quality, learning, and intellectual distinction are out of style."

"MacKinnon is a totalitarian. She wants a risk-free, state controlled world. She believes rules and regulations will solve every human ill and straighten out all those irksome problems between the sexes that have been going on for five thousand years. As a lawyer, MacKinnon is deft and pragmatic. But as a political thinker, cultural historian or commentator on sex, she is incompetent. For a woman of her obvious intelligence, her frame of reference is shockingly small."

"Pornography does not cause rape or violence, which predate pornography by thousands of years. Rape and violence occur not because of patriarchal conditioning but because of the opposite, a breakdown of social controls."

"The instant myth of Amy Fisher turned feminist dogma on on is head: as in the hit films Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, woman rules and destroys. The femme fatale is for real."

"[Feminism] is alienating women from their own bodies … because they don’t understand that they have something that men want, okay? So they’re encouraged to interpret all male lust as oppressive and victimizing and negative, instead of seeing that it is up to them to husband this flame. They have a flame, and it’s enormously powerful…"

"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"

"I’m saying that men go from control by their mothers to control by their wives, and this is the horror of men’s lives. And feminism refuses to see this."

"The two deepest thinkers on sex in the twentieth century are Sigmund Freud and D. H. Lawrence. Their reputations as radical liberators were so universally acknowledged that brooding images of Freud and Lawrence in poster form adorned the walls of students in the Sixties. Yet the voluminous and complex works of both men were swept away by the current women's movement, when it burst out in the late Sixties and consolidated its ideology in the Seventies. Whatever their motives, the first feminist theorists acted as vandals and Bolsheviks. The damage they did to culture has in the long run damaged the cause of feminism."

"Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters."

"Feminism, for all its boasts, has not found a single major female painter or sculptor to add to the canon. It did revive the reputations of many minor women, like Frida Kahlo or Romaine Brooks. Mary Cassatt, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Helen Frankenthaler were already known and did not need rediscovery. Artemisia Gentileschi was simply a polished, competent painter in a Baroque style created by men."

"Dworkin, like Kate Millet, has turned a garish history of mental instability into feminist grand opera. Dworkin publicly boasts of her bizarre multiple rapes, assaults, beatings, breakdowns and tacky traumas, as if her inability to cope with life were the patriarchy’s fault rather than her own. She pretends to be a daring truth-teller but never mentions her most obvious problem: food."

"I'm absolutely a feminist. The reason other feminists don't like me is that I criticize the movement, explaining that it needs a correction. Feminism has betrayed women, alienated men and women, replaced dialogue with political correctness. PC feminism has boxed women in. The idea that feminism — that liberation from domestic prison — is going to bring happiness is just wrong. Women have advanced a great deal, but they are no happier. The happiest women I know are not those who are balancing their careers and families, like a lot of my friends are. The happiest people I know are the women — like my cousins — who have a high school education, got married immediately graduating and never went to college. They are very religious and they never question their Catholicism. They do not regard the house as a prison. … I look at my friends who are on the fast track. They are desperate, frenzied and frazzled, the most unhappy women who have ever existed. They work nights and weekends and have no lives. Some of them have children who are raised by nannies. … The entire feminist culture says that the most important woman is the woman with an attache case. I want to empower the woman who wants to say, "I'm tired of this and I want to go home." The far right is correct when it says the price of women's liberation is being paid by the children."

"We have allowed the sexual debate to be defined by women, and that's not right. Men must speak, and speak in their own voices, not voices coerced by feminist moralists."

"The women's movement is rooted in the belief that we don't even need men. All it will take is one natural disaster to prove how wrong that is. Then, the only thing holding this culture together will be masculine men of the working class. The cultural elite — women and men — will be pleading for the plumbers and the construction workers. We are such a parasitic class."

"At Bennington, I would go to a faculty meeting and be aware that everyone hated me. The men were appalled by a strong, loud woman. But I went to this auto shop and the men there thought I was cute. "Oh, there's that Professor Paglia from the college." The real men, men who work on cars, find me cute. They are not frightened by me, no matter how loud I am. But the men at the college were terrified because they are eunuchs, and I threatened every goddamned one of them."

"The problem with America is that there's too little sex, not too much. The more our instincts are repressed, the more we need sex, pornography and all that. The problem is that feminists have taken over with their attempts to inhibit sex. We have a serious testosterone problem in this country. … It's a mess out there. Men are suspicious of women's intentions. Feminism has crippled them. They don't know when to make a pass. If they do make a pass, they don't know if they're going to end up in court."

"I believe in moderate sexual harassment guidelines. But you can't the Stalinist situation we have in America right now, where any neurotic woman can make any stupid charge and destroy a man's reputation. If there is evidence of false accusation, the accuser should be expelled. Similarly, a woman who falsely accuses a man of rape should be sent to jail. My definition of sexual harassment is specific. It is only sexual harassment — by a man or a woman — if it is quid pro quo. That is, if someone says, "You must do this or I'm going to do that" — for instance, fire you. And whereas touching is sexual harassment, speech is not. I am militant on this. Words must remain free. The solution to speech is that women must signal the level of their tolerance — women are all different. Some are very bawdy. … You must develop the verbal tools to counter offensive language. That s life. Feminism has created a privileged, white middle class of girls who claim they're victims because they want to preserve their bourgeois decorum and passivity."

"We must examine the degree to which we coddle middle-class girls. There is something sick about it. The girls I see on campuses are often innocuous, with completely homogenized personalities, miserable, anorexic and bulimic. The feminist movement teaches them that it's men's fault, but it isn't. These girls go out into the world as heiresses of all the affluence in the universe. They are the most pampered and most affluent girls on the globe. So stop complaining about men. You're getting all the rewards that come with the nice-girl persona you've chosen. When you get into trouble and you're batting your eyes and someone is offending you and you are too nice to deal with it, that's a choice. Assess your persona. Realize the degree to which your niceness may invoke people to say lewd and pornographic things to you — sometimes to violate your niceness. The more you blush, the more people want to do it. Understand your part of it and learn to parry. Sex talk is a game. The girls in the Sixties loved it. If you don't want some professor to call you honey, tell him."

"I have lesbian impulses, so I understand how a man looks at a woman. … When I was growing up, it wasn't possible for me to do anything about my attraction to women. Lesbianism didn't exist in that time, as far as I knew."

"I understand when men complain about women giving mixed messages, because women have given me a lot of mixed messages. I understand the rage that this can cause. … A woman I'm talking with at some event says, "Let's leave here and go to this bar," which is a lesbian bar. We go to the bar and we're talking and then she says, "Let's go have coffee," and we go to this coffee shop and end up, at three in the morning, half a block from her apartment. Finally, she says, "All right, well, goodnight." She's ready to go home alone and I look at her, like, "What do you mean? Aren't we going to go back to your apartment?" "No." "What?" And she says, "Do you think I was leading you on?" Un-fucking-believable. I can't tell you the rage. I am, at that point, looking at her and.... All I can say is, if I had been an 18-year-old street kid instead of a 45-year-old woman, I would have stabbed her. I was completely humiliated and furious. If I had been a guy with a hard-on, I would have hit her."

"Most people aren't sure what's going to happen on a first date. Given that ambiguity, every woman must be totally aware at every moment that she is responsible for every choice she makes. … protect yourselves. See trouble coming."

"I collected 599 pictures of Elizabeth Taylor — some people find that obsessive. I collected 599. Not 600, but 599. I feel that genius and obsession be the same thing. It is rare when a woman is driven by obsession. Similarly, it is rare when a woman is a genius. That's why I said one of my most notorious sentences, that there is no woman Mozart because there is no woman Jack the Ripper. Men are more prone to obsession because they are fleeing domination by women. They flee to a chess game or to a computer or to fixing a car, or whatever, to attempt to complete their identities, because they always feel incomplete."

"The fact is, you get great art only from mutilated egos. Only mutilated egos are obsessive enough. When I entered graduate school in 1968, 1 thought women were going to have all these enormous achievements, that they would redo everything. Then I saw every one of my female friends — these great minds who were going to transform the world — get married, move because their husbands moved and have babies. I screamed at them: What are you doing? Finish your great book! But they all read me the riot act. They said, "Camille, we are not you." They said, "We want life. We want love. We want happiness. We are not happy — like you are — just living off ideas." I am weird."

"She is so deluded that she genuinely believes she speaks for all women. She's a victim of her own success. I liked the early Steinem. There was once a survey conducted for Time about who would make a good candidate for the first female president, and I wrote in Gloria Steinem. But now? Gloria Steinem is dissing men and dissing fashion and she's out having her hair streaked at Kenneth's. She became a socialite with a coterie. A lot of middle-aged white ladies still love her, but the media have been negligent regarding her."

"After the Sixties there was a collapse in almost everything we believed in. It culminated in the biological disaster of AIDS — an answer to every one of us who preached free love. … AIDS is a price paid for sins committed in the Sixties, and by gay men who took free love to extremes throughout the Seventies and had unrestrained, decadent, pagan sex. I support paganism in all its forms, but a price must be paid. I believed in free love, too, but we were wrong. It wasn't the Pope who was the problem. It wasn't the struggle with old-fashioned moral codes that was the problem. It was nature. Nature said, "Guess what? If you're going to be that promiscuous, I will off you." … I believe that nature rewards things that are in its best interest and punishes things that are not."

"My point is that you cannot force social change at a speed that it cannot go. Social change is evolutionary, not revolutionary. Deep social change takes time. And slowly the culture is changing. The MTV generation is far more tolerant, and that tolerance is growing."

"Clinton is in trouble and she (Joycelyn Elders) opens her mouth about masturbation. Can't she control herself? She was in the wrong job. In some ways she's like me — she says what she thinks. But then you shouldn't be part of politics. I would like Joycelyn Elders to be in a position to speak her mind and not worry about political consequences. You cannot have a nondiplomatic figure in a political appointment."

"The Democratic Party has to return to its populist base, to rediscover the party of FDR, the one that appealed to my grandfather and the factory workers and others. To do this, there must be a period of self-criticism. We must face this head-on or continue to be governed by the Republicans. We must examine how we set up the rise of Republicans on campuses, where the dissent should be coming from. It is explained by the lack of energy; and ideas from the other side. As a result, campuses are the most depressing places, devoid of passion."

"The left constantly identifies the pro-life advocates as misogynists and fanatics, but that doesn't represent most of those people. They are deeply religious and they truly believe that taking a life is wrong. If the left were to show respect for that position and acknowledge the moral conundrum of unwanted pregnancy, the opposition to abortion would lessen. We must acknowledge that people should be a little troubled by abortion. Not to acknowledge that this is a difficult decision is wrong. The procedure snuffs out a potential personality. … You have a stronger case if you give due respect to the other side. An abortion should be something that is wrestled with. And herein is the point. Though most people agree that abortion should be an option, there is something attractive about the deeply moral position of those against abortion, particularly when the other side is in a spiritual vacuum. There is nothing in kids' education anymore that tells them to revere anything. Traditional religions, with all their moral codes, are becoming increasingly attractive in light of the alternatives: the Prozac nation, or heroin, which has come back with a vengeance."

"Millions of kids are being maimed right now on Ritalin. I would have been given Ritalin. And there would have been no Sexual Personae, no nothing. We are castrating a whole generation of kids."

"The only problem I have with computers and television is that when all cultures on earth reach the stage we are at it will lead to a kind of homogenization."

"In the real world, very smart people fail and mediocre people rise. Part of what makes people fail or succeed are skills that have nothing to do with IQ. Also, the idea that intelligence can be gauged by an IQ test is erroneous."

"I loathe Meryl Streep. She was good in Silkwood, but she began to take herself very seriously. I'm reacting to the horrendous overpraise she has received. She is a calculated actress, a victim of her own WASP culture. I find her totally unconvincing. She has no passion. She has no deep elemental vibration. Jodie Foster is overpraised, too. I thought she was good in The Silence of the Lambs, and The Accused, but she's getting on my nerves."

"I am reverential to great stars. I don't want sexual congress with them. The writer in me reveres the artist in them."

"He was a revealing symbol. He called himself passive-aggressive. There was self-pity, whining. There was a diminishment, a diminution. He was sitting there in his sweater, hunched over his guitar, looking like a little lost boy. Compare that with the great figures of my generation: Jimi Hendrix. Pete Townshend. Keith Richards."

"I like Liz Phair, but there were these stupid women reviewers who said she's surpassing the Stones. Dream on."

"I had crushes on women — actually I loved charismatic, extreme people, women or men. By high school I was saying I must be a lesbian, because if you are attracted to women, you're a lesbian. I was also attracted to men, but I didn't get along with men."

"From early on, my father talked to me like an adult. One of the earliest things he did was teach me the Latin names of the parts of the body. He was very analytic. We had no money, but intellectual curiosity was encouraged, and my parents constantly talked with each other. This develops the brain. I remember listening and thinking, listening to voices talking, talking, talking. … My father died of cancer but lived long enough to see me famous, though not long enough to read my book fully. If he were alive I wouldn't be quite so outrageous, speaking about my sex life, for instance. I don't believe in embarrassing my family."

"I think intellectuals should be fascinated by my rise, what it reveals about the time. My critics are irrelevant, though. It tells how much I'm getting to them by how vitriolic they are. They refuse to deal with the ideas. But reviews don't reflect anything; the books are selling. A friend told me, "The attacks make you.""

"I am popular with certain people, but I'm still blocked out of the establishment. I hate that incestuous world. It makes me sick. It's impossible for anything truly original to get done. Thinking is not allowed. It's all PC. It is so horrible because it is a fossilized, parasitic version of Sixties philosophy."

"Because of the nature of the penis, men have performance anxiety, whereas no woman ever has to prove herself in this way. So men's egos are totally involved in performance, in doing, achieving. An erection is a kind of achievement. So is peeing. As I've said, a boy has to learn to aim in order to no longer be infantile. So it's an accomplishment. The male orgasm is short-lived and transient — and that's the irony of men's sexuality. It's ironic that feminism looks at the penis as power and violence when in fact it is very weak."

"It took most of my life to realize that men are not tyrants or egomaniacs. I had an epiphany in a shopping mall recently that put it all in perspective. I was having a piece of pizza and I saw all these teenage boys running around in the mall. They were wild. I looked at them and saw this desperation. When I was their age I hated those kinds of boys because they were so obnoxious. They are so involved in their status, gaining it, afraid of losing it. I'm glad I don't have to be that age again. So they sat down near me and they didn't notice me. I didn't exist on their radar map. I was thinking, This is great. I was watching. They were full of energy and life. And I suddenly realized, My God, the reason they are so loud, the reason they are so uncontrolled, the reason I hated them at that age is that they bond with each other against women. It was the first time they were able to be away from the control of a woman — their mothers. They were on their own and for this period they're very dangerous. Women have to watch out when they go to fraternity parties, because the men are all trying to up their status among one another and there is all this testosterone. And then some girl will snag them. And that's it. It's over for them. They get married and they're under the control of their wives forever. You hear these women all the time, on, like, Ricki Lake, saying, "You know, I have two children, but actually I have three children" about the husband, and it's true: The husband becomes a child again. Even when men are doing their share, taking out the garbage, doing the mopping, whatever, women are still running the household. They are in control and the men become subordinate again. So that's what the feminists are so worried about? Men who are subordinated by their mothers and then by their wives? Men are looking for maternal solace in women, and that's the nature of heterosexuality. Now you tell me, who really has all the power?"

"Interest in and patience with long, complex books and poems have alarmingly diminished not only among college students but college faculty in the US. It is difficult to imagine American students today, even at elite universities, gathering impromptu at midnight for a passionate discussion of big, challenging literary works like Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov -- a scene I witnessed in a recreation room strewn with rock albums at my college dormitory in upstate New York in 1965."

"As a classroom teacher for over thirty years, I have become increasingly concerned about evidence of, if not cultural decline, then cultural dissipation since the 1960s, a decade that seemed to hold such heady promise of artistic and intellectual innovation. Young people today are flooded with disconnected images but lack a sympathetic instrument to analyze them as well as a historical frame of reference in which to situate them. I am reminded of an unnerving scene in Stanley Kubrick's epic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, where an astronaut, his air hose cut by the master computer gone amok, spins helplessly off into space. The new generation, raised on TV and the personal computer but deprived of a solid primary education, has become unmoored from the mother ship of culture. Technology, like Kubrick's rogue computer, Hal, is the companionable servant turned ruthless master. The ironically self-referential or overtly politicized and jargon-ridden paradigms of higher education, far from helping the young to cope or develop, have worsened their vertigo and free fall. Today's students require not subversion of rationalist assumptions -- the childhood legacy of intellectuals born in Europe between the two World Wars -- but the most basic introduction to structure and chronology. With out that, they are riding the tail of a comet in a media starscape of explosive but evanescent images."

"The computer, with its multiplying forums for spontaneous free expression from e-mail to listservs and blogs, has increased facility and fluency of language but degraded sensitivity to the individual word and reduced respect for organized argument, the process of deductive reasoning. The jump and jitter of us commercial television have demonstrably reduced attention span in the young."

"In a media age where books are no longer the primary medium for information storage and exchange, language must be reclaimed from the hucksters and the pedants and imaginatively reinforced. To save literature, educators must take command of the pre-rational world of images. The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words."

"How dare Palin not embrace abortion as the ultimate civilized ideal of modern culture? How tacky that she speaks in a vivacious regional accent indistinguishable from that of Western Canada! How risible that she graduated from the University of Idaho and not one of those plush, pampered commodes of received opinion whose graduates, in their rush to believe the worst about her, have demonstrated that, when it comes to sifting evidence, they don't know their asses from their elbows."

"Liberal Democrats are going to wake up from their sadomasochistic, anti-Palin orgy with a very big hangover. The evil genie released during this sorry episode will not so easily go back into its bottle. A shocking level of irrational emotionalism and at times infantile rage was exposed at the heart of current Democratic ideology — contradicting Democratic core principles of compassion, tolerance and independent thought. One would have to look back to the Eisenhower 1950s for parallels to this grotesque lock-step parade of bourgeois provincialism, shallow groupthink and blind prejudice."

"I like Sarah Palin, and I’ve heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is — and quite frankly, I think the people who don’t see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn’t speak the King’s English — big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist. I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice advocate) in my last two columns — that Palin as a pro-life wife, mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it, particularly into the more traditional Third World."

"How is it possible that today's academic Left has supported rather than protested campus speech codes as well as the grotesque surveillance and over-regulation of student life? American colleges have abandoned their educational mission and become government colonies, ruled by officious bureaucrats enforcing federal dictates. This despotic imperialism has no place in a modern democracy."

"I don't want special protection for gays or transgender. I'm saying there should be protections for all dissident behavior and speech. Dissidents of every kind."

"For me, I don't believe in God, yet I believe in all Gods. I believe that the great religions of the world are these repositories of spiritual experience. And each one of the great world religions contains insights about the nature of the universe."

"The idea that these post-structuralists and postmodernists are heirs of the 1960s revolution is an absolute crock. [...] This was an elistist form from the start. It was not progressive. It was not revolutionary. It was reactionary. It was a desperate attempt to hold on to what had happened before the 1960s sensory revolution. But this postmodernist thing, this trashing of the text, this encouragement of a superior and destructive attitude toward the work of art. We're going through it, primly with red pen in hand, finding all the evidence of sexism check, racism check, homophobia check. That is not the empathic emotional sensory-based revolution of the 1960s. I am sick and tired of these people claiming any kind of mantle from the 1960s. They're frauds! What happened in the 1970s was a collapse of the job market in academia. All of a sudden jobs were scarce and this thing was there, the new and improved and shiny thing, to be a theorist. And people seized on it. It was institutionalized. And it is an enormous betrayal of the 1960s."

"I'm an atheist, but I see the great world religions as enormous works of art. As the best way to understand the universe and man's place in it."

"Authentic leftism is populist. It is based in working-class style, working-class language, working-class direct emotion, in an openness and brusqueness of speech. Not this fancy, contorted jargon of the pseudo-leftist of academe, who are frauds. These people who manage to rise to the top at Berkeley, at Harvard, at Princeton, how many of these people are radical? They are career people. They are corporate types [...] They love the institutional context. They know how to manipulate the bureaucracy which has totally invaded and usurped academe everywhere. [...] They love to sit on endless committees. They love bureaucratic regulation. Not one "leftist" in American academe raised his or her voice against obscene growth of tuition costs, which have bankrupted a whole generation of young people."

"Three years ago Camille Paglia told me that she had "single-handedly turned the ocean liner of feminism" around, a wonderfully appropriate metaphor for a woman who, wherever she is, shouts like a foghorn in an Atlantic mist."

"The 1990s brought a widespread backlash against this rigid feminist orthodoxy [in American academia]. For many, it was personified by Camille Paglia, a professor at an obscure university in Philadelphia, who, in her 1990 book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, as well as in scores of essays and interviews, dismissed women’s contributions to Western culture (“There are no female Mozarts”) and mocked the “weepy, whiny, white middle-class ideology” of the “Stalinist” feminist movement under Gloria Steinem, which Paglia reviled for its intellectual vacuity, sexual puritanism, and hostility to men -- not to mention its obsessive victim mentality, which, in her view, only served to reinforce Victorian stereotypes. For Paglia, women, far from being the weaker sex, were gifted by nature with an innate power over men -- the power of sex. […] The feminist establishment, however, chose not to learn from but to vilify Paglia and company. And Women’s Studies, unable to answer them, all but ignored them."

"Camille, in terms of the achievement of Sexual Personae, belongs at a place like Yale or Harvard or Princeton or Chicago or Berkeley. But they will not have her. One of the many, many signs of the incredible decadence of our academic institutions is that someone as brilliant, as learned, as talented, and as ferociously burning an intellect as Camille Paglia is much less likely to win conferment at one of our major universities than any of these humdrum bureaucrats of resentment who are appointed by others in the network because they are politically correct."

"The person that made this newfound pursuit of intellectual engagement invigorating and sexy was Camille Paglia. Her book, Sexual Personae, made me realize how little I really had learned in college. Her articles and assorted writings began to open my mind to the fraud that is higher education in America."

"Paglia, a controversial professor... author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence... revealed that she never, not for a moment, felt like a woman. She had never felt like a man either, and she called this lifelong reality her radical gender dysphoria. I had never heard of such a thing. So here I was, once again, trying to process a news story that combined an issue of sexuality, controversy, and unclear boundaries. I looked up the meaning of her words and found another term for this: nonbinary."

"The literary critic Camille Paglia argues that sexuality is by nature aggressive. “My theory,” she says [on page 3 of Sexual Personae] “is that whenever sexual freedom is sought or achieved, sadomasochism will not be far behind.” She attacks feminists who believe that sex is all sugar and spice and that it is patriarchal society that makes sex violent. Sex, for Paglia, is about power; society is not the source of sexual violence; sex, the irrepressible natural force, is. If anything, society is the force that inhibits the natural violence of sex. Paglia is certainly more accurate than those who deny that perversion is rife with aggression. But in assuming that sex is fundamentally aggressive, and sadomasochistic, she doesn’t allow for the plasticity of human sexuality. Just because sex and aggression can unite in a plastic brain, and appear “natural,” doesn’t mean that that is their only possible expression."

"Examples [of censorship and intolerance from self-described 'liberals'] are well-known. When Camille Paglia was invited to speak at Brown, campus feminists were outraged, though their voices greatly outnumbered hers..."

"How can you take her seriously? She is an exhibitionist, and she takes the most extreme elements of the women's movement and tries to make the whole movement antisexual, antilife, antijoy. And neither I nor most of the women I know are that way."

"There is one area in which I think Paglia and I would agree that politically correct feminism has produced a noticeable inequity. Nowadays, when a woman behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, 'Poor dear, it's probably PMS.' Whereas, if a man behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, 'What an asshole.' Let me leap to correct this unfairness by saying of Paglia, Sheesh, what an asshole."

"[T]he most threatening thing about her, from the American viewpoint, is that she refuses to treat the arts as an instrument of civil rights. Without talent, no entitlement."

"When pro-choice social commentator Camille Paglia wrote that she sanctions "murder" when it is called "abortion," pro-lifers were horrified. They should have cheered. […] Almost every pro-abortion activist lives in a zone where they conceal what abortion really is -- though they know that the procedure involves killing a person each and every time. The difference between them and Paglia is that they don't come out and say it."

"When I mentioned to friends that I was heading to Philadelphia to meet Camille Paglia, I realized the degree of animosity she provokes. She was contemptuously dismissed, often by people who had never read her work. Others seemed torn by her … Some praised her as fresh and profound, but even more dismissed her as outrageous and repugnant. … Despite such opinions, in person and in context instead of in sound bites, Paglia is often reasonable, witty and likable … She is also correct in at least one of her assessments — that she, like such loudmouths as Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern and Ross Perot, helps to encourage discourse and free speech in a country that needs all it can get."

"It is very rare these days to hear anyone praising masculinity. The dissident feminist writer Camille Paglia is a refreshing example. Her observations are effective antidotes to the surfeit of disparagements."

"Scholars who refuse to toe the feminist line are also ignored... The iconoclastic Camille Paglia appears [only] once [...], in Women’s Realities, Women’s Choices, and is described as someone who “assails feminists for what she regards as dull rhetoric.”"

"Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others."

"Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace. The soul that knows it not, knows no release From little things: Knows not the livid loneliness of fear, Nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear The sound of wings."

"How can Life grant us boon of living, compensate For dull grey ugliness and pregnant hate Unless we dare The soul's dominion? Each time we make a choice, we pay With courage to behold the restless day, And count it fair."

"Ours is the commencement of a flying age, and I am happy to have popped into existence at a period so interesting."

"I understood. I was a girl-a "nervous lady." I might jump out. There had to be somebody on hand to grab my ankle as I went over. It was no use to explain I had seen aeroplanes before and wasn't excitable. I was not to be permitted to go alone in the front cockpit."

"In soloing—as in other activities—it is far easier to start something than it is to finish it. Almost every beginner hops off with a whoop of joy, though he is likely to end his flight with something akin to the D.T.'s."

"There is so much that must be done in a civilized barbarism like war."

"As I look back on the flight I think two questions have been asked me most frequently. First: Was I afraid? Secondly: What did I wear?"

"I want you to understand I shall not hold you to any midaevil code of faithfulness to me nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly."

"The time to worry is three months before a flight. Decide then whether or not the goal is worth the risks involved. If it is, stop worrying. To worry is to add another hazard. It retards reactions, makes one unfit. . . . Hamlet would have been a bad aviator. He worried too much."

"The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one's appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship."

"The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life and the procedure. The process is its own reward."

"Anticipation, I suppose, sometimes exceeds realization."

"Preparation, I have often said, is rightly two-thirds of any venture."

"In my life I had come to realize that when things were going very well indeed it was just the time to anticipate trouble. And, conversely, I learned from pleasant experience that at the most despairing crisis, when all looked sour beyond words, some delightful "break" was apt to lurk just around the corner."

"Please know that I am aware of the hazards. I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be a challenge to others."

"Never do things others can do and will do, if there are things others cannot do or will not do."

"Never interrupt someone doing something you said couldn't be done."

"Better do a good deed near at home than go far away to burn incense."

"No kind action ever stops with itself. One kind action leads to another. Good example is followed. A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees. The greatest work that kindness does to others is that it makes them kind themselves."

"In the total devastation of the heart which is the world, the lands-lords rule. There is no way we can defeat the landslords. But under their reins and their watchful eyes. I sail as the winds of lusts and emotions bare me. Everywhere and anywhere. I who will never own, whatever and whenever I want, I take."

"It's all up to you, girls. You have to be strong. These are the days of post-women's liberation. You have grown up by now and you have to take care of yourself. No one's going to help you."

"Even a woman who has the soul of a pirate, at least pirate morals, even a woman who prefer loneliness to the bickerings and constraints of heterosexual marriage, even such a woman who is a freak in our society needs a home. Even freaks needs homes, countries, language, communication. The only characteristic freaks share is our knowledge that we don't fit in. Anywhere. Is it for you, freaks, my loves, I am writing and it is about you."

"The German Romantics had to destroy the same bastions we do. Logocentrism and idealism, theology, all supports of the repressive society. Property's pillars. Reason which always homogenizes and reduces, represses and unifies phenomena or actuality into what can be perceived and so controlled. The subjects, us, are now stable and socializable. Reason is always in the service of the political and economic masters. It is here that literature strikes, at this base, where the concepts and actings of order impose themselves. Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified."

"You create identity, you're not given identity per se. What became more interesting to me wasn't the I, it was text because it's texts that create the identity. That's how I got interested in plagiarism."

"At a certain point I realized that the "I" doesn't exist. So I said to myself: If the "I" doesn't exist, I have to construct one, or maybe even more than one."

"My nutritionist read my pathology report and said, "There's only one way you can beat your cancer." "What's that?" "You have to find out what caused it.""

"I had been confused why I had gotten cancer. Three weeks later, I saw the network of causation so clearly I wondered why I wasn't more disease-riddled. My healer reminded me that if health is based on forgiveness, then I had to forgive ..."

"Every book, remember, is dead until a reader activates it by reading. Every time that you read you are walking among the dead, and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies. Aeneas did. Odysseus did. Listen to Delany, a prophet."

"We come crawling through these cracks, orphans, lobotomies; if you ask me what I want, I'll tell you. I want everything. Whole rotten world come down and break. Let me spread my legs."

"We don't have a clue what it is to be male or female, or if there are intermediate genders. Male and female might be fields which overlap into androgyny or different kinds of sexual desires. But because we live in a Western, patriarchal world, we have very little chance of exploring these gender possibilities."

""Why are they ashamed and miserable?" "They're repenting they're white. Any thinking human does it. Don't you read your own history books? So if you attack those miserable moderns or modernist, knight, you'll be making a miserable historical mistake. You will be preventing whites from hating their own whiteness." Don Quixote finally refused the dogs' attack on her attack: "Liberalism has never stopped me from doing anything", said the knight."

"Women need to become literary "criminals", break the literary laws and reinvent their own, because the established laws prevent women from presenting the reality of their lives."

"The students who come to my class are very closely related to all the evil girls who are very interested in their bodies and sex and pleasure. I learn a lot from them about how to have pleasure and how cool the female body is. One of my students had a piercing through her labia. And she told me about how when you ride on a motorcycle, the little bead on the ring acts like a vibrator. Her story turned me on so I did it. I got two. It was very cool. I'm very staid compared to my students, actually. I come from a generation where you've got the PC dykes and confused heterosexuals. No one ever told me that you could walk around with a strap-on, having orgasms."

"I think writing is basically about time and rhythm. Like with jazz. You have your basic melody and then you just riff off of it. And the riffs are about timing. And about sex. Writing for me is about my freedom. When I was a kid, my parents were like monsters to me, and the world extended from them. They were horrible. And I was this good little girl — I didn't have the guts to oppose them. They told me what to do and how to be. So the only time I could have any freedom or joy was when I was alone in my room. Writing is what I did when I was alone with no one watching me or telling me what to do. I could do whatever I wanted. So writing was really associated with body pleasure — it was the same thing. It was like the only thing I had."

"KA: I've been going to this rolfer. I don't know why I'm doing it. It's like: "You will get rid of all your childhood traumas if you only go through this pain." Fuck childhood. People always say you do all these things because of your childhood. I'm sorry, but what really gets me off is the idea that you can just travel, and traveling is just like having an endless orgasm. You just go and go and go. RUS: In that state, you lose your individual identity — and therefore your childhood. But the rolfer is trying to drag you back into accepting your singular identity. KA: Yeah. He's telling me, "Your agenda is ..." and I'm saying, "My agenda? I don't have an agenda and I'm not sure who I am. Who am I?" He keeps on saying, "You know what you want." And I say, "I don't know what I want." RUS: If he succeeds in dragging you into a singular "I," that's the death of Kathy Acker the writer. KA: Yeah, it sure is. But I don't think he'll succeed. He doesn't have a fuckin' chance. I'm just trying to fuck him. If he won't fuck, we're not going anywhere. He can't make me into this singular "I." I told him, "You gotta consider the pleasure principle — namely my pleasure." He didn't like that. RUS: I always say, divide the word "therapist" between the "e" and the "r." KA: Yeah. The rapist. Because they're taking all your childhood wonderment and reducing it to childhood trauma. He gives me these long lectures about how he's not enlightened and he wants to be an animal. Can you imagine long lectures about wanting to be an animal? What a fuckin' bozo! RUS: When I was in college, all of the poetry teachers worshipped Robert Bly, so I had my fill of that shit. KA: I told him about my piercings and he said, "Oh, you're a wild woman." Then I asked him if he wanted to see my piercings. He wouldn't do it."

"A friend told me that there are these clean and sober dykes that have piercings every couple months just to get high. It's about learning about my body. I didn't know my body could do this. It's not exactly pleasure. It's more like vision. I didn't know the body is such a visionary factory. Basically we grew up not wanting to know that we had bodies. And it's not as if these piercings are in that deep — it's just on the surface. So if that little thing can do so much, who knows what else we can experience?"

"Bataille is associated with the surrealists. Basically the idea is that democracy doesn't work. Communism doesn't work. All these fucking models aren't working. We've got to find some new models — a model of what society should look like. We don't know what humans are like. And the ground is not economics; it's not like people do everything they do for economic reasons. You've got to look at the imagination; you've got to look at sex. We have no way of describing these things using the language we have. So a group was formed around Bataille to try to figure out what it means to be human — what society should look like. Humans have to live in a society — they can't just survive as individuals. That's not a viable condition. You know, everyone's always talking about trauma and pain and how this society isn't working, that we shouldn't have racism and sexism, but we never talk in positive terms — like what would joy be, what it would be like to have a totally great existence. Bataille and his followers looked for models for people to have totally great existences. … Well, they looked at tribal models and how they dealt with sexual stuff and sacrifice and property — the joys that aren't based on economic accumulation and the workaday world, but based on giving it all up — not having that specific, controlling, imprisoning "I." He wasn't a Freudian. He was much more interested in the tribal model where everything is on the surface and you deal with sexual stuff the same way you deal with economic stuff and social stuff."

"I'm starting to worry about self-censorship — that I might be internalizing some shit. I might be writing what people expect me to write, writing from that place where I might be ruled by economic considerations. To overcome that, I started working with my dreams, because I'm not so censored when I use dream material. And I'm working at trying to find a kind of language where I won't be so easily modulated by expectation. I'm looking for what might be called a body language. One thing I do is stick a vibrator up my cunt and start writing — writing from the point of orgasm and losing control of the language and seeing what that's like."

"For 2.000 years, you've had the nerve to tell women who we are. We use your words; we eat your food. Every way we get money has to be a crime. We are plagiarists, liars and criminals."

"I am as closed-up and fucked-up as everybody else. I am hell. The world is hell. "No, it isn't", I scream, but I know it is. Hell. Hell. Hell. Hell. Help. Help me. Help me. Love me."

"Teach me how to talk to you. WANT. Is my wanting you so bad, wanting your cock so bad, wanting the feel of your lips on my lips just me being selfish and egoistic? Teach me a new language."

"Love goes away when your mind goes away and then you're someone else."

"Heart disease syphilis pregnancy"

"IF THERE IS A GOD, GOD IS DISJUNCTION AND MADNESS."

"All the people around Hester hate her and despise her and think she's a total freak. The kid's beyond human law and human consideration. How do you feel about yourself when every human being you hear and see and smell every day of your being thinks you're worse than garbage? Your conception of who you are has always, at least partially, depended on how the people around you behaved towards you... You don't know. How can you know anything? How can you know anything? You begin to go crazy."

"Every day a sharp tool, a powerful destroyer, is necessary to cut away dullness, lobotomy, buzzing, belief in human beings, stagnancy, images, and accumulation. As soon as we stop believing in human beings, rather know we are dogs and trees, we'll start to be happy."

"Let me put it another way. Most people are what they sense and if all you see day after day is a mat on a floor that belongs to the rats and four walls with tiny piles of plaster at the bottom, and all you eat is starch, and all you hear is continuous music, you smell garbage and piss which drips through the walls continually, and all the people you know live like you, it's not horrible, it's just... Who they are."

"Acker gives her work the power to mirror the reader's soul."

"I got an e-mail from somebody one day saying, “I understand you’re a friend of Kathy Acker’s. She’s currently dying in a hospital in Mexico.” I immediately e-mailed the UK and said, “She’s dying in a hospital in Mexico,” and a mutual friend of mine and Charlie’s, a guy named Igor, said, “She’s not dying, she’s just got flu, I checked around. She’s in San Francisco with flu, she’s just being a drama queen.” So I wrote back to the guy who said she’s dying and said I’m told she’s the flu in San Francisco, and they wrote back, “She’s really dying.” I phoned her in the hospital in Mexico. We chatted a while. She was very weak. It was good. This week has been a particularly rough one on me because my friend John M. Ford the writer died completely unexpectedly. And it’s everybody who knew him and loved him is completely devastated, and one reason we’re devastated is he was sending us e-mails the day before and his heart went or his kidneys went in the night and he was gone. With Kathy I never had that. I’ve always missed her, but I got to phone up and say good-bye. That was good. That sort of somehow made it copable. Then she was gone, and she died in room 101. As Alan Moore said, “There’s nothing that woman can’t turn into a literary reference.”"

"She calls herself Acker. And Acker is this person I hang with sometimes. What's cool is that we can talk about anything and nobody gets uptight (though she does decide that I'm a sexist pig sometimes). Some have called her the next generation's Burroughs."

"I think the music business will eventually crush me, but I [smiles]... I'm ready."

"[when asked about cigarettes] I don't recommend them... but I smoke them."

"I don't intend to write depressing songs and I'd probably rather write happy ones"

"Here's a song I made up while I was watching Xena the Warrior Princess with the sound off. It's a fact. I had a secret crush on Xena. It was a secret to me too. I wouldn't admit it. She's pretty fuckin' tough. She has a good yell... she kills the stupid gladiators with the log-trap. Release the log-trap! She releases the log-trap and they all get... crushed. They'd all wanna be with her if they could, but unfortunately they're not on her side. It's a lot better with the sound off. Really, it is. And the song didn't have anything to do with Xena... but... I was about half a bottle through Jameson's... if that makes any sense."

"There's some records that sell millions of copies, that it's really unclear if anybody liked it who was making it, y'know?"

"I'm a roman candle My head is full of flames I want to hurt him I want to give him pain And make him feel this pretty burn."

"Church bells and now I'm awake And I guess it must be some kind of holiday I can't seem to join in the celebration But I'll go to the service And I'll go to pray And I'll sing the praises of my maker's name Like I was as good as she made me..."

"Your hand on his arm, the hay stack charm around your neck, strung out and thin, calling some friend trying to cash some check, he's acting dumb, that's what you've come to expect. * I can't beat myself I can't beat myself And I don't want to talk. I'm taking the cure so I can be quiet Whenever I want. So leave me alone You ought to be proud that I'm getting good marks."

"You turned white, like a saint But I'm tired of dancing on a pot of gold... ...Flecked paint."

"I'm a junkyard full of false starts And I don't need your permission To bury my love under this bare light bulb. The moon is a sickle cell It'll kill you in time."

"I'm looking at a hand full of broken plans And I'm tired of playing it down You just want her to do anything to you There ain't nothing you won't allow You wake up in the middle of the night From a dream you won't remember flashing on like a cop's light You say she's waiting and I know what for The white lady loves you more"

"Drink up, baby, look at the stars I'll kiss you again Between the bars Where I'm seeing you there With your hands in the air Waiting to finally be caught Drink up one more time and I'll make you mine..."

"I could make you satisfied in everything you do, All your secret wishes could right now be coming true And be forever with my poisoned arms Around you. No one's gonna fool around with us."

"I'm going out now like a baby A naïve unsatisfiable baby Grabbing onto whatever's around For the soaring high or the crushing down With hidden cracks that don't show, but that constantly just grow."

"Crooked spin can't come to rest, I'm damaged bad at best."

"I'm in love with the world, Through the eyes of a girl, Who's still around the morning after."

"It's a picture perfect evening And I'm staring down the sun Fully loaded, deaf, and dumb And done waiting for sedation to disconnect my head Or any situation where I'm better off than dead"

"They took your life apart And called your failures art They were wrong, though They won't know 'Til tomorrow"

"She appears composed So she is, I suppose Who can really tell? She shows no emotion at all Stares into space like a dead china doll"

"London Bridge is safe and sound No matter what you keep repeating Nothing's gonna drag me down To a death that's not worth cheating"

"The first time I saw you I knew it would never last I'm not half what I wish I was I'm so angry I don't think it'll ever pass And I was bad news for you just because I never meant to hurt you"

"I waited for a bus To separate the both of us And take me off far away from you 'Cause my feelings never change a bit I always feel like shit I don't know why; I guess that I "just do""

"Bored in a role, but he can't stop Standing up to sit back down, and lose the one thing found. Spinning the world like a toy top 'till there's a ghost in every town."

"Everything here is free Everything but you and me This painting never dries Stupidity tries"

"What I used to be will pass away, and then you'll see That all I want now is happiness for you and me."

"The first true love that folded at the slightest touch, brought down like an old hotel, people digging through the rubble for things they can resell."

"This is the place you end up when you lose the chase, Where you're dragged against your will from a basement on a hill, And all anybody knows, is you're not like them, So they kick you in the head...and send you back to bed."

"I'm comfortable apart, it's all written on my chart And I take what's given me, most cooperatively I do what people say and lie in bed all day Absolutely horrified, I hope you're satisfied"

"So I wait for confirmation That you're never gonna use your starting gun."

"I met a girl, snowball in hell she was hard and as cracked as the liberty bell."

"I see you're leaving me and taking up with the enemy the cold comfort of the in between a little less than a human being a little less than a happy high a little less than a suicide the only things that you really tried."

"Veins full of disappearing ink Vomitting in the kitchen sink."

"The scraping subjects, ruled by fear, they told me whiskey works better than beer."

"This is the place where time reverses. Dead men talk to all the pretty nurses. Instruments shine on a silver tray Don't let me get carried away."

"Gimme one good reason not to do it (because we love you), so do it."

"Because your candle burns too bright well, I almost forgot it was twilight. Even if I think that you are right, well, I'm tired of being down, I got no fight. You're wonderful, and it's beautiful, but I'm already somebody's baby. And if i went with you, I'd disappoint you, too."

"Haven't laughed this hard in a long time I better stop now before I start crying Go off to sleep in the sunshine I don't want to see the day when its dying."

"You don't deserve to be lonely, but those drugs you got won't make you feel better. Pretty soon you'll find it's the only little part of your life you're keeping together."

"My mama told me 'baby stay clean there's no in between.' but all you ladies and you gentlemen, between is all you've ever seen or been."

"You disappoint me, all you people raking in on the world. The devil's script sells you the heart of a blackbird."

"Shine on me, baby cause it's raining in my heart."

"And though you'd rather see me gone then to see there come the day, I'll be waiting for you anyway"

"Next door, the TV's flashing blue frames on the wall. It's a comedy from the seventies with a lead no one recalls. He vanished into oblivion it's easy to do and I cried a sea when you talked to me the day you said we were through. But it's all right, some enchanted night I'll be with you"

"I'd say you make the perfect angel in the snow all crushed out on the way you are, I'd better stop before it goes too far."

"Don't you know that I love you? sometimes I feel like only a cold still life only a frozen still life that fell down here to lay beside you."

"Your arsenal of excuses you never told her when you walked out on the savannah shoulder with your veins all full of beer thinking 'well at least now everything is clear'"

"Here come your pride and joy The comic little drunk you call your boy, Making everybody smile"

"I'm sorry you seem so stung, and I'm sorry you feel you have to hold your tongue when you're so pretty and smart"

"Wearing clothes that clash Wondering 'is this treasure, is this trash?' Still trying to decide"

"The clock moved a quarter of a turn, the time it took a cigarette to burn"

"Elliott: "Do you want to hear a happy or a sad song?" Crowd: "Happy!" Elliott: "Old or new?" Crowd: "Old!" Elliott: "Happy and old, that's a strange choice.""

"I am a witch, by which I mean that I am somebody who believes that the earth is sacred, and that women and women's bodies are one expression of that sacred being. My spirituality has always been linked to my feminism. Feminism is about challenging unequal power structures. So, it also means challenging inequalities in race, class, sexual preference. What we need to be doing is not just changing who holds power, but changing the way we conceive of power. There is the power we're all familiar with — power over. But there is another kind of power — power from within. For a woman, it is the power to be fertile either in terms of having babies or writing books or dancing or baking bread or being a great organizer. It is the kind of power that doesn't depend on depriving someone else."

"Much of what is written on the craft is biased in one way or another, so weed out what is useful to you and ignore the rest. I see the next few years as being crucial in the transformation of our culture away from the patriarchal death cults and toward the love of life, of nature, of the female principle. The craft is only one path among the many opening up for women, and many of us will blaze new trails as we explore the uncharted country of our own interiors. The heritage, the culture, the knowledge of the ancient priestesses, healers, poets, singers, and seers were nearly lost, but a seed survived the flames that will blossom in a new age into thousands of flowers. The long sleep of Mother Goddess is ended. May She awaken in each of our hearts — Merry meet, merry part, and blessed be."

"The witches, the wise women, and the healers were also always the counselors. It's a whole other tradition of knowledge and learning that has been suppressed because it had political implications."

"Each being is sacred — meaning that each has inherent value that cannot be ranked in a hierarchy or compared to the value of another being."

"Any ritual is an opportunity for transformation. To do a ritual, you must be willing to be transformed in some way. The inner willingness is what makes the ritual come alive and have power. If you aren't willing to be changed by the ritual, don't do it."

"...They would probably only get a little while, if that, but even a drop of happiness could color a whole well of misery."

"Spirituality leaps where science cannot yet follow, because science must always test and measure, and much of reality and human experience is immeasurable."

"In the Craft, we do not believe in the Goddess — we connect with her; through the moon, the stars, the ocean, the earth, through trees, animals, through other human beings, through ourselves. She is here. She is within us all."

"The test of a true myth is that each time you return to it, new insights and interpretations arise."

"Witchcraft offers the model of a religion of poetry, not theology. It presents metaphors, not doctrines, and leaves open the possibility of reconciliation of science and religion, of many ways of knowing."

"The mythology and cosmology of Witchcraft are rooted in that “Paleolithic shaman’s insight”: that all things are swirls of energy, vortexes of moving forces, currents in an ever-changing sea. Underlying the appearance of separateness, of fixed objects within a linear stream of time, reality is a field of energies that congeal, temporarily, into forms. In time, all “fixed” things dissolve, only to coalesce again into new forms, new vehicles."

"The primary principle of magic is connection. The universe is a fluid, everchanging energy pattern, not a collection of fixed and separate things. What affects one thing affects, in some way, all things: All is interwoven into the continuous fabric of being."

"Energy flows in spirals. Its motion is always circular, cyclical, wavelike. The spiral motion is revealed in the shape of galaxies, shells, whirlpools, DNA. Sound, light, and radiation travel in waves—which themselves are spirals viewed in a flat plane. The moon waxes and wanes, as do the tides, the economy, and our own vitality. The implications of the spiral model are many. Essentially, it means that no form of energy can be exerted indefinitely in one direction only. Always, it will reach a peak, a point of climax, and then turn."

"The Trickster represents the quality of randomness and chance in the universe, without which there could be no freedom. In the Craft the Goddess is not omnipotent. The cosmos is interesting rather than perfect, and everything is not part of some greater plan, nor is all necessarily under control. Understanding this keeps us humble, able to admit that we cannot know or control or define everything."

"Any creative work that is truly alive is influenced by a thousand chance factors in its generation."

"When power relations of domination are no longer the norm in society, and when men assume truly equal shares of all aspects of childrearing, perhaps we will be able to fully reclaim the nurturing aspects of the God. Until then, let us hope some men will begin this process by the way they lead their lives."

"One of the great disservices a culture of domination has done to all of us is to confuse the erotic with domination and violence. The God is wild, but his is the wildness of connection, not of domination. Wildness is not the same as violence. Gentleness and tenderness do not translate into wimpiness. When men — or women, for that matter — begin to unleash what is untamed in us, we need to remember that the first images and impulses we encounter will often be the stereotyped paths of power we have learned in a culture of domination. To become truly wild, we must not be sidetracked by the dramas of power-over, the seduction of addictions, or the thrill of control. We must go deeper."

"We need to fully feel and express our emotions without worrying that they are likely to cause harm to another. But intensely and obsessively brooding on one's anger or resentment is not a good thing to do."

"The Conqueror, whose core issue is safety splits us into Conqueror and Enemy/Victim, tells us, "Don't trust!" and generates fear, paranoia, distortions of reality, and the need to annihilate enemies. The Conqueror seduces us by making us feel special, sometimes grandiose and self-righteous, sometimes especially weak and victimized."

"The Judge, whose core issue is our sense of worth and value, splits us into Judge and Subject to be Judged. When possessed by the Judge, we live in a world of comparisons, competition, and punishment, constantly rate ourselves and others, feel jealousy and guilt. The Judge seduces us with the false promise that we can gain value if we obey, perform, produce."

"The Orderer, whose core issue is control, splits us into Controller and Out-of-Control selves, tells us "Don't Feel", and generates anxiety, rigidity, and addictions. The Orderer seduces us with the belief that order can be imposed from without, that the answer to chaos is more rigid order."

"The Censor, whose core issue is isolation and connection, splits us into Silencer and Secret-to-be-kept, tells us, "Don't speak of it; don't see it; you're the only one who ever felt that." Possessed by the Censor, we feel shame confusion, and blame, often for the victim, or we live in denial. The Censor deludes us with the belief that the pain we are in will go away if we don't name it or speak of it."

"This is the stillness behind motion, when time itself stops; the center is also the circumference of all. We are awake in the night. We turn the Wheel to bring the light. We call the sun from the womb of night. Blessed Be!"

"The tide has turned! The light will come again! In a new dawn, in a new day, The sun is rising! Io! Evohe! Blessed Be!"

"Magic is another word that makes people uneasy, so I use it deliberately, because words they are comfortable with, the words that sound acceptable, rational, scientific, and intellectually sound, are comfortable precisely because they are the language of estrangement."

"When we practice magic we are always making connections, moving energy, identifying with other forms of being. Magic could be called the applied science that is based on an understanding of how energy makes patterns and patterns direct energy. To put it another way, at its heart is a paradox:"

"To live with integrity in an unjust society we must work for justice. To walk with integrity through a landscape strewn with beer cans, we must stop and pick them up."

"Sexual integrity means honestly recognizing our own impulses and desires and honoring them, whether or not we choose to act on them. If we value integrity, we must also value diversity in sexual expression and orientation, recognizing that there is no one truth, or one way, that fits everyone. Sexuality is sacred because through it we make a connection with another self — but it is misused and perverted when it becomes an arena of power-over, a means of treating another — or oneself — as an object."

"We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been — a place half-remembered and half-envisioned we can only catch glimpses of from time to time. Community. Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power. Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free."

""...We believe we can continue to live and thrive only if we care for one another. This is the age of the Reaper, when we inherit five thousand years of postponed results, the fruits of our callousness toward the earth and toward other human beings. But at last we have come to understand that we are part of the earth, part of the air, the fire, and the water, as we are part of one another.” (p17)"

""What I say, what I have always said, is there has got to be an end to it. Now is the time to make an end. There will never be a better time, because there is always a reason to fight and kill and build more guns and weapons..." (p239)"

"The Goddess religion asserts that the earth is alive, and that everything on the earth is part of a living being. We believe that you can celebrate life in many different images and forms, that life moves in cycles of birth and growth and death and rebirth, and that the same spirit moves through nature, through the cycles of the seasons, through the birth and growth and death of plants and animals, and through our lives as human beings. There is a multiplicity of images that you can draw upon for understanding and power, but the reason we focus on the goddess is partly to counterbalance the 5,000 years worth of focus on male holy images, and partly to affirm that bringing life into the world is sacred. Our goal is not to get out of the world or to get out of life, but to integrate it, to celebrate it, to embrace it fully, and to embrace all the different cycles within it"

"I'm going to end with a vision I have for the winter solstice: There are bonfires everywhere strung along the beaches, blazing on twin peaks on all the high places. In the parks and on rooftops small groups gather around cauldrons. There are no mass meetings, only circles."

"The Spiral Dance is a seed planted twenty years ago. Over the last two decades, the goddess movement has grown from many seeds like a garden of long-life flowers and healing herbs. It's a big garden — I've tended only one corner of it."

"The word witch is related to the root of the word "willow," a very flexible tree. Since ancient times witches have been known as those who can bend or shape fate. We twist the energies. The idea of witch became synonymous with wise woman, and with others who were herbalists and healers and keepers of the old traditions after the advent of Christianity. We were the ones who really knew the land and knew what grew there, and how to use it."

"The god is Eros, but he is also Logos, the power of the mind. In witchcraft there is no opposition between the two. The bodily desire for union and the emotional desire for connection are transmuted into the intellectual desire for knowledge, which is also a form of union. Knowledge can be both analytic and synthetic; it can take these apart and look at differences, or form a pattern from unintegrated parts and see the whole."

"We join together to earth the power of the season and to slip between the worlds, the voices saying to every one of us, "Wake up, you are it, you are a part of the circle of the wise. There is no mystery that has not already been revealed to you. There is no power you do not already have. You share in all the love there is. The goddess awakens in infinite forms and a thousand disguises. She is found where she is least expected, appears out of nowhere and everywhere to illumine the open heart. She is singing, crying, moaning, wailing, shrieking, crooning to us, to be awake, to commit ourselves to life, to be a lover in the world and of the world, to join our voices in the single song of constant change and creation. For her law is to love all beings, and she is the cup of the drink of life. The circle is ever open, ever unbroken."

""Another world is possible!" is the slogan created at the World Social Forum in Brazil in 2001. Another world is also necessary, for this one is unjust, unsustainable, and unsafe. It's up to us to envision, fight for, and create that world, a world of freedom, real justice, balance, and shared abundance, a world woven in a new design. (p8)"

"This is how it works: Someone has a vision that arises from a fierce and passionate love. To make it real, we must love every moment of what we do. Impermanent spirals embed themselves in asphalt, concrete, dust. Slowly, slowly, they eat into the foundations of the structures of power. Deep transformations take time. Regeneration arises from decay. Si, se puede! It can be done. (p26)"

"In a culture where profit has become the true God, self-sacrifice can seem incomprehensible rather than noble. (p215)"

"No sane person with a life really wants to be a political activist. When activism is exciting, it tends to involve the risk of bodily harm or incarceration, and when it's safe, it is often tedious, dry, and boring. Activism tends to put one into contact with extremely unpleasant people, whether they are media interviewers, riot cops, or at times, your fellow activists. Not only that, it generates enormous feelings of frustration and rage, makes your throat sore from shouting, and hurts your feet. Nonetheless, at this moment in history, we are called to act as if we truly believe that the Earth is a living, conscious being that we're part of, that human beings are interconnected and precious, and that liberty and justice for all is a desirable thing."

"When we founded Reclaiming two decades ago, our intention was to bring together the spiritual and the political. Or more accurately, some of us for whom the spiritual and the political were inseparable wanted to create a practice and community that reflected this integration. Now, with the Bush forces pushing into an aggressive war, with horrific environmental and social problems left unaddressed, the need for activism is stronger than ever. The stakes have never been higher, and the sense of urgency is palpable."

"Spirituality and ritual are not something removed from the world, but are deeply embedded in it. Reclaiming is founded on Earth-based spirituality, which rejects the split between spirit and matter, and claims nature and the physical, material world as equally sacred with the spirit."

"We don't ideologically believe in the separation of spirit and matter, but in practice, we still tend to think that things that are too material, too real-life, are somehow not as spiritual. So a trance to Faery is perceived as "spiritual," whereas a trance to a Brazilian favela slum is not. We can argue about the reality of Faery, but the favela is undeniably real. If we truly believe that our spirituality is about deep interconnectedness, maybe it's more important for us to grapple internally with the reality of the favela than to dance with the faeries."

"Much of our magic and our community work is about creating spaces of refuge from a harsh and often hostile world, safe places where people can heal and regenerate, renew our energies and learn new skills. In that work, we try to release guilt, rage, and frustration, and generally turn them into positive emotions. Safety and refuge and healing are important aspects of spiritual community. But they are not the whole of spirituality. Feeling good is not the measure by which we should judge our spiritual work. Ritual is more than self-soothing activity. Spirituality is also about challenge and disturbance, about pushing our edges and giving us the support we need to take great risks. The Goddess is not just a light, happy maiden or a nurturing mother. She is death as well as birth, dark as well as light, rage as well as compassion — and if we shy away from her fiercer embrace we undercut both her own power and our own growth."

"There are times when it is inappropriate to feel wholly good. Now is one of them. As the saying goes, "If you aren't angry, you aren't paying attention." This doesn't mean that we need to be in a constant state of rage or irritability or guilt. It means we need to use our magical tools to face the stark and overwhelming realities that confront us, acknowledge our feelings, and transmute them into the energy we need for change."

"Everyone has the right to their own opinion about a ritual, and to their own aesthetics. There's generally at least one invocation in every ritual that I could personally do without."

"The water we hold sacred is not some abstract image or fantasy of Water, but the real stuff that we need to drink and bathe and grow our gardens, that provides the crucial habitat for fish and plants and thousands of other creatures, that is the Earth's literal life blood."

"Another common, unspoken assumption is that spirituality is about calm and peace, and conflict is unspiritual. Which of course makes it hard to integrate the spiritual with the political, which is all about conflict. In New Age circles, a common slogan is that "What you resist, persists." Truly spiritual people are never supposed to be confrontational or adversarial — that would be perpetuating an unevolved, "us-them" dualism. I don't know from what spiritual tradition the "what you resist, persists" slogan originated, but I often want to ask those who blithely repeat it, "What's your evidence?" When it is so patently obvious that what you don't resist persists like hell and spreads all over the place. In fact, good, strong, solid resistance may be the only thing that stands between us and hell. Hitler didn't persist because of the Resistance — he succeeded in taking over Germany and murdering millions because not enough people resisted."

"On some deep cosmic level, we are all one, and within us we each contain the potential for good and for destruction, for compassion and hate, for generosity and greed. But even if I acknowledge the full range of impulses within myself, that doesn't erase the differences between a person acting from compassion and love, and another choosing to act from hate and greed. Moreover, it doesn't erase my responsibility to challenge a system which furthers hate and greed. If I don't resist such a system, I am complicit in what it does. I join the perpetrators in oppressing the victims."

"I am often astonished at well-meaning, spiritual people who advocate beaming light toward world leaders, who scold activists for expressing anger toward authorities or police, who define compassion as loving the enemy — but somehow lose sight of the need to love our friends, our allies, and those who suffer at the hands of the perpetrators. I really don't feel much call to beam love and light at Bush or Cheney or the directors of the International Monetary Fund. Whether or not they suffer from lack of love is beyond me. From my perspective, they suffer from an excess of power, and I feel called to take it away from them. Because I do love the child in Iraq, the woman in the favela, the eighteen-year-old recruit to the Marines who never dreamed he was signing up to bomb civilians. I can't love them, or myself and my community, effectively if I can't articulate the real differences in interests and agendas between "us" and "them" — between those who have too little social power and those who have too much."

"Systems don't change easily. Systems try to maintain themselves, and seek equilibrium. To change a system, you need to shake it up, disrupt the equilibrium. That often requires conflict. To me, conflict is a deeply spiritual place. It's the high-energy place where power meets power, where change and transformation can occur."

"Our magical tools and insights, our awareness of energies and allies on many planes, can deepen and inform our activism. And our activism can deepen our magic, by encouraging us to create ritual that speaks to the real challenges we face in the world, offers the healing and renewal we need to continue working, and a community that understands that spirit and action are one."

"Instead of closing our eyes to meditate, we need to open our eyes and observe. Unless our spiritual practice is grounded in a real connection to the natural world, we run the risk of simply manipulating our own internal imagery and missing the real communication taking place all around us. (p11)"

"I use “Witch” to identify with the heritage outlined above, to place myself firmly in the line of outlaw healers and purveyors of unapproved wisdom. And I use the word “magic” for much the same reason. I could say “sophisticated non-mechanistic psychology,” but that term lacks the same ring. Magic is a discipline of the mind, and it begins with understanding how consciousness is shaped and how our view of reality is constructed. Since the time of the Witch persecutions, knowledge that derives from the worldview of an animate, interconnected, dynamic universe is considered suspect—either outright evil or simply woo-woo. But whenever an area of knowledge is considered suspect, our minds are constricted. The universe is too big, too complex, too ever-changing for us to know it completely, so we choose to view it through a certain frame—one that screens out pieces of information that conflict with the categories in our minds. The narrower that frame, the more we screen out, the less we are capable of understanding or doing. (p26)"

"Because everything is interdependent, there are no simple, single causes and effects. Every action creates not just an equal and opposite reaction, but a web of reverberating consequences. (p33)"

"Systems change in response to forces that disturb their equilibrium. External forces, changes in conditions, new energies, and new challenges can shake up self-regulating cycles. So one way to change a system is to stir it up. That’s the role of protest and direct action, and it’s the reason why stronger forms of action are often necessary to bring change. Sweet reason, gentle persuasion, and dialogue that doesn’t challenge the functioning of the system often end up becoming incorporated in the system’s own efforts to maintain equilibrium. (p37)"

"The essence of nonviolence is choice: acknowledging that we always do have a choice about whether or not to use violence, and posing an expanded range of choices to those in power. (p64)"

"I do not write about nice people. I am not nice people. Neither is anyone I have ever cared deeply about."

"I want to write a great book — I want to make a difference — I want to have adventures and take enormous risks and be everything they say we are and not give a damn what anyone says."

"He wrote Helen that "a part of adolescence is feeling that there's no one else around you who's enough like yourself to understand you.""

"Imagining something is better than remembering something."

"Imagination, he realized, came harder than memory."

"In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases."

"To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread, we were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense."

"You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed."

"Never confuse faith, or belief — of any kind — with something even remotely intellectual."

"Your memory is a monster; you forget — it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!"

"Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean—make sure they know what they mean!"

"The kind of people claiming to be in communication with God today … they are enough to drive a real Christian crazy!"

"But we are not known for our ability to follow through on our unearned discoveries. We are top-of-the-water adventurers, who limit our opinions of the icebergs to what we can see."

"You can't learn everything you need to know legally."

"Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can."

"I can't imagine what the first sentence is, I can't imagine where I want the reader to enter the story, if I don't know where the reader is going to leave the story. So once I know what the last thing the reader hears is, I can work my way backward, like following a roadmap in reverse."

"A reader told me recently, in London, said that 'well, I read that you write the last sentence first, so I always read your last sentence first.' And I said, 'oh, no, you're not supposed to do that.'"

"Ted Seabrooke, my wrestling coach, had a kind of Nietzschean effect on me in terms of not just his estimation of my limited abilities, but his decidedly philosophical stance about how to conduct your life, what you should do to compensate for your limitations. This was essential to me, both as a student—and not a good one—and as a wrestler who was not a natural athlete but who had found something he loved."

"This is Marxism. It's leveling everything by decimating what works ... It's that vindictive 'We've suffered, and now we're going to take money from your kid and watch you squirm'... There's a minority which is an open target in this country which no one protects, and that's rich people."

"I write repeatedly—against my will—of those things I fear most happening. Losing a loved one, losing a parent, losing a child. I'm in terror of losing a child. It's never happened to me, but I am clearly compelled to write about it over and over again, and in a way I think, psychologically at least, this says more about me autobiographically as a novelist than the fact that Danny Angel goes to the Iowa Writers Workshop and has Kurt Vonnegut as a teacher, which I also did."

"Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn’t know he was a novelist either."

"Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties."

"There is no more conspicuous evidence of postsixties confusion than the enormous success, both critical and popular (over 2,500,000 paperback copies in print), of The World According to Garp. Though Garp has its virtues as a novel, I think it owes its status as a phenomenon to its point of view: John Irving attempts to square an emancipated, profeminist stance with a profoundly conservative defense of the family, and because he is such a good storyteller he almost pulls it off."

"There is a vast and terrible sibling rivalry going within the human family as we satisfy our desires for territory, dominance, and exclusivity. How strange: In our ongoing eagerness to create aliens, we express our need for them, and we express our deep fear of being alone in a universe that cares no more for us than it does for stones or suns or any other fragments of itself. And yet we are unable to get along with those aliens who are closest to us, those aliens who are of course ourselves. All the more need then to create more cooperative aliens, supernatural beings or intelligences from the stars. Sometimes we just need someone to talk to, someone we can trust to listen and care, someone who knows us as we really are and as we rarely get to know one another, someone whose whole agenda is us. Like children, we do still need great and powerful parent figures and we need invisible friends. What is adult behavior after all but modified, disguised, excused childhood behavior? The more educated, the more sophisticated, the more thoughtful we are, the more able we are to conceal the child within us. No matter. The child persists and it's lonely."

"I can’t do it, Joachim. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. A long leash is still a leash. And Coransee will still be at the other end of it, holding on."

"“I’ll tell you,” she said softly. “But you won’t like it.” He looked away from her. “I asked for the truth. Whether I like it or not, I have to know.”"

"He showed me his fantastic library first, and that helped me warm to him a little. A guy with a room like that in his house couldn’t be all bad."

"A pet. In pets, free will was tolerated only as long as the pet owner found it amusing."

"I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm. (beginning of Prologue)"

"Margaret Weylin complained because she couldn’t find anything to complain about."

"There was no shame in raping a black woman, but there could be shame in loving one. (p124)"

"“He’s a fair man.” I looked at him, startled. “I said fair,” he repeated. “Not likable.” I kept quiet. His father wasn’t the monster he could have been with the power he held over his slaves. He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper."

"Slavery was a long slow process of dulling. (p183)"

"He didn’t look all right to me. “Has anyone gone for the doctor?” “Marse Tom don’t hardly get Doc West for ague. He says all the doc knows is bleeding and blistering and purging and puking and making folks sicker than they was to start.”"

"Some of his neighbors found out what I was doing and offered him fatherly advice. It was dangerous to educate slaves, they warned. Education made blacks dissatisfied with slavery. It spoiled them for field work. The Methodist minister said it made them disobedient, made them want more than the Lord intended them to have."

""There're are worse things than being dead." (p253)"

"I got up to leave. There was nothing more to be said. He had asked for what he knew I could not give, and I had refused."

"Sometimes, one must become a master to avoid becoming a slave."

"She was too alert, too alive not to have the kind of mind that probed and reached and got her into trouble now and then."

"She glanced at him. “What gods do you respect?” “None.” “And why not?” “I help myself,” he said."

"He was surprised when I ignored him. He is wealthy and arrogant and used to being listened to even when what he says is nonsense—as it often is."

"“What were they saying?” Daly asked. “They disapprove of your profession,” Doro told him. “Heathen savages,” Daly muttered. “They’re like animals. They’re all cannibals.” “These aren’t,” Doro said, “though some of the their neighbors are.” “All of them,” Daly insisted. “Just give them the chance.” Doro smiled. “Well, no doubt the missionaries will reach them eventually and teach them to practice only symbolic cannibalism.” Daly jumped. He considered himself a pious man in spite of his work. “You shouldn’t say such things,” he whispered. “Not even you are beyond the reach of God.” “Spare me your mythology,” Doro said, “and your righteous indignation.” Daly had been Doro’s man too long to be pampered in such matters. “At least we cannibals are honest about what we do,” Doro continued. “We don’t pretend as your slavers do to be acting for the benefit of our victims’ souls. We don’t tell ourselves we’ve caught them to teach them civilized religion.”"

"Short-lived people, people who could die, did not know what enemies loneliness and boredom could be."

"“What will they do when they have only the herbs” he asked her. “Live or die as best they can,” she said. “Everything truly alive dies sooner or later.”"

"“You’re bright,” Lupe said to her softly. “Very bright, but stubborn. You think you can choose your realities. You can’t.”"

"“It was an old passion,” he said. “I haven’t touched a violin for months. I didn’t know what that would be like.” “What is it like?” she asked. He began to walk so that she almost missed his answer. “An amputation,” he whispered."

"They had clearly feared turn-of-the-century irrationality—religious overzealousness on one side, destructive hedonism on the other, with both heated by ideological intolerance and corporate greed."

"So he had locked her in the closet. Some of his people, ignorant and fearful, could not quite believe her illness was not contagious. Badger locked her away from them for her own safety. She had seen for herself how eager they were to get her out of their sight."

"“Yes,” he said, “intelligence does enable you to deny facts you dislike. But your denial doesn’t matter. A cancer growing in someone’s body will go on growing in spite of denial. And a complex combination of genes that work together to make you intelligent as well as hierarchical will still handicap you whether you acknowledge it or not.”"

"Lilith might be strong enough now to handle troublemakers herself, but she did not want to do that unless she had to. It would not help the people become a community, and if they could not unite, nothing else they did would matter."

"“I don’t understand why the sight of you should scare me so,” Joseph said. He did not sound frightened. “You don’t look that threatening. Just...very different.” “Different is threatening to most species,” Nikanj answered. “Different is dangerous. It might kill you. That was true to your animal ancestors and your nearest animal relatives. And it’s true for you.”"

"She found more gratification in teaching one willing student than a dozen resentful ones."

"“Human beings fear difference,” Lilith had told him once. “Oankali crave difference. Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status. Oankali seek difference and collect it. They need it to keep themselves from stagnation and overspecialization. If you don’t understand this, you will. You’ll probably find both tendencies surfacing in your own behavior.” And she had put her hand on his hair. “When you feel a conflict, try to go the Oankali way. Embrace difference.”"

"“I didn’t want to scare you. We don’t want to scare anyone.” “No? Well, sometimes it’s a good thing to scare people. Sometimes fear is all that will keep them from doing stupid things.”"

"If you don’t care about my people, why should I care about yours?"

"He thought about that for a moment, wondered what he should say. The truth or nothing. The truth."

"“Yori, Human purpose isn’t what you say it is or what I say it is. It’s what your biology says it is—what your genes say it is.”"

"I might not have believed this if a Human had said it. Humans said one thing with their bodies and another with their mouths and everybody had to spend time and energy figuring out what they really meant."

"Life was treasure. The only treasure."

"Helpless lust and unreasoning anxiety were just part of growing up."

"Tomas stopped and looked at the three Oankali. “Do you believe in spirits?” “We believe in life,” Ahajas said. “Life after death?” Ahajas smoothed her tentacles briefly in agreement. “When I’m dead,” she said, “I will nourish other life.” “But I mean—” “If I died on a lifeless world, a world that could sustain some form of life if it were tenacious enough, organelles within each cell of my body would survive and evolve. In perhaps a thousand million years, that world would be as full of life as this one.” “...it would?” “Yes. Our ancestors have seeded a great many barren worlds that way. Nothing is more tenacious than the life we are made of. A world of life from apparent death, from dissolution. That’s what we believe in.” “Nothing more?” Ahajas became smooth enough with amusement to reflect firelight. “No, Lelka. Nothing more.”"

"Humans were genetically inclined to be intolerant of difference. They could overcome the inclination, but it was a reality of the Human conflict that they often did not."

"All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change."

"A lot of people seem to believe in a big-daddy-God or a big-cop-God or a big-king-God. They believe in a kind of superperson. A few believe God is another word for nature. And nature turns out to mean just about anything they happen not to understand or feel in control of."

"People here in the neighborhood are saying she had no business going to Mars, anyway. All that money wasted on another crazy space trip when so many people here on earth can’t afford water, food, or shelter"

"Dad decided not to vote for Donner after all. He didn’t vote for anyone. He said politicians turned his stomach."

"Intelligence is ongoing, individual adaptability. Adaptations that an intelligent species may make in a single generation, other species make over many generations of selective breeding and selective dying. Yet intelligence is demanding. If it is misdirected by accident or by intent, it can foster its own orgies of breeding and dying."

"A victim of God may, Through learning adaption, Become a partner of God, A victim of God may, Through forethought and planning, Become a shaper of God. Or a victim of God may, Through shortsightedness and fear, Remain God’s victim, God’s plaything, God’s prey."

"Sometimes I write to keep from going crazy. There’s a world of things I don’t feel free to talk to anyone about."

"People have changed the climate of the world. Now they’re waiting for the old days to come back’"

"I realize I don’t know very much. None of us knows very much. But we can all learn more. Then we can teach one another. We can stop denying reality or hoping it will go away by magic."

"It’s better to teach people than to scare them, Lauren. If you scare them and nothing happens, they lose their fear, and you lose some of your authority with them."

"A tree Cannot grow In its parents’ shadows."

"The Destiny of Earthseed Is to take root among the stars."

"All struggles Are essentially Power struggles. Who will rule, Who will lead, Who will define, refine, confine, design, Who will dominate. All struggles Are essentially Power struggles, And most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together."

"Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation."

"If everyone could feel everyone else’s pain, who would torture?"

"“When it comes to strangers with guns,” I told her, “I think suspicion is more likely to keep you alive than trust.”"

"Freedom is dangerous, Cory, but it’s precious, too. You can’t just throw it away or let it slip away. You can’t sell it for bread and pottage."

"The only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it"

"There’s no narcotic like exhaustion."

"“Your God doesn’t care about you at all,” Travis said. “All the more reason to care about myself and others.”"

"“From what I’ve read,” I said to him, “the world goes crazy every three or four decades. The trick is to survive until it goes sane again.”"

"You tend to resent people you’re afraid of."

"I wonder what a badge is, other than a license to steal."

"Who knows what we humans have that others might be willing to take in trade for a livable space on a world not our own."

"They can create something beautiful, useful, even something worthless. But they create. They don't destroy."

"“Don’t you know everything?” God smiled. “No, I outgrew that trick long ago. You can’t imagine how boring it was.”"

"You're truly free for the first time. What could be more difficult than that?"

"Consider— We are born Not with purpose, But with potential."

"We give our dead To the orchards And the groves. We give our dead To life."

"Overall, the Pox has had the effect of an installment-plan World War III. In fact, there were several small, bloody shooting wars going on around the world during the Pox. These were stupid affairs—wastes of life and treasure. They were fought, ostensibly, to defend against vicious foreign enemies. All too often, they were actually fought because inadequate leaders did not know what else to do. Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war. Amid all this, somehow, the United States of America suffered a major, nonmilitary defeat. It lost no important war, yet it did not survive the Pox. Perhaps it simply lost sight of what it once intended to be, then blundered aimlessly until it exhausted itself."

"Life is getting better, but that won’t stop a war if politicians and business people decide it’s to their advantage to have one."

":Choose your leaders"

":::with wisdom and forethought."

":To be led by a coward"

":::is to be controlled"

":::by all that the coward fears."

":To be led by a fool"

":::is to be led"

":::by the opportunists"

":::who control the fool."

":To be led by a thief"

":::is to offer up"

":::your most precious treasures"

":::to be stolen."

":To be led by a liar"

":::is to ask"

":::to be lied to."

":To be led by a tyrant"

":::is to sell yourself"

":::and those you love"

":::into slavery."

"Beware: Ignorance Protects itself Ignorance Promotes suspicion. Suspicion Engenders fear. Fear quails, Irrational and blind, Or fear looms, Defiant and closed. Blind, closed, Suspicious, afraid, Ignorance Protects itself, And protected, Ignorance grows."

"When vision fails Direction is lost. When direction is lost Purpose may be forgotten. When purpose if forgotten Emotion rules alone. When emotion rules alone, Destruction...destruction."

"Now I have been raped. It happened twice. Once on Monday, and again yesterday. It is my Christmas gift from Christian America."

"We were snatched away and given alone into the hands of people who believed that it was their duty to break us and remake us in the Christian American image. And, of course, breaking people is much easier than putting them together again. So much agony caused, so much evil done in God’s name."

"If you hear nonsense like that often enough for long enough, you begin to believe it."

":All too often,"

":What we hear others say."

":What we’re told that we think."

":What we’re permitted to see."

":We see what we’re told that we see."

":Repetition and pride are the keys to this."

":To hear and to see"

":Even an obvious lie"

":And again and again"

":May be to say it,"

":Almost by reflex"

":Then to defend it"

":Because we’ve said it"

":And at last to embrace it"

":Because we’ve defended it"

":And because we cannot admit"

":That we’ve embraced and defended"

":An obvious lie."

":Thus, without thought,"

":Without intent,"

":Mere echoes"

":Of ourselves—"

":And we say"

"All religions are ultimately cargo cults. Adherents perform required rituals, follow specific rules, and expect to be supernaturally gifted with desired rewards—long life, honor, wisdom, children, good health, wealth, victory over opponents, immortality after death, any desired rewards."

"Are you Earthseed? Do you believe? Belief will not save you. Only actions Guided and shaped By belief and knowledge Will save you. Belief Initiates and guides action— Or it does nothing."

"Jarrett would be easier to take if he cared half as much about children’s bodies and minds as he pretends to care about their souls."

"We keep falling into the same ditches, you know? I mean, we learn more and more about the physical universe, more about our own bodies, more technology, but somehow, down through history, we go on building empires of one kind or another, then destroying them in one way or another. We go on having stupid wars that we justify and get passionate about, but in the end, all they do is kill huge numbers of people, maim others, impoverish still more, spread disease and hunger, and set the stage for the next war. And when we look at all of that in history, we just shrug our shoulders and say, well, that’s the way things are. That’s the way things always have been."

"“I’m not a demagogue.” “That’s too bad. That leaves the field to people who are demagogues—to the Jarrets of the world. And there have always been Jarrets. Probably there always will be.”"

"No one thought about what kind of society we were building with such stupid decisions. People who could afford to educate their children in private schools were glad to see the government finally stop wasting their tax money, educating other people’s children. They seemed to think they lived on Mars. They imagined that a country filled with poor, uneducated, unemployable people somehow wouldn’t hurt them!"

"I’m literate, and the idea of leaving children illiterate is criminal."

"We’ve also been laughed at, argued with, booed, and threatened with hellfire—or gunfire. But Jarret’s kind of religion and Jarret himself are getting less and less popular these days. Both, it seems, are bad for business, bad for the U. S. Constitution, and bad for a large percentage of the population. They always have been, but now more and more people are willing to say so in public. The Crusaders have terrorized some people into silence, but they’ve just made others very angry."

"How completely, how thoroughly he has stolen my child. I have never even tried to forgive him."

"“It’s a crucifix,” Wright told me when I showed it to him. “It must have been worn by one of the people who lived here. Or maybe the arsonist lost it.” He gave a humorless smile. “You never know who’s liable to turn out to be religious.”"

"“He had guns,” Celia said. “Iosif didn’t like guns, but Stefan did.” It hadn’t helped him survive."

"My ignorance wasn’t just annoying. It was dangerous."

"That is the most unromantic declaration of love I’ve ever heard. Or is that what you’re saying? Do you love me, Shori, or do I just taste good?"

"We can see that our Councils aren’t games like the tribunals humans have. The work of a Council of Judgment is to learn the truth and then decide what to do about it within our law. It isn’t about following laws so strictly that the guilty go unpunished or the innocent are made to suffer. It isn’t about protecting everyone’s rights. It’s about finding the truth, period, and then deciding what to do about it."

""When your rage is choking you, it is best to say nothing." (p.275)"

"I don't write about good and evil with this enormous dichotomy. I write about people."

"I began writing the book with the thought that maybe what we needed was the biological conscience. It does seem to me that there are too many people in this world who would just as soon wipe out half their country if they could rule the other half."

"I want to write about what's going to happen if we keep doing what we've been doing, if we keep recklessly endangering the environment, if we keep paying no attention to economic realities, if we keep paying no attention to educational needs, if we keep doing a lot of the things that are hurting us now. And that's what I wound up writing about. And everything else just kind of fell into it, fell into place."

"I did not read any Langston Hughes until I was an adult, but I remember being carried away by him and Gwendolyn Brooks. When I was growing up, the only blacks you came across in school were slaves-who were always well treated-and later, when we got to individuals, Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. Booker T. Washington started a college, and Carver did something with peanuts; we never knew what. We did not read anything by a black writer except [James Weldon] Johnson's The Creation, and that was in high school. We managed to get through adolescence without being introduced to any black culture. (1996)"

"When I began writing science fiction, when I began reading, heck, I wasn't in any of this stuff I read. The only black people you found were occasional characters or characters who were so feeble-witted that they couldn't manage anything, any way. I wrote myself in, since I'm me and I'm here and I'm writing."

"I was in classes sometimes where I was the only Black person and tend to either get ignored or get petted on the head a lot. Neither is in the slightest useful so I was eager to get away from that and Harlan was not interested in doing either. (1994)"

"Obviously in some places you will meet with some nastiness, but it isn't general. The only place I was ever called "nigger," had someone scream nigger at me in public, was in Boston, for goodness sakes. It wasn't a person going to a conference, it was just a stranger who happened to see me standing, waiting for a traffic light. (1990)"

"My favorite collection of slave narratives was a nineteen-volume set called The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. It was assembled in the 1930s by the Writer's Project [of the Works Progress Administration], and these people interviewed the slaves who were left, the very last ones. It was depressing reading not only because bad things happened to slaves, but because slavery could become so pedestrian when you read enough of it, so ordinary. I remember someone telling me that they'd read the Harriet Jacobs narrative, and they said it was mild compared to other slave narratives. And, horribly enough, it was, but that doesn't make her any less a slave. It wasn't something you'd want to undergo. (2003)"

"Everything is political in one way or another. (1997)"

"I think the most interesting thing about looking back now at the 1950s is how familiar things would be...We can do a lot of things faster, bigger, higher, that sort of thing, but they're essentially the same things. We're talking on the telephone. Now of course we could be going on computers, but even so we would be typing and looking at a screen and in those days we had typing and we had screens. We're connected. The cars might look different but they're still internal combustion engine cars for the most part. All the things that we thought, the flying cars, and buildings a mile high...The nonsense, I like to call it. The things that would make our era un-recognizable are mainly the social things. Imagine going back to the fifties and explaining that we're now discussing homosexual marriage. In the fifties, you didn't even hear the word homosexual, let alone that they might get married. I mean, black and white was illegal, forget two people of the same sex. And it was still OK to lynch people in different parts of our country. It was still OK to expect people to be openly racist in all parts of our country. Interesting how that goes in and out of fashion."

"I know a lot of people are where I was several years ago, when I was getting started with writing, wondering how they might get started as writers. And I have this little litany of things they can do. And the first one, of course, is to write-every day, no excuses. It's so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they'd rather clean the toilet than do the writing. Second, read every day. Read voraciously and omnivorously, whatever's out there. You never know what's gonna grab you. Third, for people who aren't doing it already, take classes-they're worthwhile. Workshops or classes-a workshop is where you do actually get feedback on your work, not just something where you go and sit for a day. A workshop is a way of renting an audience, and making sure you're communicating what you think you're communicating. It's so easy as a young writer to think you're been very clear when in fact you haven't. Those are some of the suggestions I give to my young writers. (2004)"

"("Are there social movements that you identify with or are inspired by?") OB: Not terribly. Not in the sense of joining something. I'm with the ABB-"Anybody But Bush"-movement right now [winter 2003]. For the first time in my life I was sending campaign donations to a political candidate-Dean, as a matter of fact, before he fell out. There are a lot of things that I care about, and I mention some of them with relation to the two Parable books. I belong to a lot of environmentalist organizations. I really feel that it's important we stop playing games, and the idea that we're somehow going to improve the forests by having people go in and chop down the most valuable trees is just obscene, and the idea that we are going to lose environmental legislation for clean air and clean water that earlier groups worked really hard for is obscene. I mean we're doing such unutterably stupid things that I can't not pay attention to it. Then there are things like war and peace, of course. I found the war [in Iraq] to be totally unnecessary, and I said so before we got into it. We're going down a lot of wrong paths. The books are warnings, they're "If this goes on..." novels. Nobody really needed warning, everybody could see that we're sliding in the wrong directions, especially with regard to things like global warming. But nothing is being done, at least on the part of our national government. (2003)"

"Most vampires, I’ve discovered, are men, for some reason. I guess it’s because Dracula, people are kind of feeding off that."

"I fell into writing it because I saw a bad movie, a movie called Devil Girl from Mars, and went into competition with it. But I think I stayed with it because it was so wide open. It gave me the chance to comment on every aspect of humanity. People tend to think of science fiction as, oh, Star Wars or Star Trek. And the truth is, there are no closed doors, and there are no required formulas. You can go anywhere with it."

"I wrote the two Parable books back in the '90s. And they are books about, as I said, what happens because we don't trouble to correct some of the problems that we’re brewing for ourselves right now. Global warming is one of those problems. And I was aware of it back in the ’80s. I was reading books about it. And a lot of people were seeing it as politics, as something very iffy, as something they could ignore because nothing was going to come of it tomorrow. That and the fact that I think I was paying a lot of attention to education because a lot of my friends were teachers, and the politics of education was getting scarier, it seemed to me. We were getting to that point where we were thinking more about the building of prisons than of schools and libraries. And I remember while I was working on the novels, my hometown, Pasadena, had a bond issue that they passed to aid libraries, and I was so happy that it passed, because so often these things don’t. And they had closed a lot of branch libraries and were able to reopen them. So, not everybody was going in the wrong direction, but a lot of the country still was. And what I wanted to write was a novel of someone who was coming up with solutions of a sort."

"Colson Whitehead, Charles Dickens and Octavia Butler — fascinating writers who carved out their own dominions in literature and who, in wholly unique fashion, changed writing for the rest of us."

"The Prophet Octavia Butler."

"“She was an utter inspiration,” said Steven Barnes, a longtime friend and science fiction author who was the first African American to write one of the novels based on “Star Wars.” “I don’t know what would have happened to me had I not had her as an example.” Mystery writer Walter Mosley said Butler expanded the genre “by writing a kind of fiction that African American women around the country could read and understand both technically and emotionally.... She wasn’t writing romance or feel-good novels, she was writing very difficult, brilliant work.” “For an African American woman to somehow define herself as a science fiction writer and to realize that dream is an extraordinary thing,” he said in an interview Monday. “In black speculative fiction, we are a tiny family and Octavia Butler was our matriarch,” writer Tananarive Due said. “So we just lost our mother, our grandmother.”"

"Seattle-based science fiction writer Greg Bear said. "For being a black female growing up in Los Angeles in the '60s, she was attracted to science fiction for the same reasons I was: It liberated her. She had a far-ranging imagination, and she was a treasure in our community.""

"For too long, the voices and visions for our future have been provided, for the most part, by and from a culturally European (if not Eurocentric) perspective. However, there is change afoot. The works of Octavia E. Butler are becoming mainstream, and names like Nnedi Okorafor and Lesley Nneka Arimah are bringing much needed flavor to the narratives that help shape our future."

"Imagination is a muscle that, for many of us, will atrophy if we don't use it, especially under the pressure of constant fear. Fear and imagination often can't be in the same room. So, one of the things I think to strengthen that muscle is, first of all, reading. Reading visionary fiction, reading visionary texts. I often recommend Octavia Butler to people because it's reading things that are hard."

"Sister, we got cities burning, you know, they were telling her. And how dare she, you know, sort of retreat into this world. But actually, she was showing us an even bigger world, you know, something that we couldn't even wrap our minds around. And that's important."

"As Katrina was happening, in the aftermath of Katrina, a lot of people were talking about Octavia Butler and how the Parable series made them think about that."

"Donna Haraway and Amanda Boulter praise Butler's novels for the way that they consistently "interrogate reproductive, linguistic, and nuclear politics in a mythic field structured by late twentieth-century race and gender,""

"Octavia Butler told me one of the failures of sci-fi /fantasy was its inability to imagine the alien other as anything different from a human form "with a mask on." I rate sci-fi on that basis to this day. Yes. I knew her. Yes. She was exceptional."

"I wish more people would talk about the ways in which she messes with normative sexualities, and I miss her very much"

"We titled this collection in honor of Black science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler. Butler explored the intersections of identity and imagination, the gray areas of race, class, gender, sexuality, love, militarism, inequality, oppression, resistance, and most important-hope. Her work has taught us so much about the principles of visionary fiction, inspiring us. The title plays on Butler's three novel collection, Lilith's Brood, which is about adaptation as a necessity for survival. Changes will occur that we cannot even begin to imagine, and the next generation will be both utterly familiar and wholly alien to their parents. We believe this is what it means to carry on Butler's legacy of writing visionary fiction."

"At a retreat for women writers in 1988, Octavia E. Butler said that she never wanted the title of being the solitary Black female sci-fi writer. She wanted to be one of many Black female sci-fi writers. She wanted to be one of thousands of folks writing themselves into the present and into the future. We believe in that right Butler claimed for each of us-the right to dream as ourselves, individually and collectively. But we also think it is a responsibility she handed down: are we brave enough to imagine beyond the boundaries of "the real" and then do the hard work of sculpting reality from our dreams?"

"(The book that...shaped my worldview:) Dawn by Octavia E. Butler."

"Kindred is her most overtly political novel, the Patternmaster series the most popular. Survivor brilliantly blends genre SF with issues of colonialism and racism."

"Since Trump got elected, many people in my community have been talking about how Octavia Butler was a prophet and how her books Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents eerily predicted the climate change, wildfires, and fascism of our current world. Many people in movement spaces have taken Butler's words as prophecy and text...But what is often missing from these discussions is how Lauren Olamina, Butler's Black, genderqueer teenage hero who leads her community out of the ashes and founds a new spirituality that embraces change as god, is disabled. In the book, she is called a sharer: someone with hyperempathy syndrome from her mother's use of the Einstein drug, a popular drug that heightened intelligence. She feels everything everyone feels, and it's often overwhelming in a way that reminds me of some autistic and neurodivergent realities. It gives her impairments and also gifts. To me, Butler's Parable books are a Black disability justice narrative."

"Octavia Butler's wild and talented science fiction novels."

"In 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. cautioned us about adding "deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars." He wrote that darkness cannot drive out darkness, that hate cannot drive out hate, and he reminded us that only love can do that. Thirty years later, Octavia E. Butler wrote in her novel Parable of the Sower that our "destiny is to take root among the stars." The activist and the artist seem at first to have been engaged in markedly different lifework, yet they embraced a shared dream for the future. Their work is linked by faith and a fusion of spiritual teachings and social consciousness, a futuristic social gospel. In its essence, social justice work, which King embodied and Butler expressed so skillfully in her novels and stories, is about love-a love that has the best hopes and wishes for humanity at heart."

"Walidah Imarisha and I, when we did Octavia’s Brood, Walidah called it “visionary fiction,” to look ahead at the future and then write ourselves in. And that’s what Octavia was doing with all of her work."

"she was a worker, so she was a laborer. She was always working. And her writing process would be waking up at 3:00 in the morning, because she needed to do it. She had what she called “positive obsession,” a positive obsession with moving these stories out."

"so much has changed there because of the work of Octavia, because of the work of Nnedi Okorafor, because of the work of Tananarive Due."

"one of the things that was so powerful to me when I first picked up Octavia is that she wrote these strong Black feminine characters, these protagonists, who now you might look back and see the nonbinary, see the queerness, see other things in them, but at the time, she was writing these characters, and it was like, “Oh, there’s young Black women, and they’re leading.”"

"she wrote about Black women and about Black feminism, about Black futures, but she wrote in a way that appealed to all human beings. And I think that that, to me, is one of the essences of feminism. It’s like, we’re not saying we’re better than or beyond. We’re saying we are right here, equal to anyone else and able to lead as much as anyone else. So, she understood that. She wrote it beautifully."

"Take the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or beauty or form, we are borrowers."

"Write on my gravestone: "Infidel, Traitor" — infidel to every church that compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people."

"Revolutions are not made; they come. A revolution is as natural a growth as an oak. It comes out of the past. Its foundations are laid far back."

"What gunpowder did for war, the printing press has done for the mind, and the statesman is no longer clad in the steel of special education, but every reading man is his judge."

"The best use of laws is to teach men to trample bad laws under their feet."

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty — power is ever stealing from the many to the few…. The hand entrusted with power becomes … the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot: only by unintermitted Agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity."

"What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action."

"Truth is one forever, absolute; but opinion is truth filtered through the moods, the blood, the disposition, of the spectator."

"In God's world there are no majorities, no minorities; one, on God's side, is a majority."

"Every man meets his Waterloo at last."

"Whether in chains or in laurels, Liberty knows nothing but victories."

"Difference of religion breeds more quarrels than difference of politics."

"I think the first duty of society is justice."

"Revolutions never go backward."

"[T]he Negro race, instead of being that object of pity or contempt which we usually consider it, is entitled, judged by the facts of history, to a place close by the side of the Saxon."

"[R]aces love to be judged in two ways—by the great men they produce, and by the average merit of the mass of the race."

"Aristocracy is always cruel."

"He who stifles free discussion, secretly doubts whether what he professes to believe is really true."

"Corruption does not so much rot the masses: it poisons Congress. Credit-Mobilier and money rings are not housed under thatched roofs: they flaunt at the Capitol. As usual in chemistry, the scum floats uppermost."

"The agitator must stand outside of organizations, with no bread to earn, no candidate to elect, no party to save, no object but truth — to tear a question open and riddle it with light."

"To be as good as our fathers we must be better."

"Sit not, like the figure on our silver coin, looking ever backward."

"Be not dismayed by a defeat. What is defeat! Nothing but education, nothing but the first step to something better."

"Mrs. R. (Ernestine Rose) and myself were talking of the know nothing organizations, when she criticized Lucy Stone and Wendell Philips with regard to their feelings toward foreigners. Said she had heard them both express themselves in terms of prejudice against granting to foreigners the rights of Citizenship."

"Wendell Phillips, whose wife was part of the American delegation, introduced a counter-motion that the women be seated as full delegates. He spoke: "It is the custom there in America not to admit colored men into respectable society; and we have been told again and again that we are outraging the decencies of humanity when we permit colored men to sit by our side. When we have submitted to brick-bats and the tar-tub and feathers in New England rather than yield to the custom prevalent there to not admitting colored brethren into our friendship, shall we yield to parallel custom or prejudice against women in Old England? We cannot yield this question... for it is a matter of conscience.... We have argued it over and over again, and decided it time after time, in every society in the land, in favor of the women... It is a matter of conscience, and British virtue ought not to ask us to yield.""

"The ancients were always distinguished—especially the Chaldean astrologers and Magians—for their ardent love and pursuit of knowledge in every branch of science... As chemists they were unequalled, and in his famous lecture on The Lost Arts, Wendell Phillips says: “ The chemistry of the most ancient period had reached a point which we have never even approached.” The secret of the malleable glass, which, “if supported by one end by its own weight, in twenty hours dwindles down to a fine line that you can curve around your wrist,” would be as difficult to rediscover in our civilized countries as to fly to the moon. p. 50"

"Wendell Phillips states that he has a friend who possesses an extraordinary ring “ perhaps three-quarters of an inch in diameter, and on it is the naked figure of the god Hercules. By the aid of glasses, you can distinguish the interlacing muscles, and count every separate hair on the eyebrows. p. 240 In his lecture on the Lost Arts, Wendell Phillips very artistically describes the situation. “We seem to imagine/' says he, “ that whether knowledge will die with us or not, it certainly began with us. . . . We have a pitying estimate, a tender pity for the narrowness, ignorance, and darkness of the bygone ages.” p. 534"

"Mister Toombs was willing to dissolve the Union to save slavery, Mister Phillips, to save liberty; while Mister Seward, denounced and derided by both, declared that the deepest instinct of the American people was for union. Reserved rights. State rights, limited powers, the advantages of union and disunion, were the cucumbers from which we were busily engaged in distilling light, overlooking the fact of nationality in discussing the conditions of union. We were speculating upon costume. We gravely proved that the clothes were the clothes of a woman, or of a child, without seeing that whatever the clothes might be there was a full-grown man inside of them. "The Constitution is a contract between sovereign States", shouted Mister Toombs, "let Georgia tear it and separate". "The Constitution is a league with hell", calmly replied Mister Phillips, "let New York cut off New Orleans to rot alone". "Oh, dear! it"s a dreadful dilemma", whimpered President Buchanan. "States have no right to secede, and the United States have no right to coerce. Oh, dear me! it"s perfectly awful! I"m the most patriotic of men, but what shall I do? what shall I do?" Separate! Cut off! Secede! It was of a living body they spoke, which, pierced anywhere, quivered everywhere."

"Robert G. Ingersoll and Wendell Phillips were the two greatest orators of their time, and probably of all time. Their power sprang from their passion for freedom, for truth, for justice, for a world filled with light and with happy human beings. But for this divine passion neither would have scaled the sublime heights of immortal achievement. The sacred fire burned within them and when they were aroused it flashed from their eyes and rolled from their inspired lips in torrents of eloquence. Had Ingersoll and Phillips devoted their lives to the practice of law for pay the divine fire within them would have burned to ashes and they would have died in mediocrity."

"The good Lord had had a chance for a long time before the abolition. I believe that there is a moral government; and that God reigns. I am no pessimist; I give thanks to the good Lord, and also to the good men through whom He has worked. Prominent among them was Garrison, and scarcely less so was Phillips..."

"All 13 of us graduates had orations, and mine was on Wendell Phillips. The great anti-slavery agitator had just died in February and I presume that some of my teachers must have suggested the subject, although it is quite possible that I chose it myself. But I was fascinated by his life and his work and took a long step toward a wider conception of what I was going to do."

"Phillips, the peerless, grand and brave,/A tower of strength to the outcast slave./Earth has no marble too pure and white/To enrol his name in golden light."

"behind them (The Masses staff) still throbbed the tradition of nineteenth-century American radicalism, the un-ambiguous nay-saying of Thoreau and the Abolitionists. This tradition implied that the individual person was still able to square off against the authority of the state; it signified a stance-one could not quite speak of it as a politics-of individual defiance and rectitude, little concerned because little involved with the complexities of society. The radicalism of nineteenth-century New England had been a radicalism of individual declaration far more than of collective action; and while Max Eastman and his friends were indeed connected with a movement, the Socialist party of Debs, in essential spirit they were intellectual freebooters, more concerned with speaking out than speaking to. They swore by Marx, but behind them could still be heard the voices of Thoreau and Wendell Phillips-and it was a good thing."

"In 1834, a Boston mob dragging William Lloyd Garrison through the streets with a rope around his neck, was observed by the young lawyer Wendell Phillips, offspring of a wealthy and respected family. He was so incensed by the sight that he joined in Garrison's defense and soon became one of the leading and most militant abolitionists."

"Women are stripped to the skin in the presence of leering, white-skinned, black-hearted brutes and lashed into insensibility and strangled to death from the limbs of trees. A girl child of fifteen years was lynched recently by these brutal bullies. Where has justice fled? The eloquence of Wendell Phillips is silent now. John Brown’s body lies moldering in the grave. But will his spirit lie there moldering, too? Brutes, inhuman monsters—you heartless brutes—you whom nature forms by molding you in it, deceive not yourselves by thinking that another John Brown will not arise."

"It's just what Wendell Phillips said," she declared. "'The Puritan's idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.'"

"Wendell Phillips says, “The best and greatest thing one is capable of doing, that is his sphere.”"

"When I was a young lawyer, working women wore hats. It was the only way they would take you seriously."

"When I went to represent my law firm anywhere—I was a young kid just out of college—I said, “How do you do? I'm Bella Abzug from the law firm of such and such,” and people would say, “Yes, fine, fine, sit down.” So I'd wait and nothing much would happen, so finally I'd clear my throat and say, “I'm Bella Abzug from the law firm of such and such,” and they'd say, “Yes, we know, but we're waiting.” I'd say, “What are we waiting for?” And they'd say, “We're waiting for the lawyer.” They thought I was the secretary. So I had this identity crisis. I went home and discussed it with my husband, Martin. In those days professional women wore hats—and gloves, so I put on gloves and a hat. And every time I went anywhere for business, with the hat and gloves, they knew I was there for business. And I jokingly often say, as you can see, I've taken off the gloves. But I like wearing hats and I continue to wear it. When I ran for Congress and got to Washington, they made such a fuss about the hat instead of what was under it that I didn't know whether they wanted me to take it off or keep it on. I decided that they wanted me to take it off, which made me determined to keep it on."

"Just imagine for a moment what life in this country might have been if women had been properly represented in Congress. Would a Congress where women in all their diversity were represented tolerate the countless laws now on the books that discriminate against women in all phases of their lives? Would a Congress with adequate representation of women have allowed this country to reach the 1970s without a national health care system? Would it have permitted this country to rank fourteenth in infant mortality among the developed nations of the world? Would it have allowed the situation we now have in which thousands of kids grow up without decent care because their working mothers have no place to leave them? Would such a Congress condone the continued butchering of young girls and mothers in amateur abortion mills? Would it allow fraudulent packaging and cheating of consumers in supermarkets, department stores and other retail outlets? Would it consent to the perverted sense of priorities that has dominated our government for decades, where billions have been appropriated for war while our human needs as a people have been neglected?"

"When it comes to child care, the United States is at a primitive stage compared to countries like Israel, Denmark, Sweden and Russia. (p 39)"

"All I say is that anybody who thinks he can take me lightly because I'm fresh and colorful had better watch out. (p 49)"

"Ever since my youth I've been a Zionist, and I worked hard for the cause of a Jewish homeland too. I've visited Israel and I raised my kids with a very strong background in Jewish culture. Besides that, I spent a couple of years of my life as a Hebrew teacher! To try to make me out as anti-Israel was nothing but rotten and vicious. (p 70)"

"The test for whether or not you can hold a job should not be in the arrangement of your chromosomes. (p. 80)"

"Then up gets Carl Albert to tell us he supports Bolling's resolution because he wants to see us work together with the Republicans to end the war. I was appalled! Here was the Speaker of the House-a man in that kind of position-giving us more old-fashioned, desperate, moldy garbage from the past. Since World War II the Democrats and the Republicans have been "joining hands" to fight international communism, and where has it gotten us? We've created a nuclear monster and a vast, uncontrollable military machine. We've inspired guys like Joe McCarthy and Spiro Agnew to level all the opposition. The military and the industrialists and the munitions-makers have moved in to take over our power structure, influencing it, manipulating it and dominating it. All for the sake of good old bipartisanism; all for the sake of good old anticommunism. (p 93)"

"Without getting scientific or psychological or historical about it, it's long been my judgment that women have been at the forefront of social change. When we first got the vote, we used it to clean up the sweat shops, to clean up the horrors of child labor, and so on. Then we got sidetracked. Instead of carrying forth Carrie Chapman Catt's notion that women should organize as a political movement, the movement became nonpartisan and followed the League of Women Voters route. So between their nonpositions and Madison Avenue's assigned stereotype of women as flowers in the home who can be sold all kinds of products to beautify themselves, and Hollywood with its awful stereotypes, women were sunk. Up until now, we've been laboring under the concept of women as appendages to men and children and subjected to constant brainwashing by Madison Avenue, Hollywood, TV-and the descendants of John Adams who know when they have a good thing going. We now see the concept changing because the women's movement, which renewed itself several years ago as an intellectual revolt of the bored middle class housewife, has grown into a broad movement seeking complete economic, social and political change in all arenas. It's like the black movement, which started out over the right to a seat in the front of the bus and then extended itself to pursue for the black people their rightful piece of the whole system. The women's movement, like the black movement and the movement of the young people, comes at a time when the system is not responding to the largest numbers of its people. This puts all these movements in a very critical perspective, because out of all this ferment the last thing we can realistically expect is for things to remain the same. (p 202)"

"This moment in history requires women to lead the movement for radical change (p 203)"

"I've been described as a tough and noisy woman, a prizefighter, a man-hater, you name it. They call me Battling Bella, Mother Courage and a Jewish mother with more complaints than Portnoy. There are those who say I'm impatient, impetuous, uppity, rude, profane, brash and overbearing. Whether I'm any of these things, or all of them, you can decide for yourself. But whatever I am-and this ought to be made very clear at the outset-I am a very serious woman. I am not being facetious when I say that the real enemies in this country are the Pentagon and its pals in big business. It's no joke to me that women in this country are terribly oppressed and are made to suffer economic, legal and social discrimination. I am not evoking a wild fantasy when I claim that I'm going to help organize a new political coalition of the women, the minorities and the young people, along with the poor, the elderly, the workers and the unemployed, which is going to turn this country upside down and inside out. We're going to reclaim our cities, create more jobs, better housing, better health care, more child care centers, more help for drug addicts; we're going to start doing something for the millions of people in this country whose needs, because of the callousness of the men who've been running our government, have taken a low priority to the cost of killing people in Indochina. To some people all this may sound a bit grandiose, but let me tell you something: This is the only thing we can do and still survive."

"Perhaps the best way to change Congress to make it more representative, to make it more responsive-is to show people exactly what it is. This is the reason I've decided to keep this diary. I want people to share my personal experiences in struggling with the system. Having spent many years as the legislative director of Women Strike for Peace, I'm no innocent to Washington. I've already had a pretty good whiff of what to expect. The inside operation of Congress-the deals, the compromises, the selling out, the co-opting, the unprincipled manipulating, the self-serving career-building-is a story of such monumental decadence that I believe if people find out about"

"I felt if we are going to get anywhere, Congress has got to begin to reflect in its composition the great diversity of this country."

"I am an activist. I'm the kind of person who does things at the same time that I'm working to create a feeling that something can be done. And I don't intend to disappear in Congress as many of my predecessors have. My role, as I see it, is among the people, and I am going to be outside organizing them at the same time that I'm inside fighting for them. That is the kind of leadership that I believe will build a new majority in this country, and it was primarily in the hope of being able to exemplify that kind of leadership that I ran for Congress."

"These are very special times we live in. The priorities in this country-against the will of the people-are upside down. At this moment, as the 92nd Congress is about to convene, the mood of the country is one place and its government is someplace else."

"I want to bring Congress back to the people. If that proves to be impossible to do by working from within, then I'm prepared to go back outside again-to the streets-and do it from there."

"It's also important for me to run again so that other women will be encouraged to do the same. One thing that crystallized for me like nothing else this year is that Congress is a very unrepresentative institution. Not only from an economic class point of view, but from every point of view-sex, race, age, vocation. Some people say this is because the political system tends to homogenize everything, that a Congressman by virtue of the fact that he or she represents a half million people has to appeal to all sorts of disparate groups. I don't buy that at all. These men in Congress don't represent a homogeneous point of view. They represent their own point of view-by reason of their sex, background and class."

"the liberals. They've not only been a terrible disappointment to me, but further proof that the nature of Congress must be changed. Unfortunately, the liberals have failed to take notice of the massive and fundamental movement for social change in this country, so they're still too busy patching things up when what we need is a whole new set of works. I'm sympathetic with them; I think they did very well in such things as defeating the SST and getting the detention camp bill reversed; and I know they've been trying hard to get us out of Vietnam; but I'm also very annoyed that they aren't out there fighting for and organizing people, encouraging the young to register and the underfranchised to run for office. We need activists for leaders-and they aren't filling the bill."

"the men in Congress represent essentially their own class interests and are opposed to any kind of real change that might benefit people at large."

"who are they representing? Themselves or their constituents?"

"People are desperate for help, for leadership. There's no place else to go but to me, they say, and the sad thing is that very often they are right. That's what I want to help change."

"Earth’s most valuable and most neglected natural resource: women."

"much of what has been done in the name of progress and growth and development has been done without much regard for the effects on human beings—women, men and children—on water, air and soil, on our delicately balanced, intricately interconnected global ecology."

"Women are not just victims. We are thinkers, organizers, and activists. We are part of a worldwide women’s movement that has brought into every nation of the world, no matter how poor or oppressed, the message that women can work together to take control of our lives and to bring our collective experience, wisdom, and numbers into the areas where the policies and decisions are being made about the future of our planet."

"It was thousands of women marching and demonstrating against dangerous Strontium 90 nuclear fallout who helped to win the ban on atmospheric nuclear tests and who have continued their struggle against the nuclear arms race and hazards in areas ranging from Greenham Common, Europe and the U.S. to Africa and Asia."

"it was Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland’s vision and leadership as head of the UN Commission on Environment and Development that told us of “our common future” and what we must do to assure that we have a livable future. Dr. Brundtland is an inspiring example of what can happen when the right woman is in the right place."

"Women are both affected by and effectors of the environmental crisis. We must be part—a central part—of the solution. Our views on economic justice, human rights, reproduction and the achievement of peace—all elements of the environment/development crisis—must be heard at local, national, and international forums wherever policies and decisions are made that can affect the future of life on our planet."

"Women are participating in large numbers at the grassroots levels, but in the overwhelming majority of nations, we still lack effective political power. And that is also true in the United Nations—in the Secretariat and in the member nation delegations."

"All over the world, ordinary citizens are coming forward to assert their democratic and human rights, and concern about the environment permeates their demands."

"Some of you may have been at the UN Decade of Women conferences in Nairobi in 1985. That was where global feminism came of age—a symbol of sisterhood, of international women’s networks, of our hopes for a better, fairer, safer world. Nairobi was the birthplace of the “Forward-Looking Strategies” document, the most comprehensive historic statement of our agenda, encompassing peace, equality, human rights, sustainable development and environmental protection. Now we must move on and expand our vision. The women’s movement is strong and continues to grow. We are everywhere, and we will be heard . . . or else we—women, men and children—will all hear from Mother Nature. Remember, hell hath no fury like a woman—or an Earth—scorned and despoiled."

"Imperfect though it may be, the Beijing Platform for Action is the strongest statement of consensus on women's equality, empowerment and justice ever produced by governments...It is an agenda for change, fueled by the momentum of civil society, based on a transformational vision of a better world for all."

"We are bringing women into politics to change the nature of politics, to change the vision, to change the institutions. Women are not wedded to the policies of the past. We didn't craft them. They didn't let us."

"As women, we know that we must always find ways to change the process because the present institutions want to hold on to power and keep the status quo."

"Some wonder how I have kept going for so long and how I manage to remain optimistic. When governments were removing the brackets from the document over the last two weeks, the French tested another nuclear weapon in the Pacific, NATO was bombing Bosnia and the Serbs were shelling Sarajevo. Refugee camps overflowed in too many places around this globe. Conditions for women on factory floors did not change. Women died in childbirth and in their homes Hunger gnawed at the bellies of millions. The world went on, in its downward spiral we all know all too well. In the face of so much pain, I remain an incurable optimist. I am fueled by the passion of the women I have been privileged to meet and work with, buoyed by their hope for peace, justice and democracy. I am strengthened by each of them. And to each government delegate who pushed the boundaries of progress I thank you. I thank the United Nations and my sisters in the NGO community for your good humor and hard work. I wish each of you well and sustainable optimism for the days ahead. Never underestimate the importance of what we are doing here. Never hesitate to tell the truth. And never, ever give in or give up."

"The vision that impels feminists to action was the vision of the Grandmothers' society, the society that was captured in the words of the sixteenth-century explorer Peter Martyr nearly five hundred years ago. It is the same vision repeated over and over by radical thinkers of Europe and America, from François Villon to John Locke, from William Shakespeare to Thomas Jefferson, from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, from Benito Juarez to Martin Luther King, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Judy Grahn, from Harriet Tubman to Audre Lorde, from Emma Goldman to Bella Abzug, from Malinalli to Cherríe Moraga, and from Iyatiku to me. That vision as Martyr told it is of a country where there are "no soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits... All are equal and free.""

"As activists and rebels, Jewish women like Emma Goldman, Maud Nathan, Rose Schneiderman, Bella Abzug, and Betty Friedan influenced many of the key social movements of their eras suffrage, trade unionism, international peace, and the contemporary women's rights movement."

"She did not appear in Brooklyn, but about five minutes before the Washington press conference started I had a call from an Abzug aide asking whether Bella could appear with me and my supporters at the event. I could not discover whether she intended to endorse me, or what she had in mind, but I said yes because I could see no reason to say no. After my statement, Mitchell and Dellums spoke; they gave me strong and moving endorsements. Then Bella made a strange statement, largely about movements and the underprivileged in politics. She said lit about my candidacy, except that it was "an idea whose time has come," if I remember correctly. Later a reporter asked her whether she had endorsed me or not. Bella hedged. She said she supported "the idea" of my candidacy and would support me in those states where I was running. Bella never offered to campaign for me in Florida, North Carolina or even New York, for that matter. It was a letdown, and also bewildering: if she intended to sit on the fence, why did she ask to appear with me when I made my announcement for the Presidency?"

"I believe in the stubbornness of civil disobedience and I'm not afraid of it. I remember one May Day demonstration. In 1971. Still wartime. We were arrested and we were in this big, sort of football field. Barbara Deming and I were walking around, arm in arm. We had been arrested together. It was very cold. Everybody was finding someone to walk very close to. Later on, one person wasn't enough, we would try to get into groups that huddled: fifteen. But at that point, Barbara and I were walking arm in arm and it was a pretty messy place, because that was the year they arrested thirteen or fourteen thousand people, just picking them up off the street, and then they didn't know what the hell to do with them. At that point we were in a football field. Later, we were put inside a stadium. And so we were walking around, arm in arm, talking to each other, and then congresspeople came in to see what was going on, and Bella Abzug came over to talk to us. She and I had always had these disagreements about the electoral work and what you can call action, direct action, and we would talk to each other about this. So she came over and she looked at me and Barbara walking arm in arm. She asked how we were. She was a congresswoman at this time. She was worried about us. We said we were all right. And then she said, "Well, I guess you're where you want to be and I'm where I want to be." And we laughed, we all laughed together. And I want to say about Bella that she was at this Women's Pentagon demonstration. She came, she walked with everybody, she didn't look for any limelight of any kind. She just sort of walked, and begged me not to get arrested. Again, she said she thought it was a waste of time. I could do more outside. But she really was just a part of the action. That's what we wanted all of our leaders to be, just a part of the women's action."

"Bella Abzug established a standard of integrity and chutzpah (nerve, courage) that challenges us all to tell the truth and to fight back."

"Under present conditions, people are preoccupied with consumer goods not because they are brainwashed but because buying is the one pleasurable activity not only permitted but actively encouraged by our rulers. The pleasure of eating an ice cream cone may be minor compared to the pleasure of meaningful, autonomous work, but the former is easily available and the latter is not. A poor family would undoubtedly rather have a decent apartment than a new TV, but since they are unlikely to get the apartment, what is to be gained by not getting the TV?"

"There is a persistent myth that a wife has control over her husband’s money because she gets to spend it. Actually, she does not have much more financial authority than the employee of a corporation who is delegated to buy office furniture or supplies. The husband, especially if he is rich, may allow his wife wide latitude in spending — he may reason that since she has to work in the home she is entitled to furnish it to her taste, or he may simply not want to bother with domestic details — but he retains the ultimate veto power. If he doesn’t like the way his wife handles his money, she will hear about it."

"Dylan is free now to work on his own terms. It would be foolish to predict what he will do next. But hopefully he will remain a mediator, using the language of pop to transcend it. If the gap between past and present continues to widen, such mediation may be crucial. In a communications crisis, the true prophets are the translators."

"Despite its numerical insignificance, the anti-abortion left epitomizes the hypocrisy of the right-to-life crusade. Its need to wrap misogyny in the rhetoric of social conscience and even feminism is actually a perverse tribute to the women’s movement; it is no longer acceptable to declare openly that women deserve to suffer for the sin of Eve. I suppose that’s progress — not that it does the victims of the Hyde Amendment much good."

"Whatever their limitations, Freud and Marx developed complex and subtle theories of human nature grounded in their observation of individual and social behavior. The crackpot rationalism of free-market economics merely relies on an abstract model of how people "must" behave."

"The project of organizing a democratic political movement entails the hope that one's ideas and beliefs are not merely idiosyncratic but speak to vital human needs, interests and desires, and therefore will be persuasive to many and ultimately most people. But this is a very different matter from deciding to put forward only those ideas presumed (accurately or not) to be compatible with what most people already believe."

"By definition, the conventional wisdom of the day is widely accepted, continually reiterated and regarded not as ideology but as reality itself. Rebelling against "reality," even when its limitations are clearly perceived, is always difficult. It means deciding things can be different and ought to be different; that your own perceptions are right and the experts and authorities wrong; that your discontent is legitimate and not merely evidence of selfishness, failure or refusal to grow up. Recognizing that "reality" is not inevitable makes it more painful; subversive thoughts provoke the urge to subversive action. But such action has consequences — rebels risk losing their jobs, failing in school, incurring the wrath of parents and spouses, suffering social ostracism. Often vociferous conservatism is sheer defensiveness: People are afraid to be suckers, to get their hopes up, to rethink their hard-won adjustments, to be branded bad or crazy."

"The idea that lack of paternal guidance can explain today's masculinity crisis doesn't make sense. I suspect rather that underneath the sons' charge that their fathers did not teach them how to be men lies another, unadmitted complaint — that their fathers taught them only too well how to be men, and they are choking on the lesson. These men, as boys, faced the age-old tradeoff: If you undergo the painful process of renouncing the "feminine" aspects of your humanity and follow your father into manhood (and what choice do you have, really?) you will share in the spoils of the superior half of the race. Now, as men, they find that the spoils are far more meager than expected. No wonder they feel betrayed."

"Surely we have had enough of confusing maleness with "usefulness" and other human virtues. If men had a more modest view of what their masculinity ought to entail, perhaps they could move on from debilitating feelings of loss to tackling their real economic and political problems."

"Today the changes that are generating enormous inequality, progressively destroying "real jobs" with security and benefits, demanding longer and longer hours and at least two incomes per household as prerequisites for a minimally middle-class existence, and depriving people of control over their work even in the professional classes are taking place in the absence of any credible opposition to the free-market dogma that rules the day. On the contrary, the capitalist triumphalists are riding high on a wave of "prosperity" that has enriched a minority of the population while obscuring the long-term slippage of our standard of living and our quality of life."

"More and more I am coming to the conviction that Roe vs. Wade, in the guise of a great victory, has been in some respects a disaster for feminism. We might be better off today if it had never happened, and we had had to continue a state-by-state political fight. Roe vs. Wade resulted in a lot of women declaring victory and going home. In the meantime we have been losing abortion rights on the ground, both in terms of access and funding and on the ideological and psychological levels."

"A genuinely democratic society requires a secular ethos: one that does not equate morality with religion, stigmatize atheists, defer to religious interests and aims over others or make religious belief an informal qualification for public office. Of course, secularism in the latter sense is not mandated by the First Amendment. It's a matter of sensibility, not law."

"If believers feel that their faith is trivialized and their true selves compromised by a society that will not give religious imperatives special weight, their problem is not that secularists are antidemocratic but that democracy is antiabsolutist."

"For democrats, it's as crucial to defend secular culture as to preserve secular law. And in fact the two projects are inseparable: When religion defines morality, the wall between church and state comes to be seen as immoral."

"In its original literal sense, "moral relativism" is simply moral complexity. That is, anyone who agrees that stealing a loaf of bread to feed one's children is not the moral equivalent of, say, shoplifting a dress for the fun of it, is a relativist of sorts. But in recent years, conservatives bent on reinstating an essentially religious vocabulary of absolute good and evil as the only legitimate framework for discussing social values have redefined "relative" as "arbitrary." That conflation has been reinforced by social theorists and advocates of identity politics who argue that there is no universal morality, only the value systems of particular cultures and power structures. From this perspective, the psychoanalytic – and by extension the psychotherapeutic – worldview is not relativist at all. Its values are honesty, self-knowledge, assumption of responsibility for the whole of what one does, freedom from inherited codes of family, church, tribe in favor of a universal humanism: in other words, the values of the Enlightenment, as revised and expanded by Freud's critique of scientific rationalism for ignoring the power of unconscious desire."

"The Democratic power elite on some level feels delegitimized by its working-class, black and female constituencies. What it wants are the "legitimate" votes of suburban, white, middle-class, affluent males. Even liberal voters and organizations tend on some tacit level to accept the idea that they are not the "real" Americans the Democrats must pursue."

"A triumphalist corporate capitalism, free at last of the specter of Communism, has mobilized its economic power to relentlessly marginalize all nonmarket values; to subordinate every aspect of American life to corporate "efficiency" and the bottom line; to demonize not only government but the very idea of public service and public goods."

"The notion that there might be any need for, or possibility of, profound changes in the institutions that shape American life work, family, technology, the primacy of the car and the single-family house — is foreign to the mainstream media that define our common sense. And so conflicts that cannot be addressed politically have expressed themselves by other means. From public psychodramas like the O. J. Simpson trial, the Lewinsky scandal and Columbine to disaster movies, talk shows and "reality TV," popular culture carries the burden of our emotions about race, feminism, sexual morality, youth culture, wealth, competition, exclusion, a physical and social environment that feels out of control."

"For a decade Americans have been steeped in the rhetoric of "zero tolerance" and the faith that virtually all problems from drug addiction to lousy teaching can be solved by pouring on the punishment. Even without a Commander in Chief who pledges to rid the world of evildoers, smoke them out of their holes and the like, we would be vulnerable to the temptation to brush aside frustrating complexities and relieve intolerable fear (at least for the moment) by settling on one or more scapegoats to crush. To imagine that trauma casts out fantasy is a dangerous mistake."

"The will to power is the will to ecstasy is the will to surrender is the will to submit and, in extremis, to die. Or to put it another way, the rage to attain a freedom and happiness one's psyche cannot accept creates enormous anxiety and ends in self-punishing despair."

"Can the high level of violence in patriarchal cultures be attributed to people's chronic, if largely unconscious, rage over the denial of their freedom and pleasure? To what extent is sanctioned or officially condoned violence — from war and capital punishment to lynching, wife-beating and the rape of "bad" women to harsh penalties for "immoral" activities like drug-taking and nonmarital sex to the religious and ideological persecution of totalitarian states — in effect a socially approved outlet for expressing that rage, as well as a way of relieving guilt by projecting one's own unacceptable desires onto scapegoats?"

"In practice, attempts to sort out good erotica from bad porn inevitably comes down to "What turns me on is erotic; what turns you on is pornographic.""

"I believe in the separation of sex and state. I also believe that social benefits like health insurance should not be privileges bestowed by marital status but should be available to all as individuals. Marriage, in the sense of a ceremonial commitment of people to merge their lives, is properly a social ritual reflecting religious or personal conviction, and should not have legal status. "Sanctity" is a religious category that is, or ought to be, irrelevant to secular law. The purpose of civil unions should be to establish parental rights and responsibilities, grant next-of-kin status for such purposes as medical decisions and insure equity in matters of property distribution and taxes. Such unions should be available to any two — or more — adults, regardless of gender."

"To say that historical conditions made personal life possible, and with it the self-consciousness that allowed psychoanalysis to emerge, is to tell half the story: one also has to consider that the erotic impulse, ever pressing for satisfaction, had something to do with making the history that encouraged its expression."

"Individuals bearing witness do not change history; only movements that understand their social world can do that. Movements encourage solidarity; the moral individual is likely, all unwittingly, to do the opposite, for bearing witness is lonely: it breeds feelings of superiority and moralistic anger against those who are not doing the same."

"Individuals bearing witness cannot do the work of social movements, but they can break a corrosive and demoralizing silence."

"Some conservatives have expressed outrage that the views of professors are at odds with the views of students, as if ideas were entitled to be represented in proportion to their popularity and students were entitled to professors who share their political or social values. One of the more important functions of college — that it exposes young people to ideas and arguments they have not encountered at home — is redefined as a problem."

"It’s not only corruption that distorts the utopian impulse when it begins to take some specific social shape. The prospect of more freedom stirs anxiety. We want it, but we fear it; it goes against our most deeply ingrained Judeo-Christian definitions of morality and order. At bottom, utopia equals death is a statement about the wages of sin."

"Today, anxiety is a first principle of social life, and the right knows how to exploit it. Capital foments the insecurity that impels people to submit to its demands. And yet there are more Americans than ever before who have tasted certain kinds of social freedoms and, whether they admit it or not, don’t want to give them up or deny them to others. From Bill Clinton’s impeachment to the Terri Schiavo case, the public has resisted the right wing’s efforts to close the deal on the culture. Not coincidentally, the cultural debates, however attenuated, still conjure the ghosts of utopia by raising issues of personal autonomy, power, and the right to enjoy rather than slog through life. In telling contrast, the contemporary left has not posed class questions in these terms; on the contrary, it has ceded the language of freedom and pleasure, "opportunity" and "ownership," to the libertarian right."

"The public's continuing ambivalence about cultural matters is all the more striking given that the political conversation on these issues has for 30 years been dominated by an aggressive, radical right-wing insurgency that has achieved an influence far out of proportion to its numbers. Its potent secret weapon has been the guilt and anxiety about desire that inform the character of Americans regardless of ideology; appealing to those largely unconscious emotions, the right has disarmed, intimidated, paralyzed its opposition."

"The goal of the right is not to stop abortion but to demonize it, punish it and make it as difficult and traumatic as possible. All this it has accomplished fairly well, even without overturning Roe v. Wade."

"Take back the night? How can women take back the night when they've never had it?"

"My education was dominated by modernist thinkers and artists who taught me that the supreme imperative was courage to face the awful truth, to scorn the soft-minded optimism of religious and secular romantics as well as the corrupt optimism of governments, advertisers, and mechanistic or manipulative revolutionaries. I learned that lesson well (though it came too late to wholly supplant certain critical opposing influences, like comic books and rock-and-roll). Yet the modernists’ once-subversive refusal to be gulled or lulled has long since degenerated into a ritual despair at least as corrupt, soft-minded, and cowardly — not to say smug — as the false cheer it replaced. The terms of the dialectic have reversed: now the subversive task is to affirm an authentic post-modernist optimism that gives full weight to existent horror and possible (or probable) apocalyptic disaster, yet insists — credibly — that we can, well, overcome. The catch is that you have to be an optimist (an American?) in the first place not to dismiss such a project as insane. ("Tom Wolfe's Failed Optimism" 1977)"

"My deepest impulses are optimistic; an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect. ("Tom Wolfe's Failed Optimism" 1977)"

"There are two kinds of sex, classical and baroque. Classical sex is romantic, profound, serious, emotional, moral, mysterious, spontaneous, abandoned, focused on a particular person, and stereotypically feminine. Baroque sex is pop, playful, funny, experimental, conscious, deliberate, amoral, anonymous, focused on sensation for sensation's sake, and stereotypically masculine. The classical mentality taken to an extreme is sentimental and finally puritanical; the baroque mentality taken to an extreme is pornographic and finally obscene. Ideally, a sexual relation ought to create a satisfying tension between the two modes (a baroque idea, particularly if the tension is ironic) or else blend them so well that the distinction disappears (a classical aspiration). ("Classical and Baroque Sex in Everyday Life" 1979)"

"To regard marriage and singleness simply as “options,” or even as situations equally favorable to men and oppressive to women, misses the point. The institution of the family, and the people who enforce its rules and uphold its values, define the lives of both married and single people, just as capitalism defines the lives of workers and dropouts alike. The family system divides us up into insiders and outsiders; as insiders married people are more likely to identify with the established order, and when they do they are not simply expressing a personal preference but taking a political stand. The issue, finally, is whether we have the right to hope for a freer, more humane way of connecting with each other. Defenders of the family seem to think that we have already gone too far, that the problem of this painful and confusing time is too much freedom. I think there’s no such thing as too much freedom — only too little nerve. ("The Family: Love It or Leave It" 1979)"

"Any useful discussion of black-Jewish conflict must begin by acknowledging two basic realities. One is that American Jews are white and predominantly middle class, and so tend to have a white middle-class perspective on racial issues. The other is that blacks are part of the gentile majority and so tend to share the misconceptions about Jews and the overt or unconscious anti-Jewish attitudes that permeate our culture. Unfortunately, neither group has been eager to accept its share of responsibility for the conflict. If Jews have often minimized their privileges and denied or rationalized their racism, blacks have regularly dismissed Jewish protest against anti-Semitism in the black community as at best oversensitivity, at worst racist par­anoia. And in the end, guess who benefits from all the bitterness? Hint: the answer isn’t blacks or Jews. ("The Black-Jewish Conflict, Part II: The Myth of the Powerful Jew" 1979)"

"Mass consumption, advertising, and mass art are a corporate Frankenstein; while they reinforce the system, they also undermine it. By continually pushing the message that we have the right to gratification now, consumerism at its most expansive encouraged a demand for fulfillment that could not so easily be contained by products…"

"I think the craving for freedom for self-determination, in the most literal sense is a basic impulse that can be suppressed but never eliminated."

"To be anticapitalist is not enough. Socialist regimes have attacked the grosser forms of economic inequality, yet in terms of the larger struggle for freedom, socialism in practice has been, if anything, a devastating counterrevolution against the liberal concept of individual rights."

"The colonized people who have contributed to the enrichment of the capitalist West share neither its prosperity nor its relative freedom. And the imperatives of the marketplace set people against each other; the comforts of middle-class life are bought at the expense of the poor, liberty at the expense of community."

"On one level the sixties revolt was an impressive illustration of Lenin's remark that the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with."

"Art that succeeds manages to evade or transcend or turn to its own purposes the strictures imposed on the artist; on the deepest level it is the enemy of authority, as Plato understood. Mass art is no exception."

"it is the longing for happiness that is potentially radical, while the morality of sacrifice is an age-old weapon of rulers. I don't mean to suggest that social revolution can be painless-only that there is no reason to go through the pain if not, finally, to affirm our right to pleasure. In the meantime we have to live our lives, which means living with the contradictions of a system built on the premise that one must continually choose-insofar as one has a choice-to be either an oppressor or a victim. So long as that system exists, our pleasures will be guilty, our suffering self-righteous, our glimpses of freedom ambiguous and elusive."

"as realities get grimmer, the possibilities tend to be forgotten."

"While liberals appeared to be safely in power, feminists could perhaps afford the luxury of defining Larry Flynt or Roman Polanski as Enemy Number One. Now that we have to cope with Jerry Falwell and Jesse Helms, a rethinking of priorities seems in order. ("Lust Horizons: Is the Woman's Movement Pro-Sex?" 1981)"

"These apparently opposed perspectives meet on the common ground of sexual conservatism. The monogamists uphold the traditional wife's "official" values: emotional commitment is inseparable from a legal/moral obligation to permanence and fidelity; men are always trying to escape these duties; it's in our interest to make them shape up. The separatists tap into the underside of traditional femininity — the bitter, self-righteous fury that propels the indictment of men as lustful beasts ravaging their chaste victims. These are the two faces of feminine ideology in a patriarchal culture: they induce women to accept a spurious moral superiority as a substitute for sexual pleasure, and curbs on men's sexual freedom as a substitute for real power. ("Lust Horizons: Is the Woman's Movement Pro-Sex?" 1981)"

"Often men's impulses to coerce and degrade women seem to express not a confident assumption of dominance but a desire to retaliate for feelings of rejection, humiliation, and impotence: as many men see it, they need women sexually more than women need them, an intolerable balance of power. ("Toward a Feminist Sexual Revolution")"

"one exasperating example of how easy it is to obliterate history is that Betty Friedan can now get away with the outrageous claim that radical feminist "extremism" turned women off and derailed the movement she built. Radical feminism turned women on, by the thousands. ("Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism" 1984)"

"The logic of competing oppressions does not heal divisions but intensifies them, since it invites endless and absurd extension — for every person who has no shoes, there is al­ways someone who has no feet...White women will not become com­mitted allies of black women because they’re told that their own suffering is unimportant. What white women must be convinced of is that it’s impossible to have it both ways — ­that the privileges we cling to are an insuperable obstacle to the freedom and equal­ity we long for. We need to learn this lesson again and again. Good books help. ("Sisters Under the Skin: Confronting Race and Sex" 1982)"

"I think it makes sense to look on violence as a tragic last resort, to ask of any violent act that it be necessary to prevent physical destruction or soul-destroying violation, and that it be directed as narrowly as possible to those most responsible for the conflict. I'm glad the French resistance used terror against the Germans-and I think our bombing of Dresden was a war crime. (“Ministries of Fear” 1985)"

"the remedy is not to apologize for Rushdie's book, or qualify the protests. It's to keep emphasizing that the struggle against our own brand of fundamentalism is far from won-ask any American librarian, science teacher, or abortion clinic head-and that the virulence of Khomeini's attack on Rushdie reflects, among other things, conflict between fundamentalists and modernists within the Moslem world. (“In Defense of Offense” 1989)"

"There were secularists, democrats, liberals, and feminists in Iran before Khomeini killed or exiled them; there are secularists, democrats, liberals, and feminists in other Islamic countries; and there are immigrants like Salman Rushdie, who have voted with their feet for a freer life. Are they all tools of Western imperialism, poisoned by Satan, as the ayatollah would say? (“In Defense of Offense”)"

"Most of us felt about the sexual revolution what Gandhi reputedly thought of Western civilization-that it would be a good idea. (“Coming Down Again” 1989)"

"The point of drugs, for me, was always the eternal moment when you felt like Jesus's son (and gender be damned); when you found your center, which is another word for sanity or, I assume, sobriety as Faith understands it. But I never found a drug that would guarantee me that moment, or even a more vulgar euphoria: acid, grass, speed, coke, even Quaaludes (I've never tried heroin), all were unpredictable, potentially treacherous, as likely to concentrate anxiety as to blow it away. Context was all-important-set and setting, as they called it in those days. My emotional state, amplified or undercut by the collective emotional atmosphere, made the difference between a good trip, a bad trip, or no trip at all. For me, the ability to get high (I don't mean only on drugs) flourished in the atmosphere of abandon that defined the '60s-that pervasive cultural invitation to leap boundaries, challenge limits, try anything, want everything, overload the senses, let go. (“Coming Down Again” 1989)"

"The drug war has nothing to do with making communities livable or creating a decent future for black kids. On the contrary, prohibition is directly responsible for the power of crack dealers to terrorize whole neighborhoods. And every cent spent on the cops, investigators, bureaucrats, courts, jails, weapons, and tests required to feed the drug-war machine is a cent not spent on reversing the social policies that have destroyed the cities, nourished racism, and laid the groundwork for crack culture. ("Hell No, I Won't Go: End the War on Drugs" 1989)"

"The centerpiece of the cultural counterrevolution is the snowballing campaign for a "drug-free workplace" — a euphemism for "drug-free workforce," since urine testing also picks up for off-duty indulgence. The purpose of this '80s version of the loyalty oath is less to deter drug use than to make people undergo a humiliating ritual of subordination: "When I say pee, you pee." The idea is to reinforce the principle that one must forfeit one's dignity and privacy to earn a living, and bring back the good old days when employers had the unquestioned right to demand that their workers' appearance and behavior, on or off the job, meet management's standards. ("Hell No, I Won't Go: End the War on Drugs" 1989)"

"Pleasure. Does it sound like a dirty word to you? No wonder, given how relentlessly it's been attacked not only by puritanical conservatives but by liberals who uncritically accept the Reaganite equation of pleasure with greed and callousness. (I think, for instance, of a recent newspaper article that described our society as a snake pit of "crime, violence, poverty and hedonism.") Yet life without pleasure-without spontaneity and playfulness, sexuality and sensuality, esthetic experience, surprise, excitement, ecstasy-is a kind of death. People deprived of pleasure don't get kinder and gentler but meaner and nastier. Indeed, it's not an excess of pleasure but pleasure-starvation on a mass scale that we have to thank for the rampant piggishness and urban violence that plague us. (Epilogue: The Neo-Guilt Trip)"

"For my generation, formed equally by the liberating exuberance of rock and roll and the imperial brutality of Vietnam, the question of where we stood on America was inescapable. Was this nation (it!) the enemy, tyrannical abroad, hopelessly racist at home, and in the process of choking to death on a glut of consumer goods? Or were we (we!), however corrupted by various forms of power, still the source of a vital democratic impulse that fed cultural dissidence and subverted authoritarian values all over the world? I took the latter position, and through the '6os and '7os, exploring its paradoxes was a central concern of my writing."

"the cultural right has redefined the American project as closing the frontier. Frustrated that their political power has not translated into cultural hegemony, conservatives are methodically attacking cultural institutions-particularly the universities and the arts--Ostensibly for being subverted by radicals, but actually for their persistent liberalism, especially that mushy pluralistic habit of allowing cultural dissidents on the premises. The right, very simply, wants us out of America's public life: the First Amendment may protect our right to rant, but only if we can do it without money and without space."

"Though self-definition is the necessary starting point for any liberation movement, it can take us only so far. The most obvious drawback of identity politics is its logic of fragmentation into ever smaller and more particularist groups: the fracturing of the radical feminist movement along class and gay-straight lines (the racial divide having kept most black women out of the movement to begin with) is the sobering paradigm. What's at stake here, however, is not only the pragmatic question (crucial as it is) of how to avoid being divided and conquered, but our understanding of what it means to be a principled radical...Almost from the beginning, second wave feminism was a study in the limits of the identity politics it did so much to promote."

"radicals need to recreate a politics that emphasizes our common humanity, to base our social theory and practice on principles that apply to us all."

"Optimism of the will and, if possible, the intellect as well-is the engine of emancipation. ("Race and the Ordeal of Liberal Optimism")"

"Globalism erodes national and cultural boundaries at both the top and the bottom of the class hierarchy, encouraging the formation of a multiracial, multi-cultural, cosmopolitan elite as well as a multiracial, multicultural, migratory labor force. ("Race and the Ordeal of Liberal Optimism")"

"the real divide between the "politically correct" and their antagonists on the right is not free speech but equality. Heavily invested in a conception of freedom as a property right, including the right to fight for or maintain dominance in social hierarchies, conservatives have historically viewed any form of government-mandated social equality as tyranny. As the anti-P.C. shock troops see it, the right to engage in what others might call verbal bigotry is not only freedom of speech, but the substance of freedom itself, and so they often cross the line between merely defending its legality and tacitly or openly encouraging it. ("Freedom, Power, and Speech")"

"At its core, feminism is about freedom: seeking women's self-determination in private as well as public life; asserting women's individual human subjecthood against the pervasive social understanding of woman as a natural resource that exists for the benefit of men and children. Radical feminists, asking what impeded that freedom, developed an analysis of men's collective power over women. As the critique of male power is increasingly unmoored from a commitment to women's freedom-and used instead to "protect," that is, control us - it is easy to forget that these concerns once merged to create the most dynamic cultural radical movement in modern history. In one generation, feminism irreversibly shattered the culture's common sense about sex and gender. We called that process consciousness-raising. What we meant, first of all, was that we had found our voices, seized our freedom-and our power-of speech. ("Freedom, Power, and Speech")"

"American left politics, when successful, has generally worked this way: as radical ideas gain currency beyond their original advocates, they mutate into multiple forms. Groups representing different class, racial, ethnic, political, and cultural constituencies respond to the new movement with varying degrees of support or criticism and end up adapting its ideas to their own agendas. With these modifications, the movement's popularity spreads, putting pressure on existing power relations. Liberal reformers then mediate the process of dilution, containment, and "co-optation" whereby radical ideas that won't go away are incorporated into the system through new laws, policies, and court decisions. The essential dynamic here is a good cop/bad cop routine in which the liberals dismiss the radicals as impractical sectarian extremists, promote their own "responsible" proposals as an alternative, and take the credit for whatever change results. The good news is that this process does bring about significant change. The bad news is that by denying the legitimacy of radicalism it misleads people about how change takes place, rewrites history, and obliterates memory. It also leaves people sadly unprepared for the inevitable backlash. Once the radicals who were a real threat to the existing order have been marginalized, the right sees its opportunity to fight back. Conservatives in their turn become the insurgent minority, winning support by appealing to the still potent influence of the old "reality," decrying the tensions and disruptions that accompany social change, and promoting their own vision of prosperity and social order. Instead of seriously contesting their ideas, liberals try to placate them and cut deals, which only incites them to push further. Desperate to avoid isolation, the liberal left keeps retreating, moving its goal post toward the center, where "ordinary people" supposedly reside; but as yesterday's center becomes today's left, the entire debate shifts to the right. And in the end, despite all their efforts to stay "relevant," the liberals are themselves hopelessly marginalized. This has been our sorry situation since 1994."

"No mass left-wing movement has ever been built on a majoritarian strategy. On the contrary, every such movement-socialism, populism, labor, civil rights, feminism, gay rights, ecology-has begun with a visionary minority whose ideas were at first decried as impractical, ridiculous, crazy, dangerous, and/or immoral."

"Recognizing that “reality” is not inevitable makes it more painful; subversive thoughts provoke the urge to subversive action. But such action has consequences-rebels risk losing their jobs, failing in school, incurring the wrath of parents and spouses, suffering social ostracism. Often vociferous conservatism is sheer defensiveness: people are afraid to be suckers, to get their hopes up, to rethink their hard-won adjustments, to be branded bad or crazy."

"The perceived conflict between class and cultural politics arises not because they are intrinsically incompatible but because majoritarian leftists have uncritically equated the cultural values of workers and "ordinary people" with their historically dominant voices: white, straight, male, and morally conservative."

"the weight of my experience leads me to suspect that in my desire for a freer, saner, and more pleasurable way of life, I am not so different from most people, American or otherwise, as it might presently appear. It is this hopeful suspicion that keeps me writing."

"What can "American democracy" mean when no one even bothers to hide the fact that economic policy is made, not by elected officials accountable to their constituencies, but by the croupiers of global capital's floating crap game?"

"On a world scale, militant nationalism has followed economic globalism as surely as it once followed colonialism; but while it has served as an outlet for strong and deadly emotions, it has never solved the economic and social problems that provoked it."

"Only movements with particular social visions and practical goals can give faith a concrete, real-world shape"

"In the 1980s, Ellen Willis led the so-called pro-sex radical feminists in their heated challenge to the antipornography movement. Countering the arguments of Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, and others that "sexual liberation is a male supremacist plot, Willis proclaimed that sexual liberation was the keystone of broader social and cultural change."

"Ellen Willis is the single most important exponent of cultural radicalism in America today. I agree with her; I disagree with her; I am always stimulated."

"One of the last times I saw Ellen, she gave me a copy of Beginning to See the Light, with an inscription on the title page. It reads “To sex, hope, and rock and roll and whatever that means today.” The modesty of this simple quote is indicative of the breadth of her influence as a writer. She knew what sex, hope and rock and roll was today, but she wanted me to find out for myself."

"Her essays combine passion and moral clarity, anger and a steady commitment to having fun. Best of all, she channels the secret ecstatic undercurrents of late twentieth century American popular culture, which we need now more than ever."

"The name Ellen Willis is synonymous with political intelligence. Her cultural criticism is lucid, unerring, and important. The down-to-earth logic with which she argues a left-libertarian position is, in the final analysis, something visionary."

"Ellen Willis, who died in November at the age of 64, was such a unique and wonderful set of contradictions—or seeming contradictions. She was a staunchly radical feminist who believed in pleasure, happiness, and freedom. She was a fierce polemicist on the page who, in person, was often painfully shy. She loved long nineteenth-century novels, but was an ardent reader of the tabloids. She was one of the most instinctively ethical people I have ever known, and yet she hated any hint of sanctimony or self-righteousness. She was a dyed-in-the-wool bohemian who was obsessed with real estate—which is to say, she was a true New Yorker. And for me, part of the fun, and the adventure, of being Ellen’s friend and colleague was discovering that these disparate characteristics weren’t really contradictions at all: that somehow, in her inimitable way, she had put all the pieces together…Much has been written about the merging of high and low culture, but Ellen really lived that mix. She approached just about everything—George Eliot and The Sopranos, Herbert Marcuse and Lou Reed—with equal thoughtfulness, seriousness, dignity, and care. Ellen lacked both pretense and condescension. Her writings on pop culture weren’t a form of slumming; she genuinely—though not naively—believed in the emancipatory possibilities of the demotic, because she had experienced them herself. And though Ellen, like so many of us, was increasingly alienated from the culture in which she lived, she never became a mandarin. (In a 2005 piece, she chided Susan Sontag as a “curmudgeon” with a “free-floating animus” toward pop.) Up until almost the moment of Ellen’s death, the world, and its possibilities, held her interest…"

"Ellen Willis has always been one of the sharpest political writers on the left...one of the most profound as well."

"Through brilliant, often polemical, writings, the feminist and educator Ellen Willis, who has died of lung cancer aged 64, was central to the cultural debates and political controversies of the United States over nearly four decades...Willis brought lucidity and style to the most controversial and baffling cultural issues—her thought was a beacon of clarity. For those of us fortunate enough to have been her comrades, anticipating her insights was part of what kept us returning to meetings month after month, year after year."

"Like other eminent polemical writers, Willis has always had the knack of turning radical ideas into common sense."

"Ellen Willis was one of the few great critics of her generation. She was theoretically sophisticated, historically informed, and courageous in her commitment to freedom. Her prose was lyrical and melodic, and she was always unsettling!"

"Fearless, sweet reason, exacting style, and an unbounded sensuous spirit make Ellen Willis's radical essays among the finest that America has ever produced."

"Early on a difficult climb, especially a difficult solo climb, you constantly feel the abyss pulling at your back. To resist takes a tremendous conscious effort; you don't dare let your guard down for an instant. The siren song of the void puts you on edge; it makes your movements tentative, clumsy, herky-jerky. But as the climb goes on, you grow accustomed to the exposure, you get used to rubbing shoulders with doom, you come to believe in the reliability of your hands and feet and head. You learn to trust your self-control. By and by your attention becomes so intensely focused that you no longer notice the raw knuckles, the cramping thighs, the strain of maintaining nonstop concentration. A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence — the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes — all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand. At such moments something resembling happiness actually stirs in your chest, but it isn't the sort of emotion you want to lean on very hard. In solo climbing the whole enterprise is held together with little more than chutzpah, not the most reliable adhesive."

"Straddling the top of the world, one foot in China and the other in Nepal, I cleared the ice from my oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against the wind, and stared absently down at the vastness of Tibet. I understood on some dim, detached level that the sweep of earth beneath my feet was a spectacular sight. I'd been fantasizing about this moment, and the release of emotion that would accompany it, for many months. But now that I was finally here, actually standing on the summit of Mount Everest, I just couldn't summon the energy to care."

"I don't know what God is, or what God had in mind when the universe was set in motion. In fact, I don't know if God even exists, although I confess that I sometimes find myself praying in times of great fear, or despair, or astonishment at a display of unexpected beauty. There are some ten thousand religious sects — each with its own cosmology, each with its own answer for the meaning of life and death. Most assert that the other 9,999 not only have it completely wrong but are instruments of evil, besides. None of the ten thousand has yet persuaded me to make the requisite leap of faith. In the absence of conviction, I've come to terms with the fact that uncertainty is an inescapable corollary of life. An abundance of mystery is simply part of the bargain — which doesn't strike me as something to lament. Accepting the essential inscrutability of existence, in any case, is surely preferable to its opposite: capitulating to the tyranny of intransigent belief. And if I remain in the dark about our purpose here, and the meaning of eternity, I have nevertheless arrived at an understanding of a few modest truths: Most of us fear death. Most of us yearn to comprehend how we got here, and why — which is to say, most of us ache to know the love of our creator. And we will no doubt feel that ache, most of us, for as long as we happen to be alive."

"Prostitution myths justify the existence of prostitution, promote misinformation about prostitution, and contribute to a social climate that exploits and harms not only prostituted women but all women."

"Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), commonly occurs among prostituted women, and is indicative of their extreme emotional distress. PTSD is characterized by anxiety, depression, insomnia, irritability, flashbacks, emotional numbing, and hyperalertness. In nine countries, we found that sixty-eight percent of those in prostitution met criteria for a diagnosis of PTSD, a prevalence that was comparable to battered women seeking shelter, rape survivors seeking treatment, and survivors of state-sponsored torture. Across widely varying cultures on five continents, the traumatic consequences of prostitution were similar."

"We feminists think that women deserve the right NOT to prostitute."

"For many women, the experience of prostitution stems from the historical trauma of colonization."

"Within the gendered institution of prostitution, race and class create a hierarchy with indigenous women at its lowest point."

"U.S. prostitution can be understood in the context of the cultural normalization of prostitution as a glamorous and wealth-producing “job” for girls who lack emotional support, education, and employment opportunities. The sexual exploitation of children and women in prostitution is often indistinguishable from incest, intimate partner violence, and rape."

"Sexist and racist economic policies in the United States such as a lack of educational opportunity for poor families and a lack of sustainable income from many jobs contribute to women’s and girls’ entry into prostitution. The economic and legal vulnerability of undocumented immigrant women in the United States is exploited in prostitution/pornography."

"Prostitution/trafficking/pornography systematically discriminate against women, against the young, against the poor and against ethnically subordinated groups. Specific acts commonly perpetrated against women in prostitution and pornography are the same as the acts defining what torture is: verbal sexual harassment, forced nudity, rape, sexual mocking, physical sexual harassment such as groping, and not permitting basic hygiene. The psychological consequences of these acts are the same whether it is named state-sponsored torture or prostitution."

"Some words hide the truth. Just as torture can be named enhanced interrogation, and logging of old-growth forests is named the Healthy Forest Initiative, words that lie about prostitution leave people confused about the nature of prostitution and trafficking. The words "sex work" make the harms of prostitution invisible."

"Prostitution is sexual violence that results in massive economic profit for some of its perpetrators. The sex industry, like other global enterprises, has domestic and international sectors, marketing sectors, a range of physical locations out of which it operates in each community, is controlled by many different owners and managers, and is constantly expanding as technology, law, and public opinion permit."

"Prostitution is advertised online, where it is indistinguishable from pornography. The Internet has expanded the reach of traffickers and it has intensified the humiliation and violence of prostitution. Pornography is one specific means of trafficking women for the purpose of selling women into prostitution."

"While feminists have spoken about prostitution as the buying and selling of women’s bodies, one trick more specifically explained what he did in prostitution as "renting an organ for ten minutes." Another explained, "Guys get off on controlling women, they use physical power to control women, really. If you look at it, [prostitution is] paid rape. You’re making them subservient during that time, so you’re the dominant person. She has to do what you want.""

"Postmodern descriptions of prostituted women as sex workers promotes an acceptance of conditions that in any other employment context would be correctly described as sexual harassment, sexual exploitation, or rape. Women’s experiences of violence and their psychological response to it cannot be theorized away."

"Anyone who shoots a real gun at you when drunk and angry is simply not husband material, regardless of his taste in literature."

"Our fellow passenger was Major Grogan, who thirty years before had been the first white man to go from the Cape to Cairo. It took him three years, one whole year in the marshes of the Sudd; his two companions died. It is said he ate them; I think so. He looked like a sensible man."

"Man is exogamous—all our history is one long drive to find and impregnate the stranger. Or get impregnated by him, it works for women too. Anything different-colored, different nose, ass, anything, man has to fuck it or die trying. That’s a drive, y’know, it’s built in. Because it works fine as long as the stranger is human. For millions of years that kept the genes circulating. But now we’ve met aliens we can’t screw, and we’re about to die trying."

"People, of course, seemed to need also to talk and talk, which was a pity because their talk was mostly without meaning."

"The American black who goes to Kenya often discovers he is an American first and an African second, no matter what they did to him in Newark."

"“Stupid,” I husked to George. “Harem slaves don’t blow up the harem and themselves just to keep the new girls out. They wait and poison the new girls when they can get away with it. That does us no good.” “Nor do historical analogies, after a point.” “Analogic reasoning works when you have the right reference frame.”"

"Did you know you get clobbered for calling a polyglot a linguist?"

"Somewhere in his head a couple of neurones twitched, but they didn’t connect."

"Because dying, any time, is an experience you don’t survive."

"Entropy! The development of reliable knowledge is anti-entropic. Science’s task in a social system is comparable to the function of intelligence in the individual. It holds against disorganization, isolation, noise, entropy. But we, here—we’ve allied ourselves with an entropic subsystem. We’re not generating structure, we’re helping to degrade the system!"

"You can understand why a system would seek information—but why in hell does it offer information? Why do we strive to be understood? Why is a refusal to accept communication so painful?"

"Eerie blue, the wide old eyes reminded him of a place he had never seen."

"If it worked it would be like trying to wipe your eye with a blowtorch."

"She sounded sane as soap."

"He heard himself humming and decided to lock the whole thing into autopilot. No matter what shape that computer was in it would be saner than he was."

"What if a person is sure of his identity but it isn’t his identity?"

"What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine."

"Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like—like that smoke. We'll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You'll see."

""James Tiptree, Jr." was a science fiction writer whose very fine work began appearing in the 1960s. No one had ever met "Tiptree" and theories about "him" were rife. Finally "James Tiptree, Jr." was revealed to be a sixty-year-old biologist called Alice Sheldon. We corresponded extensively, both before this revelation and afterwards. I loved James and was sad to lose him but I loved Alice too (she sent postcards typed in blue ink with blue-ink octopi drawn on them) and was much sadder to lose her because her loss (her death) was permanent. Straight people, however sympathetic they may be, don't know the texture or the difficulties of gay lives. When I heard of her death I determined that she wouldn't go down in history as another happy, heterosexual woman (like Virginia Woolf) whose life was edited because her real desires were held to be somehow an "attack" on her character. Sheldon, like Woolf, was married and happily so but she was a lesbian. Therefore I wrote the above note to Extrapolation and donated her letters to what I considered the appropriate place."

"San Francisco, I believe, has the most disagreeable climate and locality of any city on the globe. If the winter be not unusually wet, there is some delightful weather to be enjoyed. If it be, you are flooded, and the rainy season closes to give place to what is miscalled summer — a season so cold that you require more clothing than you did in January; so damp with fogs and mists that you are penetrated to the very marrow; so windy that if you are abroad in the afternoon it is a continual struggle. Your eyes are blinded, your teeth set on edge, and your whole person made so uncomfortable by the sand that has insinuated itself through your clothing, that you could not conceive it possible to feel a sensation of comfort short of a warm bath and shower. . . . What sort of end the unfortunates, who spend their lives there, can expect under such circumstances, one does not easily foresee."

"Each of the Arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a Muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them."

"Our own theological Church, as we know, has scorned and vilified the body till it has seemed almost a reproach and a shame to have one, yet at the same time has credited it with power to drag the soul to perdition."

"The human face is the organic seat of beauty.... It is the register of value in development, a record of Experience, whose legitimate office is to perfect the life, a legible language to those who will study it, of the majestic mistress, the soul."

"I would like it if those who were active at the time I am writing about find in Vida something that brings back the excitement, the fear, the hope of that era. I would be pleased if those too young to have lived through those times might find something of value in our struggles, might learn from our successes and our failures and be inspired to imagine a movement that might again try to change the structure and direction of our country into a more humane, just and equal society."

"I said, I like my life. If I have to give it back, if they take it from me, let me only not feel I wasted any, let me not feel I forgot to love anyone I meant to love, that I forgot to give what I held in my hands, that I forgot to do some little piece of the work that wanted to come through."

"The noise from outside broke loud and sudden, as if somebody had begun cutting a superhighway through the woods. Dinah's first reaction was fury. Bounding up, she spilled her coffee right into the lap of the black velvet robe Susan had made for her. A chain saw screeched nasally but she heard something growlier under it."

"We are past the point where critics, whether reviewing a few poetry books in the London Times or New York Times, or for literary magazines, editors, teachers of literature and male poets themselves can pontificate about poetry and mean only the work of twenty or thirty white male writers."

"Good work in a field breeds interest and makes room for more good practitioners. We are not rivals but workers building something whose final shape we are not able even to fantasize."

"Like species, couples die out or evolve."

"Like many women, Daria both loved her mother and prayed not to become her. Often Daria felt helpless before her mother Nina's woes, yet her first impulse was to reassure herself: I am different. I have a good and faithful husband, I have my own work, I live in a beautiful house, I like my life. Misery was not hereditary or contagious. Since the plane had taken off late from Chicago, Daria had been dividing her time between worrying about her younger daughter Tracy, who had gone away to college for the first time, and Nina, who had sounded more depressed and lonely than usual on the phone last night. Was Nina really sick? Or just unhappy?"

"Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen: reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in."

"Doorways are sacred to women for we are the doorways of life and we must choose what comes in and what goes out."

"No, thanks." Vida placed her hand over the top of the tulip-shaped wineglass. "No more for me. Thank you." "This is a good Vouvray. Louis in the wine store recommended it" Hank tried to nudge her hand aside with the cold dripping base of the bottle. "It's lovely. I've just had enough." She made herself smile. It felt like a date, a bad date. She had to keep smiling across the debris of the dinner for two. "The chicken was wonderful!"

"Drifting with things is a habit it takes almost dying to break."

"Beth was looking in the mirror of her mother's vanity. The mirror had wings that opened and shut. When she was little she used to like to pull them together around her into a cave of mirrors with only a slit of light. It isn't me, isn't me. Well, who else would it be, stupid? Isn't anyone except Bride: a dress wearing a girl."

"The point of creating futures is to get people to imagine what they want and don’t want to happen down the road – and maybe do something about it."

"Feminist utopias were created out of a hunger for what we didn’t have, at a time when change felt not only possible but probable. Utopias came from the desire to imagine a better society when we dared to do so."

"When I was a child, I first noticed that neither history as I was taught it, nor the stories I was told, seemed to lead to me. I began to fix them. I have been at it ever since. We need a past that leads to us. Similarly, what we imagine we are working toward does a lot to define what we will consider doable action aimed at producing the future we want and preventing the future we fear."

"Utopia is born of the hunger for something better, but it relies on hope as the engine for imagining such a future. I wanted to take what I considered the most fruitful ideas of the various movements for social change and make them vivid and concrete – that was the real genesis of Woman on the Edge of Time."

"It may be that television and the ever more aggressive investigative efforts of the news media have addled our ability to choose a leader wisely. Between sound bites and the seduction of images, we run a popularity contest every four years instead of an election. ("THE MORE WE SEE, THE LESS WE KNOW" , article originally from 2004)"

"The worst thing that a politician can be called is elitist-and what do we mean by that? In Iowa, Howard Dean was labeled that-a sushi eating, PBS watching, Volvo driving man-not macho enough, clearly, to win the vote of working men. But who determines the massive layoffs and the movement of corporations abroad that gut the economies of so many cities and drive families from comfort into chaos? Those are the members of the real elite ("THE MORE WE SEE, THE LESS WE KNOW")"

"Poetry was a way of keeping myself relatively sane and trying to make sense of the world I inhabited, which did not correspond to the world shown on the television we acquired the year we moved or the world that textbooks and school commended to us. The place I had grown up in was far more violent. Radical politics made sense to me. ("TOUCHED BY GINSBERG AT A (RELATIVELY) TENDER AGE")"

"Poetry changes with every generation, but it does not improve or progress. It just changes its styles, trappings and some of its obsessions, but we can still enjoy Sappho and Homer; they are today's news as much as when they were written or recited."

"the most fruitful ways to approach the future for me are speculative fiction or utopian fiction. Isaac Asimov once said that all science fiction falls into three categories: What if, If only, and If this continues. I have written in all three categories."

"Who wants equality? Those who do not have it."

"(about putting time into trying to look young) It is certainly a replacement for educating your mind, developing your interests, becoming closer to other people. If you spent the amount of time a week you might spend on the pursuit of a prepubescent body on learning a foreign language, on writing something meaningful to yourself and to others, on practicing piano, on changing the society-this country would be a far different place."

"Utopia is work that issues from pain: it is what we do not have that we crave."

"It is by imagining what we truly desire that we begin to go there. That is the kind of thinking about the future that seems to me most fruitful, most rewarding. I want a future in which women are not punished for having women's bodies, are not punished for desire or the lack of it, are viewed as independent protagonists in their own adventures-spiritual, intellectual, romantic, sexual, and creative adventures. That's one reason I read and write speculative fiction."

"When the knocking came, Maud was taking a sponge bath. (first line of "The Cost of Lunch, Etc.")"

"In my life, there have been a great many Mr. Wrongs. I married one of them and spent time and energy and emotion on dozens more. My feeling is that in love you are entitled to a great many mistakes so long as you aren't making the same one over and over. (beginning of "The Easy Arrangement")"

"As if a wind that had been blowing hard against her had suddenly fallen silent, her ears roared with silence. ("What the Arbor Said")"

"I love silence but I fear emptiness. (p11)"

"From the time I arrived on the Cape, one of the things I chose explicitly was to put my writing first. Everything else in my life waxed and waned, but writing, I discovered during my restructuring, was my real core. (p218)"

"At that time, a pregnant woman could not get an abortion in Massachusetts -- but a cat could. (p221)"

"Attention is love, what we must give children, mothers, fathers, pets, our friends, the news, the woes of others. What we want to change we curse and then pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can with eyes and hands and tongue. If you can't bless it, get ready to make it new."

"Holy is the hand that works for peace and for justice, holy is the mouth that speaks for goodness, holy is the foot that walks toward mercy."

"there is no justice we don't make daily like bread and love."

"Poems start from a phrase, an image, an idea, a rhythm insistent in the back of the brain...Some poems are a journey of discovery and exploration for the writer as well as the reader. I find out where I am going when I finally arrive, which may take years."

"The mind wraps itself around a poem."

"Each good novel has a vision of its world that informs what is put in and what is left out."

"For me the gifts of the novelist are empathy and imagination."

"I think poetry ultimately is a more communal activity than fiction, but I love both equally."

"Every artist creates with open eyes what she sees in her dream. (p67)"

"He fought her with full energy and intelligence, as she had wanted to be loved. (one: IN THE CORPORATE FORTRESS)"

"He's in Veecee Beecee, making those elaborate worlds people play at living in instead of worrying about the one we're all stuck with." (one: IN THE CORPORATE FORTRESS)"

"No one before the twenty-first century had ever loved flowers and fruiting trees and little birds and the simple beauty of green leaves as did those who lived after the Famine, for whom they were precious and rare and always endangered. (four: THROUGH THE BURNING LABYRINTH)"

"This was the home she had fled, not from an unhappy childhood but from too early and too intense love, paradise torn. (four: THROUGH THE BURNING LABYRINTH)"

"For years she had had this magic circle they could weave about themselves, luminous with Gadi's imagination, the place where she could never be lonely or bored. In that private world of play more intense, far more real than reality, she was whatever she longed for. (five: FIFTEEN YEARS BEFORE: THE DAY OF ALEF)"

"Malkah's love was strong but abrasive, scrubbing her clean. Gadi's love bore both roses and thorns... (five: FIFTEEN YEARS BEFORE: THE DAY OF ALEF)"

"His body was a city, vast, filling her head. (five: FIFTEEN YEARS BEFORE: THE DAY OF ALEF)"

""You love too hard. It occupies the center and squeezes out your strength. If you work in the center and love to the side, you will love better in the long run, Shira. You will give more gracefully, without counting, and what you get, you will enjoy." (Malkah, six: WE KNOW TOO MUCH AND TOO LITTLE)"

""...No one can stop children in love unless by exile. But you'll never grow up if you don't let go of each other." (Malkah, six: WE KNOW TOO MUCH AND TOO LITTLE)"

"She felt as if she were seventeen again, ignorant, fearful, a creature all gusty emotions and pain. (eight: HOW SHALL I ADDRESS YOU?)"

""I never wanted to belong to anybody. I only wanted to borrow them for a while, for the fun of it, the tenderness, some laughs." (Malkah, nine: REVISING THE FAMILY ALBUM)"

""Some people go on wanting [sex] as long as they live, but other people, they let it go as if it were a garment that had worn out." (Malkah, nine: REVISING THE FAMILY ALBUM)"

""I still have insomnia, but now I tell myself stories instead of counting men." (Malkah nine: REVISING THE FAMILY ALBUM)"

"People had gone too far in destroying the earth, and now the earth was diminishing the number of people. (fourteen: BY THE LIGHT OF THE UNYELLOW MOON)"

"They ambled around the world through the Glops, into multi enclaves, onto the tubes and the zips, far more freely and safely than people or animals could. Shira watched it wistfully. That was true freedom, she thought, something now available only to special machines. (fourteen: BY THE LIGHT OF THE UNYELLOW MOON)"

""One aspect of working with you, even of being with you, that I really appreciate is how hard you try to communicate. Human males don't often have that habit." (Shira to Yod, fourteen: BY THE LIGHT OF THE UNYELLOW MOON)"

""Nobody at twenty-eight is a success or a failure. It's too early to figure out which way the tide's moving (Malkah, fifteen: THE SAME AS ME)"

""Before you, the strongest feeling I knew was fear." (Yod, twenty-two: THE PRESENT)"

"We all of us go about, she meant to tell him but was too occupied, wanting to be wanted but unsure why anybody should bother. (twenty-two: THE PRESENT)"

"Riva said, "Most folks press the diodes of stimmies against their temples and experience some twit's tears and orgasms, while the few plug in and access information on a scale never before available. The many know less and less and the few more and more." (twenty-three: WINE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT)"

""They perceive whatever they don't control as hostile." (Avram, twenty-five: WHERE THE ELITE MEET)"

""I used to wonder what I did wrong. But now I think that unless you grossly mistreat a child or spoil her or let her be injured, basically there's a given element in all of us, something from genes or the moment. From birth on, a child follows her own path. She learns, but she also unfolds from within." (Malkah, twenty-eight: HOW CAN WE TELL THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE?)"

"Most of life was bizarre when she stopped to examine it. (twenty-eight: HOW CAN WE TELL THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE?)"

""There's too little pleasant in this nasty dying world. We all need to remember how to play, how to be children together for a little while." (Gadi, twenty-eight: HOW CAN WE TELL THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE?)"

""He said to me once he had given up a normal life for the cyborgs. As if he could only create life if he gave up loving and living." (Yod about Avram, twenty-eight: HOW CAN WE TELL THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE?)"

"[He] felt a controlled importance, a fine passionate honing of his attention and intellect that made him impatient with his whole previous life. (p208)"

"If only I could tell each of them how much more fully I could love them now. I could give them, not the dutiful, selfish and perfunctory love of an adolescent, but an understanding love that would lighten their terrible burdens. (p253)"

"In their minds we're not human...They don't hate us because we did something or said something. They make us stand for an evil they invent and then they want to kill it in us. (p255)"

""...you have a reciprocal nature. You understand if you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening." (p343)"

"It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover. (p402)"

"Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third. (p666)"

"There is an attitude that has developed since about the 1890s that attempts to cast all politics and sociology out of poetry. I don't understand how anyone can seriously maintain this attitude. Actually, the attitude itself is political. Art which embodies the ideals of the ruling class in society isn't conceived as being political, and is simply judged by how well it is done. Art which contains ideas which threaten the position of that ruling class is silenced by critics: it is political, they say, and not art."

"Connie got up from her kitchen table and walked slowly to the door. Either I saw him or I didn't and I'm crazy for real this time, she thought. (first lines)"

"Over the old buildings the rain blew in long gray ropy strands cascading down the brick walls. As she was beckoned out with rough speed, she was surprised to see gulls wheeling above, far inland, as over other refuse grounds. Little was recycled here. She was human garbage carried to the dump. (Chapter One, p26)"

"She will walk in strength like a man and never sell her body and she will nurse her babies like a woman and live in love like a garden... (Chapter Seven, p133)"

""Those of your time who fought hard for change, often they had myths that a revolution was inevitable. But nothing is! All things interlock. We are only one possible future..." (p177)"

""How come you took so long to get together and start fighting for what was yours? It's running easy to know smart looking backward, but it seems as if people fought hardest against those who had a little more than themselves or often a little less, instead of the lugs who got richer and richer." (p177)"

"Suddenly she thought that these men believed feeling itself a disease, something to be cut out like a rotten appendix. Cold, calculating, ambitious, believing themselves rational and superior, they chased the crouching female animal through the brain with a scalpel. From an early age she had been told that what she felt was unreal and didn’t matter. Now they were about to place in her something that would rule her feelings like a thermostat. (p282)"

""Only in us do the dead live. Water flows downhill through us. The sun cools in our bones. We are joined with all living in one singing web of energy. In us live the dead who made us. In us live the children unborn. Breathing each other’s air, drinking each other’s water, eating each other’s flesh, we grow like a tree from the earth." (p322)"

"The Movement is supposed to be for human liberation: how come the condition of women inside it is no better than outside?"

"Repression brings hardening."

"If the rewards are concentrated at the top, the shitwork is concentrated at the bottom."

"If you have contempt for people and think they cannot know what they want and need, who the hell is the revolution for?"

"We are oppressed, and we will achieve our liberation by fighting for it the same as any other oppressed group. Nobody is going to give it to us because we ask, however eloquently."

"A tendency to believe quite literally in the rhetoric of Movement males is a form of naiveté that no woman can afford."

"There are a lot of lonely and a lot of horny women."

"The use of women as props for a sagging ego is accepted socially. Everybody sees it and everybody agrees that they don't."

"The importance of male solidarity to enforce discrimination and contempt for women cannot be overemphasized."

"Certain of any oppressed group can always rise from that group by incorporating the manners and value system of the oppressed, and outwitting them at their own rigged game. We want Something Else. We are told that our sense of oppression is not legitimate. We are told women's liberation is a secondary issue, to be dealt with after the war is won. But the basis of women's oppression is economic in a sense that far predates capitalism and the market economy and that is woven through the whole fabric of socialization. Our claims are the most radical, for they entail restructuring even the nuclear family. Nowhere on earth are women free now, although in some places things are marginally better. What we want we will have to invent ourselves."

"There is much anger here at Movement Men, but I know they have been warped and programmed by the same society that has damn near crippled us. My anger is because they have created in the Movement a microcosm of that oppression and are proud of it. Manipulation and careerism and competition will not evaporate of themselves. Sisters, what we do, we have to do together, and we will see about them."

"All in all, the world of He, She and It is becoming reality much faster than I imagined. (2020)"

"The art of fiction is one of constant seduction. You must persuade the reader on page 1 to start reading - on page 50, or page 150 and yes, on page 850. (2004)"

"As for the political and corporate aspects, as one of the founders of the North American Congress on Latin America, I spent a couple of year doing power structure research. I was extrapolating from current trends – which have progressed today to the point where every cabinet post under Trump is run by an official from the corporations that the departments are supposed to regulate."

"Reconstructionism, which is my branch of Judaism, is strongly concerned with the environment"

"(What advice would you give to young people who are currently concerned about the state of the world and who want to fight against environmental destruction and big business?) There are endless organizations that have sprung up since Trump entered office to fight many of his terrible decisions and appointments.There are also environmental organizations that have been around since the seventies. Join a group that appeals to you and work on the issue that most alarms or impinges on you. No one else can tell you what to join or what to work on. It has to be something that actually gets you excited, angry, and passionate, not something you think you should care about."

"Science fiction, speculative fiction, whatever you want to call it, is one of the ways to explore social issues in fiction. You can explore what it's going to be like if current trends continue. You can change a variable and see what that does."

"The idea that poetry should be devoid of politics is a modern heresy designed to diminish any slight power we might have, to render us irrelevant. It is a notion that poets before about 1940 would have found really weird. Shakespeare's plays are rife with politics; same with Milton, Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Shelley, [[Byron, and that's only a few British poets. All the Irish poets had political ideas. Go back to the Romans. Find one without politics! Poets and novelists and memoirists and essayists are all citizens like your plumber or neighborhood cop or clergy. If you don't take an interest, politics may come down on your head, may take away your livelihood, pollute your air, give you cancer from the food you eat, teach your children garbage and false history, make you pay for wars you don't believe in and actually hate."

"What interests me in history is how those periods influenced the present. In Sex Wars, one of the alarming aspects is that in the period after the Civil War they were dealing with the same problems and issues we are dealing with today: the rights of women and minorities, immigration, abortion, contraception, income inequality, prison reform, election manipulation."

"The best way, we always say, to learn to write memoirs is to read memoirs and learn from those that don't work for you as well as from those who do. Look at how they did things. Separate out the craft elements. If you want to write detective stories, read them. If you want to write historical novels, read them."

"I’ve always felt that in order to change things, you have to understand the forces and choices that created the PRESENT, therefore I write about times in the past that I find very relevant."

"My political ideas changed when feminism of the second wave developed. I had read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex partly in French, then far more easily in English as soon as it came out. But there was almost no context then for my feminist leanings until in 1967, we began to organize in women’s liberation. I learned a lot from Marxism but probably lean more toward syndicalist anarchism"

"When you remove religion from the golem, you get Superman."

"Religions have done far more damage over the centuries than good. Religion may help individuals to bear hard times and trouble and loss, but institutionalized religion of all stripes quickly becomes dangerous. Established religion always seems to breed a them vs us mentality that has lead to crusades, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, the Inquisition, genocide, civil war, and legal discrimination."

"Everything to me is connected-religion, the body, politics, our relation to each other and all other living beings, the environment. Life is of a piece. To me it's all one vision, and poetry is at the center."

"I've been amazed at the number of unions that tell me how helpful "To be of use" is to them in their organizing work."

"I am an intensely curious person, nosy, insatiable. As a poet, everything you experience, whether personally or vicariously or virtuously or virtually, for that matter, is your stuff. Imagery can't really be taught. You can lecture about the different kinds of imagery in different sorts of poems, but the truth is, imagery is the most personal core of a poet. What you know and what you feel becomes your imagery."

"You have to stay open and curious and keep learning as you go. Poems come from a whole variety of sources. When you're younger, you believe in inspiration. As you get older, you believe most in receptivity and work."

"We have been living in times in which human cruelty is all around us. Yet the world is very beautiful."

"To be a poet is to open your eyes to everything around you. I love the beauty of the world, but I get angry at the cruelty in the world. How can we not get angry at the tremendous cruelty that is built into our system?"

"From the third grade on, women are trained to mistrust their natural bodies and to try to make them conform with body types belonging to two percent of the population."

"Lots of people are angry and just can't figure out where to aim their anger. We forget how to do anything political. Every generation has to start all over again-people have to figure out what's happened, but you have to start with two, three at a time, and organize. In the meantime, we need the poems-if not for the politicians then for the people the politicians ignore."

"I want my poems to give voice to something in the experience of a life. To find ourselves spoken for in art gives dignity to our pain, our anger, our losses."

"The farther you are from the centers of power in this society, the less likely you are to find validation of your experiences, your insights and ideas, your life. It is more important to you to find in art that validation, that respect for your experiences that no minority except the thin, white, and wealthy can count on."

"Poems told me there were other people who felt the way I felt. That was validation for the person I was. Poems can mean survival."

"If you're female in this society, culture tells you that you've had it if you're not twenty-two, blond, and weigh about ninety-two pounds. Then, even if you are twenty-two, blond, and weigh ninety-two pounds, you're still going to fail because you're going to get old. Women are destined to age into failure even if when they're young they are what society defines as perfect. Poems about women who are not twenty-two, blond, and ninety-two pounds can remind us of reality."

"We have to know how connected we are. It's quite remarkable, the very strange notion of the self today. We think the self stops right here. But my self doesn't stop here. It flows out into the people I love, into the people I have loved, the people I come from, the people I speak to. Sometimes, in dream or in vision, we encounter each other without boundaries. Being strong means being strong together."

"I like sex because it's one of the ways that people leave off operating so much with forebrain. If I like poetry because it ties all the different ways of knowing and being together, sex does the same thing."

"The reason I am political is because I want there to be a juster apportionment of the world's pleasure and less unjust apportionment of the world's pain. Power per se is fairly uninteresting to me, except as I observe it distorting peoples' characters."

"I think that there is in any of us numerous other people that we never live out, and our opposites are as fascinating as what we are. In fiction you get to live out all those little pieces of you, that never really come into your life at all."

"I don't tend to smile a lot in situations where I feel on display - public situations. I speak directly and straightforwardly and bluntly, and that lack of subterfuge and lack of middle-class women's mannerisms is perceived by some men as hostile, just as Black behavior which is simply straightforward is perceived by some whites as hostile."

"Unlike some separatists I don't view men as biologically impaired. I believe sexism is culturally conditioned and that if you change the culture, you will change the kind of behavior which people with the various sorts of genitalia will consider appropriate. What I hate in men is what I consider ugly, brutal, violent, mean behavior - behavior damaging to women, to men they consider inferior, to children, to other living creatures with whom we share our biosphere."

"I'm a pluralist in sexuality as in most things. I want people to make many different choices and flourish in them, and to respect the choices they don't make in their own lives as well as those they do."

"I am very interested in the voluntary families that people create; not just the communes but the informal social webs by which a great many people survive and flourish. A lot of my adult life I have been trying in one form or another to create alternatives to the nuclear family."

"Friendship is my paradigm for the good relationship. If you like someone, you will also love them better. If you love without liking, there's a chill at the core of it that easily turns into possessiveness, jealousy, competition."

"What is honor from a woman's point of view? Honor has been defined from a male point of view. What does it mean to choose not to endure having been raped?"

"just as politically when there is no vocabulary for discussing your situation, when you're a woman before there is language of feminism, trying to understand what it's like to be a woman, you have no concepts, no vocabulary for even understanding your own situation."

"Often I imagine in different and better times not have to be political. I can even imagine, when I am at the bottom of a long uphill grade, doing something besides writing novels, although I doubt it. But I never imagine living without poetry."

"Jewish women in second-wave feminism helped to provide the theoretical underpinnings and models for radical action that were seized on and imitated throughout the United States and abroad. Their articles and books became classics of the movement and led the way into new arenas of cultural and political understanding in academe, politics, and grassroots organizing. Even a partial honor roll of Jewish women's liberation pioneers must include such figures as Shulamith Firestone, Ellen Willis, Robin Morgan, Alix Kates Shulman, Naomi Weisstein, Heather Booth, Susan Brownmiller, Marilyn Webb, Meredith Tax, Andrea Dworkin, Linda Gordon, Ellen DuBois, Ann Snitow, Marge Piercy, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, and Vivian Gornick. Despite historians' acknowledgment of the salience of Jewish women in earlier social movements, their prominence within radical feminism failed to attract much attention."

"Remember to weave real connections, wrote Marge Piercy: “create real nodes, build real houses/Live a life you can endure; make love that is loving/Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground/You cannot tell always by looking what is happening/More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.”"

"Her work has always had the courage both of her convictions and of its own (the difference between the two has occasionally been one of her problems), and the present books are no exception. She is a serious writer who deserves the sort of considered attention which, too often, she does not get... out of all the surge and flux, the sometimes dutiful rhetoric, Piercy can build moments and sometimes whole poems that she would not have achieved with careful elegance. “People of the Shell,” for instance, is superb, and it is not alone. Lines and aphorisms surface, flash and sink, poems transform themselves, words swirl. The literary ancestor here is not Dickinson but Whitman, and the vision is finally, despite the small ironies, a romantic one. Like Whitman, Piercy must be read in chunks, not sips, and appreciated for her courage, gut energy and verbal fecundity, not for laconic polish. Dancing is hard and you may fall down, her poetry implies, but she is going to dance anyway. She rams on, and the reader can only applaud."

"Marge Piercy is shameless; that is, she is that rarity, a free person. Her freedom enables her to write about her brilliant, fascinating life with honesty and gusto. She is magnificent on the subject of cats."

"Marge Piercy is a literary icon-novelist, poet, social activist."

"(her poems) are Marge Piercy at her most telling. The author is a fearless and exciting woman"

"In the women's consciousness-raising groups I belonged to in the early 1970s, we shared personal and very emotional stories of what it had really been like for us to live as women, examining our experiences with men and with other women in our families, sexual relationships, workplaces and schools, in the health care system and in surviving the general societal contempt and violence toward women. As we told our stories we found validation that our experiences and our reactions to them were common to many women, that our perceptions, thoughts, and feelings made sense to other women. We then used that shared experience as a source of authority. Where our lives did not match official knowledge, we trusted our lives and used the collective and mutually validated body of stories to critique those official versions of reality. This was theory born of an activist need, and the feminist literature we read, from articles like "The Politics of Housework" and "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm" to the poetry of Susan Griffin, Marge Piercy, Alta, Judy Grahn, and others, rose out of the same mass phenomenon of truth-telling from personal knowledge."

"Some critics may wince at her politics, but no one can doubt whose voice is speaking, or that the language comes from a fully engaged life. Not that politics is her only subject. She writes about planting tomatoes, making love, remodeling the kitchen, and dying. Her avid followers know that she can be just as tough about herself and as humorous-as about the world's absurdities. At heart, Marge Piercy is a utopian, possessing what Margaret Atwood describes as "a view of human possibility-harmony between the sexes, among races, and between humankind and nature-that makes the present state of affairs clearly unacceptable by comparison.""

"one of our finest novelists and poets"

"Marge Piercy is very dear to me-a person who puts her life where her mouth is...I'm always interested in what Marge [Piercy] does. I mean we have our differences about several things, and approaches to writing-what and who and how-but she's an amazing woman and a true writer, and she does a tremendous amount of work and is very particular about what she's doing. She's doing a certain kind of chronicling of our time. She has a book called The High Cost of Living. I think it's really a wonderful book. It's not well-known. And it's one of her shortest things. I think she thinks she just tossed it off."

"I remember Marge Piercy saying at the Aspen Conference that she had "an aesthetics of clarity." And I thought, hmm, that's not bad."

"A lot of the young women in the peace movement were really just pushed around by SDS (the student organization). That is, Meredith Tax or Marge Piercy were pushed around by these guys, these young fellows in these student movements, who were really not shallow because they were very smart, but callow and full of male beans and ambition and so forth. And accustomed to or forced to play a certain role. I think the women's movement has done a lot for men, a tremendous lot for them. For men who paid attention it has taken some of the burden of machoism off their backs, which is a terrible burden to bear. If you think about it, it's horrible. It's horrible to have to be that kind of person in order to be a person."

"Piercy writes with high intelligence, love for the world, ethical passion and innate feminism."

"I hope my work is recognizable as being by a woman, though I certainly would never deliberately make it feminine in any way, in subject or treatment. But if I speak in a voice which is my own, it's bound to be the voice of a woman."

"I didn't want to be a woman artist, I just wanted to be an artist."

"They would go off to college and when they come home they'd pick up their interest in me, like a parent ... One of my sister had me in Eton collars and tunics; then she went off and another came home and disapproved of those dull clothes and put me in some fancy little things. Everyone was trying to do something to me, except my mother. She was indifferent."

"At sixty I look back on a life of deep disappointments, of withered hopes, of unlooked for suffering, of severe discipline. Yet I have sometimes tasted exquisite joy and have found solace for many a woe in the innocence and earnest love of Theodore's children. But for this my life would have little to record of mundane pleasures."

"Oh, had I received the education I desired, had I been bred to the profession of the law, I might have been a useful member of society, and instead of myself and my property being taken care of, I might have been a protector of the helpless, a pleader for the poor and unfortunate."

"Had Adam tenderly reproved his wife, and endeavored to lead her to repentance instead of sharing in her guilt, I should be much more ready to accord to man that superiority which he claims; but as the facts stand disclosed by the sacred historian, it appears to me that to say the least, there was as much weakness exhibited by Adam as by Eve. They both fell from innocence, and consequently from happiness, but not from equality."

"All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior."

"I ask no favors for my sex. I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy."

"I am persuaded that the rights of woman, like the rights of slaves, need only be examined to be understood and asserted."

"Fashionable women regard themselves, and are regarded by men, as pretty toys or as mere instruments of pleasure; and the vacuity of mind, the heartlessness, the frivolity which is the necessary result of this false and debasing estimate of women, can only be fully understood by those who have mingled in the folly and wickedness of fashionable life."

"The virtue of female slaves is wholly at the mercy of irresponsible tyrants, and women are bought and sold in our slave markets, to gratify the brutal lust of those who bear the name of Christians."

"There has been a comparatively greater proportion of good queens, than of good kings."

"Intellect is not sexed;... strength of mind is not sexed; and … our views about the duties of men and the duties of women, the sphere of man and the sphere of woman, are mere arbitrary opinions, differing in different ages and countries, and dependent solely on the will and judgment of erring mortals."

"One of the duties which devolve upon women in the present interesting crisis, is to prepare themselves for more extensive usefulness, by making use of those religious and literary privileges and advantages that are within their reach, if they will only stretch out their hands and possess them."

"If the minds of women were enlightened and improved, the domestic circle would be more frequently refreshed by intelligent conversation, a means of edification now deplorably neglected, for want of that cultivation which these intellectual advantages would confer."

"I want my sex to claim nothing from their brethren but what their brethren may justly claim from them."

"If the sewing societies, the avails of whose industry are now expended in supporting and educating young men for the ministry, were to withdraw their contributions to these objects, and give them where they are more needed, to their advancement of their own sex in useful learning, the next generation might furnish sufficient proof, that in intelligence and ability to master the whole circle of sciences, woman is not inferior to man."

"I do deeply deplore, of the sake of the cause, the prevalent notion, that the clergy must be had, either by persuasion or by bribery. They will not need persuasion or bribery, if their hearts are with us; if they are not, we are better without them. It is idle to suppose that the kingdom of heaven cannot come on earth, without their cooperation."

"I know nothing of man’s rights, or woman’s rights; human rights are all that I recognise."

"The reason why women effect so little and are so shallow is because their aims are low, marriage is the prize for which they strive; if foiled in that they rarely rise above disappointment."

"It would be as wise to set up an accomplished lawyer to saw wood as a business as to condemn an educated and sensible woman to spend all her time boiling potatoes and patching old garments. Yet this is the lot of many a one who incessantly stitches and boils and bakes, compelled to thrust back out of sight the aspirations which fill her soul."

"Is it not clear that to give to such women as desire it and can devote themselves to literary and scientific pursuits all the advantages enjoyed by men of the same class will lessen essentially the number of thoughtless, idle, vain and frivolous women and thus secure the [sic] society the services of those who now hang as dead weight?"

"[Girls] study under the paralyzing idea that their acquirements cannot be brought into practical use. They may subserve the purposes of promoting individual domestic pleasure and social enjoyment in conversation, but what are they in comparison with the grand stimulation of independence and self- reliance, of the capability of contributing to the comfort and happiness of those whom they love as their own souls?"

"Many a woman shudders … at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians."

"Thus far woman has struggled through life with bandaged eyes, accepting the dogma of her weakness and inability to take care of herself not only physically but intellectually. She has held out a trembling hand and received gratefully the proffered aid. She has foregone her right to study, to know the laws and purposes of government to which she is subject. But there is now awakened in her a consciousness that she is defrauded of her legitimate Rights and that she never can fulfill her mission until she is placed in that position to which she feels herself called by the divinity within. Hitherto she has surrendered her person and her individuality to man, but she can no longer do this and not feel that she is outraging her nature and her God."

"I never saw that great woman, Mary Wollstonecraft, but I l have read her eloquent and unanswerable arguments in behalf of the liberty of womankind. I have met and known most of the progressive women who came after her — Lucretia Mott, the Grimké sisters, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone — a long galaxy of great women. I have heard them speak, saying in only slightly different phrases exactly what I heard these newer advocates of the cause say at these meetings. Those older women have gone on and most of those who work with me in the early years have gone. I am here for a little time only and then my place will be filled as theirs was filled. The fight must not cease; you must see that it does not stop. There have been others also just as true and devoted to the cause — I wish I could name every one — but with such women consecrating their lives, failure is impossible!"

""Thine in the bonds of Womanhood," the abolitionist and woman's rights advocate Sarah Grimké signed her letters."

"the essay by the Southern-born abolitionist, Sarah Grimké, The Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women (1838), represented, in the opinion of historian Eleanor Flexner, the first serious discussion of woman's rights by an American woman. Sarah Grímké argued for social, political, economic, and legal equality between the sexes. She condemned the rape of Black women under slavery and observed the injurious effects of that system upon the white women of the South. Likewise, she pointed to the effects of inequality upon marital relations, portending the future content of the feminist claim: "That there is a root of bitterness continually springing up in families and troubling the repose of both men and women, must be manifest to even a superficial observer; and I believe it is the mistaken notion of the inequality of the sexes. As there is an assumption of superiority on the one part, which is not sanctioned by Jehovah, there is an incessant struggle on the other to rise to that degree of dignity, which God designed women to possess in common with men, and to maintain those rights and exercise those privileges which every woman's common sense, apart from prejudices of education, tells her are inalienable; they are a part of her moral nature, and can only cease when her immortal mind is extinguished.”"

"Female anti-slavery networks, work on the Underground Railroad, club and church activities, and literary associations reflected a significant homosocial world. Some letters also reveal intimate, lifelong friendships that crossed racial lines. The Afro-American abolitionist, educator, and woman's rights advocate Sarah Mapps Douglass had such a relationship with Sarah Grimké; and Emma V. Brown, also an educator and an early graduate of Oberlin College, corresponded with Emily Howland, a white abolitionist and Quaker educator, for more than forty years. Given the taboo against interracial friendships, these personal alliances, and others like them, are notable…"

"Of Sarah and Angelina Grimke I knew but little personally. These brave sisters from Charleston, South Carolina, had inherited slaves, but in their conversion from Episcopacy to Quakerism, in 1828, became convinced that they had no right to such inheritance. They emancipated their slaves and came North and entered at once upon the pioneer work in the advancing education of woman, though they saw then in their course only their duty to the slave. They had " fought the good fight" before I came into the ranks, but by their unflinching testimony and unwavering courage, they had opened the way and made it possible, if not easy, for other women to follow their example. It is memorable of them that their public advocacy of anti-slavery was made the occasion of the issuing of a papal bull, in the form of a " pastoral letter," by the evangelical clergy of Boston, in which the churches and all God-fearing people were warned against their influence."

"I came into the study of history through my work on a biography of Sarah and Angelina Grimké... I was fascinated with the lives and characters of these two women, who had not had a biography written about them since 1885... They spoke to me in a very personal way and I wanted to transmit what I received from these women of another century to readers of my day."

"Deriving their analytic framework from the work of an earlier generation of feminists, particularly such singular rebels as Mary Wollstonecraft and Sarah Grimké, the anarchist women insisted that the humanity of women was all the justification their cause required."

"Anarchist-feminists would have concurred with Sarah Grimké's simple plea: "I ask no favor for my sex...All I ask our brethren is that they will take their heels from our necks and to permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy.""

"The widening of women’s sphere is to improve her lot. Let us do it, and if the world scoff, let it scoff — if it sneer, let it sneer — but we will go emulating the example of the sisters Grimké and Abby Kelly. When they first lectured against slavery they were not listened to as respectfully as you listen to us. So the first female physician meets many difficulties, but to the next the path will be made easy."

"The anti-slavery cause had come to break stronger fetters than those that held the slave. The idea of equal rights was in the air. The wail of the slave, his clanking fetters, his utter need, appealed to everybody. Women heard. Angelina and Sarah Grimké and Abby Kelley went out to speak for the slaves. Such a thing had never been heard of. An earthquake shock could hardly have startled the community more. Some of the abolitionists forgot the slave in their efforts to silence the women. The Anti-Slavery Society rent itself in twain over the subject. The Church was moved to its very foundation in opposition."

"Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen, Bright topaz denizens of a world of green. They do not fear the men beneath the tree; They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.Aunt Jennifer's fingers fluttering through her wool Find even the ivory needle hard to pull. The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by. The tigers in the panel that she made Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid."

"A thinking woman sleeps with monsters."

"I have to say that what I know I know through making poems."

"instead of poems about experiences I am getting poems that are experiences, that contribute to my knowledge and my emotional life even while they reflect and assimilate it. In my earlier poems I told you, as precisely and eloquently as I knew how, about something in the more recent poems something is happening, something has happened to me and, if I have been a good parent to the poem, something will happen to you who read it."

"The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail."

"To become a token woman—whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters—is to become something less than a man … since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest."

"False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news False history gets written every day... The lesbian archaeologist watches herself sifting her own life out from the shards she's piecing, asking the clay all questions but her own."

"What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other's despair into hope?-- You yourself must change it.-- what would it feel like to know your country was changing?-- You yourself must change it.-- Though your life felt arduous new and unmapped and strange what would it mean to stand on the first page of the end of despair?"

"We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation."

"There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice. But I do know that art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage. The radical disparities of wealth and power in America are widening at a devastating rate. A President cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored. I know you have been engaged in a serious and disheartening struggle to save government funding for the arts, against those whose fear and suspicion of art is nakedly repressive. In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist. I could not participate in a ritual which would feel so hypocritical to me."

"I'm both a poet and one of the "everybodies" of my country. I live with manipulated fear, ignorance, cultural confusion and social antagonism huddling together on the faultline of an empire. I hope never to idealise poetry — it has suffered enough from that. Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard. There is no universal Poetry, anyway, only poetries and poetics, and the streaming, intertwining histories to which they belong. There is room, indeed necessity, for both Neruda and César Valléjo, for Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alfonsina Storni, for both Ezra Pound and Nelly Sachs. Poetries are no more pure and simple than human histories are pure and simple. And there are colonised poetics and resilient poetics, transmissions across frontiers not easily traced."

"Of course, like the consciousness behind it, behind any art, a poem can be deep or shallow, glib or visionary, prescient or stuck in an already lagging trendiness. What's pushing the grammar and syntax, the sounds, the images — is it the constriction of literalism, fundamentalism, professionalism — a stunted language? Or is it the great muscle of metaphor, drawing strength from resemblance in difference? Poetry has the capacity to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. A forgotten future: a still uncreated site whose moral architecture is founded not on ownership and dispossession, the subjection of women, outcast and tribe, but on the continuous redefining of freedom — that word now held under house arrest by the rhetoric of the "free" market. This on-going future, written-off over and over, is still within view. All over the world its paths are being rediscovered and reinvented. There is always that in poetry which will not be grasped, which cannot be described, which survives our ardent attention, our critical theories, our late-night arguments. There is always (I am quoting the poet/translator Américo Ferrari) "an unspeakable where, perhaps, the nucleus of the living relation between the poem and the world resides"."

"There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected. (p55, "The 'Sacred Calling'")"

"In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture. (p249, "Motherhood and Daughterhood")"

"It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and plainful. ("When We Dead Awaken: Writing As Re-Vision")"

"Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society. ("When We Dead Awaken: Writing As Re-Vision")"

"poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know. ("When We Dead Awaken: Writing As Re-Vision")"

"Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother. Much male fear of feminism is infantilism–the longing to remain the mother’s son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him. ("Husband-Right and Father-Right" 1977)"

"I think that passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry. (from "Power and Danger: Works of a Common Woman" 1977)"

"motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power. (from "Motherhood: The Contemporary Emergency and the Quantum Leap" 1978)"

"nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival. ("Motherhood: The Contemporary Emergency and the Quantum Leap" 1978)"

"I had been looking for the Women's Liberation movement since the 1950s. I came into it in 1970 (Forward)"

"I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing... ("Toward a More Feminist Criticism")"

"my personal world view at sixteen, as at twenty-six, was itself being created by political conditions. I was not a man; I was white in a white-supremacist society; I was being educated from the perspective of a particular class; my father was an "assimilated" Jew in an anti-Semitic world, my mother a white southern Protestant; there were particular historical currents on which my consciousness would come together, piece by piece. My personal world view was shaped in part by the poetry I had read, a poetry written almost entirely by white Anglo-Saxon men, a few women, Celts and Frenchmen notwithstanding. Thus, no poetry in the Spanish language or from Africa or China or the Middle East. My personal world view, which like so many young people I carried as a conviction of my own uniqueness, was not original with me, but was, rather, my untutored and half-conscious rendering of the facts of blood and bread, the social and political forces of my time and place. ("Blood, Bread, and Poetry: the Location of the Poet")"

"When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. It takes some strength of soul--and not just individual strength, but collective understanding--to resist this void, this non-being, into which you are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard. And to make yourself visible, to claim that your experience is just as real and normative as any other... ("Invisibility in Academe")"

"Patriarchy is no more an abstraction than imperialism is, once you have tasted it in your mouth, felt it across your flesh. ("North American Tunnel Vision" 1983)"

"As a feminist in the United States it seemed necessary to examine how we participate in mainstream North American cultural chauvinism, the sometimes unconscious belief that white North Americans possess a superior right to judge, select, and ransack other cultures, that we are more "advanced" than other peoples of this hemisphere. ("North American Tunnel Vision" 1983)"

"Feminism has always been shaped and fired by the question How can things be other than they are? What if...? (p190 "The Soul of a Woman's College")"

"Women's Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom."

"No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness."

"In this decade now ending, as more women are entering the professions (though still suffering sexual harassment in the workplace, though still, if they have children, carrying two full-time jobs, though still vastly outnumbered by men in upper-level and decision-making jobs), we need most profoundly to remember that early insight of the feminist movement as it evolved in the late sixties: that no woman is liberated until w all are liberated."

"An early objection to feminism-in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries-was that it would make women behave like men-ruthlessly, exploitatively, oppressively. In fact, radical feminism looks to a transformation of human relationships and structures in which power, instead of a thing to be hoarded by a few, would be released to and from within the many, shared in the form of knowledge, expertise, decision making, access to tools, as well as in the basic forms of food and shelter and health care and literacy."

"The belief that established science and scholarship-which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making-are "objective" and "value-free" and that feminist studies are "unscholarly," "biased," and "ideological" dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological; there is no neutrality in culture."

"Learn to be worthy of the women of every class, culture, and historical age who did otherwise, who spoke boldly when women were jeered and physically harassed for speaking in public, who-like Anne Hutchinson, Mary Wollstonecraft, the Grimké sisters, Abby Kelley, [[Ida B. Wells-Barnett, [[Susan B. Anthony, Lillian Smith, Fannie Lou Hamer-broke taboos, who resisted slavery-their own and other people's. To become a token woman-whether you win the Nobel prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters-is to become something less than a man indeed, since men are loyal at least to their own world view, their laws of brotherhood and male self-interest. I am not suggesting that you imitate male loyalties; with the philosopher Mary Daly, I believe that the bonding of women must be utterly different and for an utterly different end: not the misering of resources and power, but the release, in each other, of the yet unexplored resources and transformative power of women, so long despised, confined, and wasted. (p9)"

"It was only in college, when I read a poem by Karl Shapiro beginning "To hate the Negro and avoid the Jew/ is the curriculum," that it flashed on me that there was an untold side to my father's story of his student years."

"According to Nazi logic, my two Jewish grandparents would have made me a Mischling, first-degree-nonexempt from the Final Solution."

"At different times in my life I have wanted to push away one or the other burden of inheritance, to say merely I am a woman; I am a lesbian. If I call myself a Jewish lesbian, do I thereby try to shed some of my southern gentile white woman's culpability? If I call myself only through my mother, is it because I pass more easily through a world where being a lesbian often seems like outsiderhood enough?"

"These were the 1940s, and we were told a great deal about the Battle of Britain, the noble French Resistance fighters, the brave, starving Dutch-but I did not learn of the resistance of the Warsaw ghetto until I left home."

"Anti-Semitism was so intrinsic as not to have a name."

"it came to me that every one of those piles of corpses, mountains of shoes and clothing had contained, simply, individuals, who had believed, as I now believed of myself, that they were intended to live out a life of some kind of meaning, that the world possessed some kind of sense and order, yet this had happened to them."

"To be able to ask even the child's astonished question Why do they hate us so? means knowing how to say "we.""

"I was admittedly young and trying to educate myself, but I was also doing something that is dangerous: I was flirting with identity."

"what isn't named is often more permeating than what is"

"It (1968) was a year of intensifying political awareness for me: the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations, the Columbia strike."

"The experience of motherhood was eventually to radicalize me."

"In the permissive liberalism of academic Cambridge, you could raise your children to be as vaguely or distinctly Jewish as you would, but Christian myth and calendar organized the year. My sons grew up knowing far more about the existence and concrete meaning of Jewish culture than I had. But I don't recall sitting down with them and telling them that millions of people like themselves, many of them children, had been rounded up and murdered in Europe in their parents' lifetime. Nor was I able to tell them that they came in part out of the rich, thousand-year-old Ashkenazic culture of eastern Europe, which the Holocaust destroyed; or that they came from a people whose traditions, religious and secular, included a hatred of oppression and an imperative to pursue justice and care for the stranger-an anti-racist, a socialist, and even sometimes a feminist vision. I could not tell them these things because these things were still too indistinct in my own mind."

"The emergence of the Civil Rights movement in the sixties I remember as lifting me out of a sense of personal frustration and hopelessness. Reading James Baldwin's early essays in the fifties had stirred me with a sense that apparently "given" situations like racism could be analyzed and described and that this could lead to action, to change. Racism had been so utter and implicit a fact of my childhood and adolescence, had felt so central among the silences, negations, cruelties, fears, superstitions of my early life, that somewhere among my feelings must have been the hope that if Black people could become free of the immense political and social burdens they were forced to bear, I, too, could become free of all the ghosts and shadows of my childhood, named and unnamed. When "the movement" began, it felt extremely personal to me. And it was often Jews who spoke up for the justice of the cause, Jewish students and civil rights lawyers who travelled South; it was two young Jews who were found murdered with a young Black man in Mississippi: Schwerner, Goodman, Chaney."

"The struggle for Black civil rights had such clarity about it for me: I knew that segregation was wrong, that unequal opportunity was wrong, I knew that segregation in particular was more than a set of social and legal rules-it meant that even "decent" white people lived in a network of lies and arrogance and moral collusion."

"I didn't understand then that I was living between two strains of Jewish social identity: the Jew as radical visionary and activist who understands oppression firsthand, and the Jew as part of America's devouring plan in which the persecuted, called to assimilation, learn that the price is to engage in persecution."

"By the time I left my marriage, after seventeen years and three children, I had become identified with the Women's Liberation movement. It was an astonishing time to be a woman of my age. In the 1950s, seeking a way to grasp the pain I seemed to be feeling most of the time, to set it in some larger context, I had read all kinds of things; but it was James Baldwin and Simone de Beauvoir who had described the world-though differently in terms that made the most sense to me. By the end of the sixties there were two political movements-one already meeting severe repression, one just emerging-which addressed those descriptions of the world. And there was, of course, a third movement, or a movement-within-a-movement: the early lesbian manifestoes, the new visibility and activism of lesbians everywhere."

"Reading The Second Sex in the 1950s isolation of an academic housewife had felt less dangerous than reading "The Myth of Vaginal Orgasm" or "Woman-identified Woman" in a world where I was in constant debate and discussion with women over every aspect of our lives that we could as yet name."

"Sometimes I feel I have seen too long from too many disconnected angles: white, Jewish, anti-Semite, racist, anti-racist, once-married, lesbian, middle-class, feminist, exmatriate southerner, split at the root-that I will never bring them whole."

"sometimes I feel inadequate to make any statement as a Jew; I feel the history of denial within me like an injury, a scar. For assimilation has affected my perceptions; those early lapses in meaning, those blanks, are with me still. My ignorance can be dangerous to me and to others. Yet we can't wait for the undamaged to make our connections for us; we can't wait to speak until we are perfectly clear and righteous. There is no purity and, in our lifetimes, no end to this process."

"I know that in the rest of my life, the next half century or so, every aspect of my identity will have to be engaged. The middle-class white girl taught to trade obedience for privilege. The Jewish lesbian raised to be a heterosexual gentile. The woman who first heard oppression named and analyzed in the Black Civil Rights struggle. The woman with three sons, the feminist who hates male violence. The woman limping with a cane, the woman who has stopped bleeding are also accountable. The poet who knows that beautiful language can lie, that the oppressor's language sometimes sounds beautiful. The woman trying, as part of her resistance, to clean up her act."

"White men need a history that does not simply "include" peoples of color and white women, but that shows the process by which the arrogance of hierarchy and the celebration of violence have reached a point of destructiveness almost out of control. In other words, white men need to start questioning the text handed down from father to son, the dominator's version."

"Historical amnesia is starvation of the imagination; nostalgia is the imagination's sugar rush, leaving depression and emptiness in its wake. Breaking silences, telling our tales, is not enough. We can value that process-and the courage it may require-without believing that it is an end in itself. Historical responsibility has, after all, to do with action-where we place the weight of our existences on the line, cast our lot with others, move from an individual consciousness to a collective one. But we all need to begin with the individual consciousness: How did we come to be where we are and not elsewhere?"

"Feminist history charges us, as women committed to the liberation of women, to know the past in order to consider what we want to conserve and what we want not to repeat or continue. To see patterns, connections, which the false assimilation of liberal humanism obscures. To draw strength: Memory is nutriment, and seeds stored for centuries can still germinate."

"As feminists, we need to be looking above all for the greatness and sanity of ordinary women, and how these women have collectively waged resistance. In searching that territory we find something better than individual heroines: the astonishing continuity of women's imagination of survival, persisting through the great and little deaths of daily life."

"If it is the present that calls us to activism, it is history that must nourish our choices and commitment."

"we need to know where we have been: we need our history."

"Those of us who came into activism in the sixties and before, who have continued as engaged citizens through the seventies into the nineties-as welfare rights organizers, as feminists, as members of a critical and oppositional press, as community organizers, as lesbian and gay activists, as anti-racism educators, as new and challenging voices in the labor movement, as builders of battered women's shelters and rape crisis centers, as coalition builders among racial and ethnic communities, as creators of socially responsive art-we did not intend for you or any young people to face at your coming-of-age so manipulated and demoralized a society, at once so fearful and so complacement, as this one. But it's not commiseration I feel for you, standing here, but hope. You have had not just educational privilege of a high order, but the privilege of having a time of youth, when you could try on different selves, without fear of being locked into any one of them. Most people your age in this country don't have a time of youth. And for those young men and women, who will not stand today or any day soon in academic robes under a threatening or a clear blue sky, who were early locked by racism and poverty into manhoods and womanhoods they had no time to choose, I also feel, not despair, but hope."

"I believe in the potential, both tapped and blocked, within each one of you. I believe that the responses to the Simi Valley verdict where hundreds of white youth have joined in demonstrations and uprisings in city after city, where citizens of conscience, whatever their, our origins, are being compelled to consider their, our place in all this-I believe that the civil and moral unrest now moving through the inner nervous system of our country, has a chance of catalyzing one of the great shifts in our history. A chance of building not into some hierarchic, monolithic movement, but into many streams of movement, always in touch with and interrogating each other: African American, Arab American, Asian American, Jewish, Latino, white, lesbian, gay and straight: women and men, old and young. My hope, for you and for us all, is that you refuse docility and shallowness and lend your gifts and intelligence to a rising democracy movement here in the United States, sharing power with sisters and brothers at whose expense that power was acquired: learning what can only be taught by those who are not here today."

"Dear and cherished graduates: Remember the youth of your generation. Remember all the youths-and the parents who are not here today nor at any commencement in the land. Remember that our true democracy cannot come to birth without their participation. Nor without yours."

"I have never believed that poetry is an escape from history, and I do not think it is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary. (Preface)"

"Where every public decision has to be justified in the scales of corporate profits, poetry unsettles these apparently self-evident propositions-not through ideology, but by its very presence and ways of being, its embodiment of states of longing and desire. (Preface)"

"poetry is always being created anew, in new places, by unforetold hands and voices. In this, it is like the many movements against demoralizing power. We don't know where either will come from. This is a story without an end. (Preface)"

"Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination. (p17, III: "What would we create?")"

"As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts. A distaste for the political dimensions of art, in this time and place, is a dangerous luxury. (p161, XIX: "The transgressor mother")"

"The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents' memories on special occasions perhaps—no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, readings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence. (XI: "A Leak in History")"

"It's Black History Month. But this is white history. White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn't brought up to hate. But hate isn't the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness-that primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic. (XXI: "The distance between language and violence" p 181)"

"A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire. (XXVIII: "What if")"

"Any truly revolutionary art is an alchemy through which waste, greed, brutality, frozen indifference, blind sorrow and anger are transmuted into some drenching recognition of the What if?-the possible...Revolutionary art dwells, by its nature, on edges. This is its power: the tension between subject and means, between the is and what can be. (XXVIII: "What if")"

"If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment. You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming. ("When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision")"

"Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler - for the liar - than it really is, or ought to be. (from "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying")"

"I look everywhere for signs of that fusion I have glimpsed in the women's movement, and most recently in Nicaragua. I turn to Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters or Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy or James Baldwin's Just above My Head; to paintings by Frida Kahlo or Jacob Lawrence; to poems by Dionne Brand or Judy Grahn or Audre Lorde or Nancy Morejón; to the music of Nina Simone or Mary Watkins. This kind of art-like the art of so many others uncanonized in the dominant culture-is not produced as a commodity, but as part of a long conversation with the elders and with the future. (And, yes, I do live and work believing in a future.) Such artists draw on a tradition in which political struggle and spiritual continuity are meshed. Nothing need be lost, no beauty sacrificed. The heart does not turn to a stone. ("Blood, Bread, and Poetry: The Location of the Poet" 1983)"

"Most biographers of women still fail to recognize that a woman's central relationship can be to her work, even as lovers come and go. ("Raya Dunayevskaya's Marx")"

"I think I've brought figures of resistance into my poetry for quite a while-going back to the voice of Mary Wollstonecraft in "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" (1960). History has always felt to me an immense resource for art, and poetry as a place where history can be kept alive-not grand master narratives, but otherwise forgotten or erased people and actions. In the 1970s we were rediscovering women whose lives had been dropped out of history or distorted, like Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Emily Dickinson, Marie Curie, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Hannah Senesch, Ethel Rosenberg. (p141)"

"The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken? (p150)"

"one period's necessary strategies can mutate into the monsters of a later time."

"Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.-both leaders with large constituencies-had been murdered just as each was unscrolling a map on which race and class intersected in a shared landscape."

"I still believe what I wrote in 1971: A change in the of sexual identity is essential if we are not to see the old political order reassert itself in every new revolution."

"But Sisyphus is not, finally, a useful image. You don't roll some unitary boulder of language or justice uphill; you try with others to assist in cutting and laying many stones, designing a foundation. One of the stonecutter-architects I met was Muriel Rukeyser, whose work I had begun reading in depth in the 1980s. Through her prose Rukeyser had engaged me intellectually; her poetry, however, in its range and daring, held me first and last. "Her Vision" is a tribute to the mentorship of her work. Another was Raya Dunayevskaya, who wrote vividly and trenchantly of the concrete revolutionary lives of women, and whose fusion of Marx's humanism with contemporary feminisms expanded my sense of the possibilities of both."

"I believe in the necessity for a poetic language untethered from the compromised language of state and media."

"A new century, even a new technology, doesn't of itself produce newness. It is live human beings, looking in all directions, who will do this."

"At times in the past decade and a half I have felt like a stranger in my own country. I seem not to speak the official language. I believe many others feel like this, not just as poets or intellectuals but as citizens-accountable yet excluded from power. I began as an American optimist, albeit a critical one, formed by our racial legacy and by the Vietnam War. In both these cases it was necessary to look hard truths in the face in order to change horrible realities. I believed, with many others, that my country's historical aquifers were flowing in that direction of democratic change. I became an American skeptic, not as to the long search for justice and dignity, which is part of all human history, but in the light of my nation's leading role in demoralizing and destabilizing that search, here at home and around the world. Perhaps just such a passionate skepticism, neither cynical nor nihilistic, is the ground for continuing."

"I've been thinking how behind every shelf of publications on gender and sexuality, every course offered in queer or gender studies, lie thousands of ghostly sheaves: leaflets, letters, pamphlets, mimeographed bibliographies, little magazines, posters, movement anthologies, some now preserved in archives, others reduced to landfill. Behind every academic program or lectureship under the rubric of queer studies stand lives that were participant in radical ideas about freedom and justice-movements that moved, in nonlinear ways, into and out of each other. In those movements, queer women and men, unknown at first unless to each other, invisible to their otherwise-comrades, emerged to declare a gay and lesbian politics, because the idea of inclusive justice is - was then -contagious and irresistible. The names Bayard Rustin, Barbara Deming, Lorraine Hansberry, Harry Hay, Martin Duberman, Audre Lorde, Joan Nestle are a few that flash immediately to mind. And, of course, I think of the queer pioneers, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, The Ladder, Daughters of Bilitis, the Mattachine Society, the early queer underground; the publicly gay, anarchist, antiwar poets Paul Goodman and Robert Duncan. I think, in short, of many lives of defiance and creation. ("'Candidates for My Love': Three Gay and Lesbian Poets" 2006)"

"the freedom of that library-whatever its limitations-let me know that it's possible and necessary to be interested in everything: Hindu mythology, the mud-blotted villages of Chekhov's peasants in Czarist Russia, the sound of an eighteenth-century English poem ("I wander through each charter'd street / Near where the charter'd Thames doth flow") or Bible cadences ("Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son"); and the French Revolution. To assume that philosophy, history, foreign literatures in translation, novels, plays, poetry of many kinds belonged together in one room of the mind."

"I've said that "American Jews" have paid an intellectual and spiritual price for the narrowing of sight demanded by conformity and reliance on Israel as surrogate identity. Part of this price has been estrangement of many Jews from any Jewish affiliation. But, of course, in reality American Jews disagree like all other Jews, past and future."

"diaspora-a multifaceted condition-means never always, or anywhere, being just like other Jews. It means class and cultural difference, dissension, contradiction, different languages and foods, living in different ages and relationships to tradition, world politics, and the "always/already" of anti-Semitism."

"it’s not even an ad hominem thing about President Clinton, although I find him cowardly and spineless. I am concerned about what it means when we have two parties which are so close together in their collaboration with the wealthiest interests in the country and who are so alike in their disregard for the majority of people in this country. And I feel as if the relative creative freedom of artists and intellectuals ultimately depends on the conditions everywhere and the conditions of human labor everywhere. We’re all working. We’re all trying to do our work. And the circumstances, the conditions under which working people exist in the society are not something that can be separated and left aside from the position of the artist. I just don’t see how you can do that. (1997)"

"I drew a lot of nourishment from the poets that I then was aware of and able to be aware of, poets like William Blake, like Emily Dickinson, like Whitman, people whose—and then later, somewhat later, Yeats, who taught me in fact that poetry could be political and still be incredibly beautiful. And on and on, because one is always reading, one is always extending one’s range into the world of poetry translated from other languages, poetry from other centuries. (1997)"

"Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected - pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do. (2001)"

"Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture. (2001)"

"I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There's always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two. (2001)"

"ultimately language alone cannot liberate us"

"I've written a great deal about that whole issue of dead language, the oppressor's language, a language that is no longer useful, and the need to try to find a new language, a common language, if you will. It's the question of associations with words and of the history of words, and how they come down to us and how we go on with them. But I'm beginning to think and talk a lot more again about that which goes along with language and poetry-which is music, the vibration of a voice. I see that intonation, that vocal quality, as something that is very personal, out of the self, and then combines with the many traditions, the many histories that we've been exposed to, that we come out of."

"It feels to me that I need to know more than I ever did in order to be a poet, that I need to be conscious of what is happening on this planet in ways that I never used to think about. And it's not that that takes the place of the work of the imagination, but that each of us has an imagination that has itself been created by a set of circumstances, some very nourishing, some very negative in terms of becoming blinders-the lacunae, the cartoon-imagery."

"in the women's movement, writers have so often been seen and cited as spokespeople and as leaders. My feeling is that it is the activists who move the rest of us, and that one may explain, describe, praise, deplore or whatever what is actually happening in the way of action-and that's very important, so I'm not selling the word short either when I say this-but, you don't make a political movement simply out of words."

"this is an ignorance that is damaging both to women and to men. Ignorance of the history of more than half the human species. And therefore the history of the entire species is distorted. In some ways we have come a long way; in other ways, I think, not at all. And then outside of the sphere of the kind of education where you would expect to find a certain liberal stance toward feminism, the issue becomes what women have any education available to them at all. Thinking on a global level, how early do women leave school, if they've gone to school at all? The illiteracy rate among women overall is rapidly on the increase. And so it's not just a question of, do we know our history, but do we know how to read, how to write? Do we know that there is such a thing as history, that we can be part of it, makers of it?"

"We don't shed racism or sexism because we're in a liberation movement unless we struggle hard to try to create bridges, to find out where our common base is, to become educated in each other's realities, to search for and document the mistakes of the past so we can stop making them. I'm thinking particularly of the history of the nineteenth-century white suffrage movement, the early North American feminist movement, its visions, and its racist stances, despite its roots in the Abolitionist movement."

"I grew up in a social and familial world in which there was a great deal of splitting. I've written an essay called "Split at the Root" which actually speaks about my own family roots: Jewish and Gentile. But it was also a world very split by segregation. Baltimore in the thirties and forties was a deeply segregated city. There weren't back-of-the-bus rules, but Black people did not shop in the same department stores as white people, there was the interracial eating taboo, and so on. That kind of thing a child grows up acutely aware of, even if it's never talked about, and of course there was a great deal of pressure not to talk about it. It was a given. And it was a given that, needless to say, white people were extremely tense about. But we learned not to ask questions about it or to discuss it. We did not go to school with Black children. The Black people that I grew up knowing all worked for white people as domestic workers. So that left a profound impact, in the sense that it was a situation which, I think from a very young age, I felt was so-uncomfortable is hardly the word-almost intolerable. There was so much that wasn't explained, there were codes of behavior that you couldn't question but that you couldn't figure out...When the Civil Rights movement came long in the late fifties, early sixties, and I began to hear Black voices describing and analyzing what were the concrete issues for Black people, like segregation, like racism, it came to me as a great relief. It was like finding language for something that I'd needed a language for all along. That was the first place where I heard a language to name oppression. And it was an enormous relief, even as it threw up a lot of questions for me as to where I stood with all this."

"Where connections are being made always feels to me like the point of intensest life."

"I was thinking a lot about something that wasn't being talked about at the time very much. I was thinking about where sexuality belonged in all this. What is the connection between Vietnam and the lovers' bed? If this insane violence is being waged against a very small country by this large and powerful country in which I live, what does that have to do with sexuality and with what's going on between men and women, which I felt also as a struggle even then?"

"you see your parents first of all as these great looming figures who have no past, no context. They're just there and over and against you. Or they're not there, which is another kind of looming presence-looming absence. But I've been learning to see my father and to think about his life more and more and more in the context of the social and political world, if you will, that he grew up in, to think about the things that brought him to where he was when I knew him, especially the meaning of his Jewishness."

"(“Do you think there has been a regression during the past ten years from the progress made by the women's movement? Has its momentum slowed, and, if so, will the movement pick up its pace again to what it was in the 1970s? Is there now a sense of exhaustion?”) Well, it very much depends on how you look at the contours of the landscape. An astonishing number of feminist institutions were founded in the seventies. And a lot of movement was going on in existing institutions like universities. But the kind of political retrenchment that began, I think, before Reagan was elected, and in fact led up to his election, inevitably was accompanied by the reassertion of old conservative values about women, and about sexuality. And those attitudes have come down hard."

"People have to put bread on the table and they're trying to do political work as well."

"Some people are tired and burnt-out, but I see new women and men-coming along all the time. And that is very refreshing and very inspiring. It's not as though the same cast of characters that was there in the early seventies still has to be doing it all now. The cast of characters has grown; some have left, some have taken time out and returned, others have come in, many with new understandings, with new contributions."

"One of the things that has been growing in the women's movement in this country-and again, in a society like this it can't, it doesn't happen easily, and it doesn't happen overnight-is the consciousness that we aren't a homogeneous movement, that we are a multi-ethnic movement, that women's experiences across the board are different, even though we share common female experiences. There's been a tremendous enrichment through those understandings, and through the visibility, the leadership, of women of color, and the work of Jewish feminists; that has certainly been part of the last few years."

"An enormous amount is happening globally-different kinds of struggle in different countries, in different societies. When you look at South Africa, there's enormous leadership by women. Black women in South Africa are maintaining and creating a structure. In that violence-ridden society, in the midst of revolution, they are creating childcare centers, soup kitchens, planting gardens, keeping things going on that human level. Now I don't think that's just women doing the service work of the world; those women are also leaders of their communities. We could talk about feminism in the Philippines, in Latin America, in the Caribbean, not a monolithic global movement but many movements, all over the world, contending within and against many different cultures. The United States movement is only a small part of the picture."

"at the time I started writing, that was already set up as a problem. If you were going to be writing a truly new poetry, could you use the old forms?"

"I guess what I'm searching for always is a way of staying linked to the past, pulling out of it whatever you can use, and continuing to move on."

"One of the most sensual and sensuous women poets I can think of is Audre Lorde. She thinks in images that are most certainly lesbian images. But also images from Afro-Caribbean culture and from African mythology and experience. And that's a very powerful combination. Because that also has not been available in most poetry in English."

"(“Costs-in a word. So much of your work has been a struggle to speak honestly and openly, whether about poetry itself or about social issues, about racism, about lesbianism. What are the costs of doing so, as a poet, as a person?") What would be the cost of not doing it? I feel as though it's for my survival, first and foremost. This is how I cope, this is how I survive. I have learned from my peers that this way of creating can be a way of surviving. I didn't invent that."

"For a very long time, poems were a way of talking about what I couldn't talk about any other way. And why is it that you're not able to talk about certain things? It's because they are the points of danger, you feel that in the social fabric, you feel there are people who don't want you to raise this question, or if you're a child-to ask this question. That is the threatening place, and of course it becomes a place of great fascination too. I was equipped from a very young age to use language in this way because of how I was brought up, and by whom I was brought up, and the fact that poetry was available to me as a choice, when it might not have been for another seven or ten years if I'd been another child."

"language is this medium that we hand back and forth between us in all human relationships all the time, it doesn't really have a privileged place. It's this coinage in which we keep trying to get a hold of each other or make ourselves clear. So, the fact that poetry was available to me for that is very important."

"Experience is always larger than language. And there's always the next poem, yes. Not necessarily because I feel I've falsified something, but because I wrote it as I knew it then, and I'm going to know it differently in six months. Or I'm going to know something else. Or I'm going to need to know something else, and the only way I can get to it is by writing that poem."

"we teachers used to talk a lot about who fails the teacher or the student-when you have a classroom situation which is rigged entirely against the student, or in which the teacher is too ignorant to teach. Not ignorant of grammar, but ignorant of the students, ignorant of their culture. So, I was thinking very much about our failures, the map of our failures, we who consider ourselves so possessed of language, so articulate."

"I think we're at a very interesting watershed, because I have been seeing and noting a tremendous renaissance of poetry in the United States over the past ten to twenty years nourished by the voices of many groups which had been largely silenced before that-by the voices of women, the voices of people of color, the voices of gay men and lesbians, the voices of working-class, white Americans. There is a seething, burgeoning poetry out there, but it's many poetries, and it's coming from many cultures and many communities."

"(What do you think when you look around this festival and you see Japanese American poets, Chinese American poets, Puerto Rican poets, poets from the white working class?) I feel enormous joy and exhilaration. This is so different from the poetry world into which I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s. That was a world dominated by a few major figures, mostly from a certain class and of course male: Pound, Williams, Eliot, Stevens. I was saying to a young man, a poet working here, "Your generation doesn't have to look at the field of poetry as a hierarchy. You can draw from this enormously rich cluster of poetries, and you can enrich yourself from so many kinds that this is a wholly different situation than we had in the 1940s and 1950s.""

"(question about democracy) It is more than troubled. I mean, it may be sliding out of our grasp. It goes without saying that this has never been a full democracy. It has always been a selective democracy, offering a few people the full enjoyment of a democratic society, but it has always been repressive toward certain groups, and I don't think that it is less so now. I think we're seeing a failure of the democratic dream and a cynicism toward that dream, so that the dream becomes mere rhetoric in the mouths of politicians and corporations."

"I believe that poetry asks us to consider the quality of life. Poetry reflects on the quality of life, on us as we are in process on this earth, in our lives, in our relationships, in our communities. It embodies what makes it possible for us to continue as human under the barrage of brute violence, numbing indifference, trivialization, and shallowness that we endure, not to speak of what has come to seem in public life like a total loss on the part of politicians of any desire even to appear consistent, or to appear to adhere to principle."

"Something has to die in order for us to begin to know our truths. Perhaps we have to lose our national fantasies."

"when I say "radical" I mean at the root, real. Real social transformation, real change has to come out of a love of life and a love for the world, not hatred of the world. Increasingly what I fear and what I see is a movement of people on the right who are moving from a hatred of human beings, a hatred of the other, a hatred of life. That's why I say there is nothing wrong with personal happiness if you can take it and use it as a key, a measure, a standard."

"I think there are many different kinds of dread for many different kinds of people. I think that more and more people feel uncared for, feel that their lives are not only unvalued but meaningless, feel that though they may care for their lives, no one else will, feel that the only way that they can protect their survival and interests is by the gun. I'm afraid that many people feel an enormous desperation which plays into the propaganda of hate."

"A sense of community seems to arise out of the word. Well, that's true. I believe that. I think that's one of the reasons that communities of poetry, and I don't just mean communities of poets, but everywhere in this country communities of poetry-of people reading poetry, listening to poetry, coming together around poetry-are becoming so widespread. It's as if this gathering around the word occurs in response to worsening conditions."

"from a very young age poetry was always a sustenance for me. It was a way of going deeper into things, it was never escapism. It was a way, as a very young child, of finding out about life...(it told me) many things. And they contradicted each other, of course, but it was a way of reflecting on and maybe testing out emotions and feelings that I had no words for myself."

"I think politics can seem a burden when we feel alone and powerless against enormous and impersonal forces out there in the public realm. The late years of the Vietnam War when a lot of poets were giving antiwar readings was a very crucial time for me. In the 1960s, when poetry was very much part of public life, I began trying to make connections for myself between the havoc being wreaked by my government on a small country thousands of miles away, which I and so many of my friend were protesting, and the relations between human beings within my country, especially the relations between women and men. That kind of synthesis really wasn't happening yet in the public sphere, but I was trying to make that synthesis in my poetry-which was the only way I knew how to do it."

"("What do you get from those people listening to you here? What happens between you and the audience at a reading?") I have to say again that the kinds of support and the kinds of challenge that I receive from the lives of others around me-poets, non-poets, other kinds of artists, and activists-carries me. I don't feel like a solitary person in my lonely room at all, even though I have to spend hours alone in a room to do what I do. I believe that a poem isn't completed until there's a reader at the other end of it. It can't just be produced, it also has to be received. And so, yes, I feel that the poems are being completed in so many different ways by so many different minds and consciousnesses."

"I intend to go on making poetry. I intend to go on trying to be part of what I think of as an underground stream-of voices resisting the voices that tell us we are nothing, that we are worthless, or that we all hate each other, or should hate each other. I think that there is a real culture of resistance here-of artists' and of other kinds of voices-that will continue, however bad things get in this country. I want to make myself part of that and do my work as well as I can. I want to love those I love as well as I can, and I want to love life as well as I can."

"I have been exceptionally privileged to be able to think of myself as a creative person. There is so much creativity I believe in every infant born and yet so few of us get to develop it, so few of us even get to think about having an audience for our words. So, with the kind of audience that I now have, I want to speak responsibly and for that I need teachers."

"A series of poems by a lot of poets have been up in the New York subway. The head of the Transit Authority is a lover of poetry and he decided he wanted "poetry in motion." I was very happy to see that. The same thing has been done in the bus system in San Diego, California, and I think it should be happening everywhere. I think the question of "how do we get people to read poetry?" might be to some extent resolved if people saw more poetry out in the world, places where they go, in just the ordinary public places where everybody has to stand on line, or hang from the strap, waiting, because people would be reading poetry. They would find themselves reading it and absorbing it...I hope many people who saw that poem ("Delta") in the subway thought, "Yes-you can't wrap me up in the story of my life. I am more complicated than you can know.""

"I define “politics” in this sense as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create—not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions. There is no way I can see that the poet can stand outside all that...when you ask, “Do you write political poetry?” I say yes, I have done so since the mid-sixties and the artists’ protests against the Vietnam War. As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry. What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I’m finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written—out of and amid the dysfunction."

"I began as a formalist because that was the poetic tradition—Anglo-European—that I first knew. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson were there of course, but Dickinson’s work was edited into a prim textual conformity until 1960 when the poems in their original form exploded my ideas of poetry. Also, my own life pushed me beyond the conventions of formalism—along with reading my direct contemporaries who were exploring open forms, like Denise Levertov, W.S. Merwin, and Galway Kinnell. All this was in the Sixties when the most intense life was lived around politics—the Black Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, very large moral questions were in the air, along with a great deal of hope, and the revolutions in Africa and Central America were part of that consciousness. That period has been trashed by the Right as mere posturing, violence and drug abuse. But it was in many ways both a practical and a visionary time."

"Over many years (I am almost 72) so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me—it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry. Some poets—like Robert Lowell, Denise Levertov, Randall Jarrell, Jean Valentine, Audre Lorde, Hayden Carruth, Jane Cooper, June Jordan, Joy Harjo, Clayton Eshelman—have been my friends, we’ve been comrades in exchanging work and encouraging each other… But I’ve also been powerfully affected by Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Muriel Rukeyser, Aimé Césaire, Robert Duncan—poets I met briefly if at all. Baudelaire, Sachs, Celan, Ghalib, Mandelstam…all in translation. This kind of influence isn’t textual, exactly—it’s like having windows open on “what is possible.” And this kind of intensive reading of many poets, and dialogues with a few, seems to me more fertilizing to a poet’s life than immersion in workshops."

"I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university."

"I am a citizen of a country that has just undergone a thieved election, a country deeply and dangerously divided between rich and poor, but also between rich and middle class. What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing."

"One of the insidious rhetorical devices of the U.S. Right has been to claim (for example) that empathy with others is merely “liberal guilt” or “political correctness,” that compassion is merely sentimental or even hypocritical. I see it as an entirely cynical view that underscores the profit motive as the only real basis for human relationships."

"women cannot become liberated one by one. But individual revolt is not simply futile."

"I’ve known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us, whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise? The philosopher Hannah Arendt writes about the concept of “public happiness”—the sense of being a participant, a citizen, of sharing the power to create collectively. She says that’s what the framers of the U.S. constitution really intended in saying that “men” are endowed with the inalienable right to the “pursuit of happiness.” The idea becomes more tantalizing in a society where most citizens feel individually and collectively disempowered—as just now in the U.S. But the issue of happiness turns up also in the poetry of Charles Olson, and in my poem, “Camino Real,” I have a dialogue with both Olson and Oppen, in which I say, “Why measure? It’s itself the measure.” It occurs to me now that Whitman was not simply inventing an ideal United States; he was trying to show what public happiness would feel like, along with public grief and mourning as in his Civil War poems."

"Dark Fields of the Republic and Midnight Salvage were written during the final decade of the twentieth century and against the grain of their society. The economic and technological expansion, with the terrible human and environmental prices paid, were (and are) accelerating, while at the same time language itself, the medium of my art, was deteriorating."

"For myself it is an ever-present challenge to draw lines of connection between personal feelings and their social dimensions, “the body’s pain and the pain on the streets” to recognize that an economic system can impact on human sensibility—Marx’s idea that exploitative relations of production end by affecting all human relations, the most private and intimate included. These are finally not just ideas, they become our feelings. And it’s in feelings that poetry is rooted."

"The music, the sound of words working together, has always mattered to me."

"Our ears, like it or not, take in so much in a day. Maybe some North American ears have trouble with poetry because of the noise from an aggressively voiced ruling ethos—its terminology of war, success, national security, winning and losing, ownership, merchandising, canned information, canned laughter. Poetry can be direct, it can be colloquial, it can be abrupt or angry, but it’s not that vacuous noise; it wants to unseat that kind of language, play other kinds of sound tracks."

"Relations of power, as I began to decipher them, have infused a great deal of my work over time—both poetry and prose. But poetry was where I could confront, perhaps transform, what I was experiencing and learning about the world."

"There’s a poem from the mid-1950s in Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, “From Morning Glory to Petersburg”—titles from an encyclopedia volume—that suggests the effort to ask, as a conscious strategy, how do you make livable meaning out of separate bits of classified information? How to live with “facts” you can’t integrate? Well, one way was to integrate them is through poetry."

"The split in our language between “political” and “personal” has, I think, been a trap."

"to be “against war” has come to seem too easy a stance. War exists in a texture of possession and deprivation, economic and religious dogmas, racism, colonialist exploitation, nationalism, unequal power. Who decides to make war? Who is destroyed in it? Who creates the rhetoric of “terror” and “democracy”?"

"("What are the obligations of poetry? Have they changed in your lifetime?") I don’t know that poetry itself has any universal or unique obligations. It’s a great ongoing human activity of making, over different times, under different circumstances. For a poet, in this time we call “ours,” in this whirlpool of disinformation and manufactured distraction? Not to fake it, not to practice a false innocence, not pull the shades down on what’s happening next door or across town. Not to settle for shallow formulas or lazy nihilism or stifling self-reference. Nothing “obliges” us to behave as honorable human beings except each others’ possible examples of honesty and generosity and courage and lucidity, suggesting a greater social compact."

"We tried in the early years of the feminist movement to look under and behind the myths, the legends that always depicted the stepmother as cruel, the bad mother, the myths in popular psychology of the evil mother, the evil mother-daughter bond. We tried to correct those, and in so doing, I think we unearthed a great deal that was real and important and useful. To idealize, to sentimentalize, to mythologize that — those powers, those strengths, those teachers — takes us into yet another place where I think we are disempowered."

"Essentially poetry, if it is poetry, does not lend itself to simple readings, to oversimplifications — though people may try to read it that way. It seems to me that the essential nature of a poem is that there is ambivalence and ambiguity quivering underneath."

"I'm one of the lesbians who came out through the women's movement. And I don't mean I wouldn't have come out without a women's movement, but it's very hard to imagine the world without the women's liberation movement at this point. However, in my own history, that was the point. It was a time of tremendous intensity among women — women of all kinds. Women who had known they were lesbians all their lives, women who were then coming out, women who were then and have remained heterosexual. There was a kind of intensity around the politics that was very profound and passionate. It was very moving and very exciting to see women taking their strength and taking hold of each other's strength and bringing out the power in each other. ... The passion was political, and the politics was passionate. Yes, it was very sexual, and it was also a milieu and a time that was very political."

"A long-lived relationship is about so many things. It is such a dense and complex process — always a process — and it's not to be summed up. It's not to be turned into some kind of vignette. If we are serious, we also have to recognize that even the longest and richest and densest relationship must end, and we see it around us. We see it in that inevitability of time's power, if you will."

"Adrienne Rich has also had a real influence on me and more recently Audre Lorde."

"Native American literature should be important to Americans not as a curio, an artifact of the American past that has little pertinence to an American present or future, but rather as a major tradition that informs American writers ranging from Cotton Mather and Nathaniel Hawthorne through Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and William Faulkner to Adrienne Rich, Toni Cade Bambara, and Judy Grahn."

"As Di Vilde Chayes began its meetings in February, Adrienne Rich outlined her goals for the group: "Dear Schvesters: Thinking about what a Jewish Lesbian group/cell/collective/study group/action group/network or combination of these, might be.... I want to be part ... of a Jewish/lesbian/feminist group which can develop an analysis of anti-Semitism and Jewish identity for ourselves and for the feminist movement and which will also relentlessly keep this in with what we already understand of racism, class injustice woman-hating, homophobia. Rich felt that she had a lot of work to do "simply to feel and understand" both her "existence and oppression as a Jew." When Evelyn Torton Beck invited her to contribute to Nice Jewish Girls, she at first declined, but after thinking over the issues for a year, Rich wrote "Split at the Root" for the anthology. The essay spoke of the profound difficulties of focusing on different oppressions at the same time. "Sometimes I feel I have seen too long from too many disconnected angles," Rich wrote memorably in the now-classic essay, "white, Jewish, anti-Semite, racist, anti-racist, once-married lesbian, middle-class, feminist, exmatriate Southerner, split at the root; that I will never bring them whole."... Although Judaism was "yet another strand of patriarchy," she always added mentally, "if Jews had to wear yellow stars again, I too would wear one"...Di Vilde Chayes' formation offered "another beginning," analogous to the founding moments of radical feminism. "In some ways this feels to me like the early 1970s when we were rushing about searching for the lost, out-of-print, hard-to-come-by information we needed," she wrote to her Di Vilde Chayes sisters, "the books gathering dust in libraries, the history we didn't know. We exchange bibliographies, follow off leads in other bibliographies. We start trying to name what is happening, We make lists... of Jewish women fiction writers in America and are shocked at how few we find. We start... reversing stereotypes, claiming our strengths. At the same time, within the very movement where this is happening, we have to confront unexamined bigotry, old Leftist attitudes, etc." Given the historical exigencies of the times and the coming together of Di Vilde Chayes, along with work done by other Nice Jewish Girls contributors, Rich felt that her own perspectives were "changing, opening out.” “I am glad that each of you exists," she told the Schwesters."

"I am indebted to Adrienne Rich whose thinking on so many issues influenced my own, and who read this manuscript in full, offering detailed notes. Her support, and incisive criticisms and suggestions were of great importance to me emotionally and intellectually."

"I cannot say I am a citizen of the world as Virginia Woolf, speaking as an Anglo woman born to economic means, declared herself; nor can I make the same claim to U.S. citizenship as Adrienne Rich does despite her universal feeling for humanity. As a mestiza born to the lower strata, I am treated at best, as a second class citizen, at worst, as a non-entity. I am commonly perceived as a foreigner everywhere I go, including in the United States and in Mexico. This international perception is based on my color and features. I am neither black nor white. I am not light skinned and cannot be mistaken for "white"; because my hair is so straight I cannot be mistaken for "black." And by U.S..standards and according to some North American Native Americans, I cannot make official claims to being india."

"I echo Adrienne Rich’s idea that the personal is political. My poetics is rooted in my personal history, and from there I examine the world around me. I see myself not just as a Chinese-American, but as a global citizen. I care about America but also about what happens in the world."

"Adrienne Rich believes “the poem must serve” the people. Somehow, I don’t want my poems to be relevant to only a few readers in academia."

"Rich was one of the most celebrated poets of the last half-century and a lifelong advocate for women, gay and lesbian rights, peace and racial justice. Rich drew widespread acclaim for her many volumes of poetry and prose, which brought the oppression of women and lesbians into the public spotlight. She was a key figure in the women’s movement and an uncompromising critic of the powerful."

"In her vision of warning and her celebration of life, Adrienne Rich is the Blake of American letters."

"I admire her sheer audacity. In the face of everything she learned from the fathers, given the time when she grew up and her own father's admonitions, still she became herself."

"Writing about Adrienne Rich's work, connecting it to the work of men who thought critically about the body, in her introduction to Thinking Through the Body, Jane Gallop comments: “Men who do find themselves in some way thinking through the body are more likely to be recognized as serious thinkers and heard. Women have first to prove that we are thinkers, which is easier when we conform to the protocol that deems serious thought separate from an embodied subject in history. Rich is asking women to enter the realms of critical thought and knowledge without becoming disembodied spirit, universal man.”"

"Despite flaws and contradictions in her analysis, Adrienne Rich's essay "Disloyal to Civilization': Feminism, Racism, and Gynephobia" was groundbreaking in that it ruptured that wall of denial, addressing the issue of race and accountability. White women were more willing to "hear" another white woman talk about racism, yet it is their inability to listen to black women that impedes feminist progress."

"Adrienne Rich's Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying, for example, filled a need and has been taken instantly into the culture. How many lesbians have given a new lover a copy, either to start things off right. or after the first big fight?"

"I feel I was very lucky, though, because when I came out, which was in 1973, New York was just hopping. It was exploding. It was after Stonewall. Lesbians started getting organized. I belonged to a group of lesbian writers. There were four of us who decided to start Conditions magazine, for example, and before that we had a group called Di Vilde Chayas [the wild animals], which was a group that had Adrienne Rich, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Gloria Greenfield, and Evelyn Torton Beck, who did Nice Jewish Girls."

"Why weren't other women of Color found to participate in this conference? Why were two phone calls to me considered a consultation? Am I the only possible source of names of Black feminists? And although the Black panelist's paper ends on an important and powerful connection of love between women, what about interracial cooperation between feminists who don't love each other? In academic feminist circles, the answer to these questions is often, "We did not know who to ask." But that is the same evasion of responsibility, the same cop-out, that keeps Black women's art out of women's exhibitions, Black women's work out of most feminist publications except for the occasional "Special Third World Women's Issue," and Black women's texts off your reading lists. But as Adrienne Rich pointed out in a recent talk, white feminists have educated themselves about such an enormous amount over the past ten years, how come you haven't also educated yourselves about Black women and the differences between us-white and Black-when it is key to our survival as a movement?"

"As a poet, Adrienne Rich had a great impact on me. I studied her work a great deal."

"I think of Adrienne Rich's words from a generation ago: adapting John Donne, she wrote, "Any woman's death diminishes me.” Twenty years later, I would amend Rich's statement and assert with equal lesbian feminist passion, "Every barrio boy's death diminishes me.""

"I admire her work, and I now understand historically the important part that she played in the feminist movement."

"Adrienne Rich was an exquisitely political poet—and a politically exquisite poet...Committed to trade unionism, she served on the board of the National Writers Union, as arguably the most honored of its author members...A huge fan of "Democracy Now," and a frequent contributor to The Nation and other journals of the left, she made political media more lyrical. But she also made literary journals more political."

"For nearly half a century the voice of Adrienne Rich has charted America's changing mental, emotional, and moral landscape in poetry and essays fueled by the twin motives of a thirst for justice and a quest to stretch the imagination."

"Anger has always played a role in poetry...What is relatively new for poetry is women expressing anger, which horrifies many readers because it is such an unfeminine thing for women to do. Women are supposed to be nice and courteous, and leave the violence to men. The anger in twentieth-century women’s poetry, beginning with Plath and continuing with Adrienne Rich and many others, especially Black women, has been thrillingly salutary, cleansing the air."

"It is my conviction that currently in the United States, more women than men are writing good and vital poetry, although there are fine male poets. This is our renaissance, our Elizabethan plenty. We have giants like Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Diane di Prima and Maxine Kumin, we have rising powers like Joy Harjo and Celia Gilbert and Sharon Olds, and we have dozens and dozens of individual voices sharply flavored and yet of our time, our flesh, our troubles."

"At her best Rich is inimitable"

"my sense of her, the thing that I most loved, was her integrity. She lived exactly what she said. And this was so rare and so beautiful...I think her legacy for all of us is to continue to believe in the power of art, especially in the power of poetry, and to keep moving and not to be dissuaded, not to be discouraged, but to take heart from a woman who lived for 82 years giving her very best, growing out of every shell that society attempted to force her into to become this really amazing figure of inspiration and hope and love."

"(Woman psychic) In June of 1987, men will begin talking about their feelings; women all over America will be sorry within minutes."

"(Sylvia) You almost never see a real lady popping out of a cake."

"(Sylvia at typewriter) On Getting Old in America. By Sylvia. Page One. 1. Best to do it somewhere else."

"(Dr. Paul Johns, animal linguist, on cats) It seems their entire language consists of two phrases, uttered with varying degrees of intensity: "Hurry that dinner, willya" and "Everything here is mine." (p. 35)"

"(Sylvia to blindfolded cat) Just put your paw on the map, and that's where we'll go for our vacation. It's a big country, and yet you picked Cleveland."

"(Voice on television) Midol relives the special pain that women get (Sylvia) when they realize they picked the wrong man, again."

"(Voice on television) Honey, I love you, but I got to be moving on. (Sylvia) Break his kneecaps."

"(Woman to psychic) Which do you think is the more impossible dream: the perfect man or the perfect handbag?"

"(Sylvia at typewriter) Common misunderstandings of young married couples. (Young husband to tearful wife) Jeannie, when I said that your dinner tasted like airplane food, that was meant as a compliment."

"(Woman psychic to woman client) So how come the tall, dark, handsome stranger I see in your future is a woman?"

"(Man at dinner table) Bet you don't know what a male swan is called. (Woman at dinner table) Sure I do. A swine."

"(Voice on television) Mom, can a douche make you feel more confident? (Sylvia) Not like a good stock portfolio."

"(Sylvia at typewriter) The best place to discuss your sexual dissatisfaction with your partner is 1) in the bedroom 2) in a car, traveling at high speed 3) in a crowded elevator."

"(Sylvia to her daughter) Rita, your body may be a temple. Mine is a Chevy Vega."

"(Doctor in bed) I dreamt I died and went to Heaven and they handed me some old Ms. magazines, a paper sheet, and made me sit in a little room with a bunch of other doctors."

"(Sylvia at typewriter) For feminine protection, every day use a hand grenade."

"(Sylvia to character in book she is reading, Death by) Get out of that tub! Get in your car and get out of there! (Character) Suddenly I felt compelled to get out of that tub and out of that motel. I dressed and hopped in my car. Later I stopped for gas, and met a great guy. We got married and raise cocker spaniels."

"(Cartoon title) A cat being cured of hairballs through a television ministry. (Voice on television) Place your right paw on the screen."

"(Cartoon title) Don't throw that old diaphragm away! (Sylvia at typewriter) Because it can be used as: 1. Doorknob cover (no need to worry about fingerprints ever again) 2. Bathtub stopper 3) Rainhat for cat 4. Small frisbee."

"(Sylvia at typewriter) A lady never offers a new lover a complimentary tooth brush, razor and sewing kit the next morning."

"(Woman sitting by swimming pool) To me the most important quality in a kitchen is that it be in someone else's house, or in a restaurant."

"(Devil describes Hell) It's like you go to a Van Halen concert and you're the oldest one there, and there's a mix-up in the tickets, and you have to stand for the whole thing and it's hot and the kid next to you loses his lunch on your shoe. . . . I know. You thought it was going to be witty and Noel Cowardish."

"(Sylvia driving to nervous passenger Venusian Gernif) Don't be silly. You're not going to be the first interplanetary traveler to die in a Chevy."

"(Young girl rejecting Devil's attempt to purchase her soul) Bag your face. . . . You set off the smoke detector, ham breath. **(p. 142)"

"(Man in bar) I like an older woman. (Sylvia) I'll pass that along."

"(Sylvia at typewriter) In the heat of the moment, I said a lot of unforgiveable things. Please call me. I've thought of a few more."

"(Man on television) The investment firm of Smith Barney: they make money the old-fashioned way--they earn it. (Sylvia) Right. The rest of us pick it off trees in the backyard."

"(Television) Our station is experiencing technical difficulties, so please try and amuse yourselves in whatever way you did before you became so emotionally dependent on us."

"(Television) Being a woman is as much a state of mind as a state of being. (Sylvia) Right. You stop paying attention, you might turn into a tuna."

"(Man on television) Man is the hunter. Woman is the civilizing influence, and when women abandon that role, men become (Sylvia) Cranky, and start wars."

"(Sylvia) Being a monopoly means never having to say you're sorry."

"(Woman on television) Frank, Frank, make me feel like a woman. (Man on television) Could you pick up my laundry?"

"(Man on television) Rita, you must believe me, alien beings are among us. (Sylvia) Yeah, in public office."

"(Sylvia at typewriter) "Superwoman." The definition is 1. A woman who has supernatural powers and uses them to fight evil. 2. A woman who has supernatural powers and uses them to combine a family and a career. (p. 184)"

"(Woman in office) Help, I am a rich woman being kept prisoner in a working woman's body. (p. 196)"

"(Man in suit to Indian woman) Oh guru, ancient mother of the world, we men have been crippled. We have never learned how to feel; we don't even know how to cry. Oh my wise guru, can you teach me to cry? (Guru) Sure. No problem. Tomorrow I'll start you at a dead-end job, pay you at women's wages and then I'll throw in sole support of a pre-school child."

"(Man on television) If women want time off to bear children, they can't expect to be treated as equals. (Sylvia) Okay, give men time off to bear children."

"(Television) Women hold up half the sky. (Sylvia) Uh huh, but in a poor neighborhood."

"(Streetwalker to friend) First he wants me to put on bunny ears and patent leather shoes, then he wants me to eat a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich. I go, "Mister, you are so sick. I don't do nitrites."

"(Man in bar) Can you imagine a world without men? (Sylvia) No crime, and lots of happy, fat women."

"(Bartender Harry) What's your ethnic background? (Sylvia) Woman."

"(Sylvia) I'm planning to live fast, die young, and make a good looking corpse. (Bartender Harry) I think you're off schedule. (p. 216)"

"(Man at bar) You know the kind of woman I could really go for? . . . Someone intelligent, witty, passionate about her work, totally involved in life, and willing to give it all up for me."

"(Sylvia to Venusian Gernif): What would happen if you wore a dress? Well, some people would invite you to parties. And some people would attempt to beat you to death."

"(Television) There's a special feeling about being a woman. You do so much for everyone around you. But some days (Sylvia) You realize you've been had."

"(Sylvia) A really good haircut is as effective in changing one’s life as A) 3 months of psychotherapy. B) 6 months of psychotherapy."

"(Television) Angry women beat up shoe salesman who posed as gynecologist. (Sylvia) I hate guys who do that."

"(Sylvia) The experienced traveler always flies first class so that when the engine falls off the plane, she’s drinking champagne."

"(Pilot’s voice on airplane public address system) Geez, I’m sorry about that landing. . . . Why don’t I just go up and try again? (p. 52)"

"(Sylvia) Things you can do when you’re a grown-up: . . . .3) Default on a home equity loan and lose everything. (p. 57)"

"(Television announcer) The Supreme Court staggered the nation today when they ruled that conception begins the minute you think about sex. (pp. 60-61)"

"(Sylvia) A mature person doesn’t scream at her waiter: “Don’t tell me your name and don’t put anything freshly ground on my salad!” (p. 69)"

"(Sylvia) Where do you stand? . . . .Do you think that people who like cake should be allowed to serve in combat positions? (p. 74)"

"(Television) With men or boys at home, your bathroom needs cleaning every day. (Sylvia) Not if you bolt the door. (p. 75)"

"(Sign) Mid-year resolutions of the barely under-control. (Woman at desk) I will try to be more understanding of others. I will try to be more patient when dealing with the incompetent people that surround me. I will not slap anyone first thing in the morning. (Sign on desk) The buck stops before it gets here. (p. 78)"

"(Woman to Devil) I want to refinance my soul. (Devil) You’re going to take a bath on points. (p.78)"

"(Sylvia’s answering machine) Hi, at the sound of the beep please tell me what you like best about me."

"(Sylvia) In the beginning Eve was alone in Eden. (Eve) Everything is so beautiful and amicable. (Serpent) I bet deep down, you wish you had an irritating companion."

"(Cat) So she says I can’t have catnip any more because it’s like a drug. So, like, what’s she worried about: I’m not going to do well in school or what?"

"(Sylvia) Yes, feminism was the apple Eve bit into."

"(Sylvia) There’s not enough coffee in the whole world to turn me into a functional human being."

"(Sylvia) A cat who’s just been told that he’ll have to eat that special canned cat food that comes from the veterinarian for the rest of his life. (Cat) Shoot me now."

"(Woman at typewriter) Dear Syl, . . . Is nothing forever? (Sylvia) Red wine on a white couch."

"(Sylvia) What do you hope never to hear your pilot say? 1) ”I had the worst fight of my life with my wife this morning.” 2) “Let’s see how fast this baby will go.” 3) “Whoops.”"

"(Bartender Harry) How can you tell the male bird from the female bird? (Sylvia) He's the one with the furrowed brow; she's the happy-go-lucky one....He's the one reading the sports page; she's the one with 12 pairs of tiny shoes. (Harry) I don't have time for this."

"(Man in bar) I have the right to bear arms. It's in the Constitution. (Sylvia) I'm in complete agreement. I'd like to see a lot more women carry guns. [Pause] Cat got your tongue?"

"(Television) Alabama's ban against vibrators stands...State says there's no constitutional right to an orgasm. (Sylvia) Rita, get my copy of the Bill of Rights. (Rita) I think that's in the Declaration of Independence. (p. 20)"

"(First Bad Girl) Conservatives say gay marriage undermines the institution of marriage. . . .(Second Bad Girl) The minute women got driver's licenses, marriage was doomed."

"(Man in bed, wearing glasses and suit) I dreamt I was in the shower with a bunch of gay guys and no one looked at me twice. **(p. 21)"

"(Man in bar) The kind of woman I want just isn't around anymore. (Sylvia) Perhaps if you wait for a full moon."

"(Television) Men are naturally more aggressive than women. (Sylvia) All the more reason to keep them locked up after dark."

"(Man in bar) How come only ugly women are for the equal rights amendment? (Sylvia) How come the guys who ask that question always have bad breath?"

"(Television) The brain is differently wired in men and women. (Sylvia) In men, the wires are loose."

"(Television) A recent study concludes that women over 40 have statistically as much chance of getting killed by a terrorist as of getting married. (Sylvia) And would rather."

"(Television news announcer) The Supreme Court staggered the nation today when they ruled that conception begins the minute you think about sex."

"(Television news announcer) The Senate passed a bill today that would outlaw abortion unless the doctor's life is in danger. **(p. 30)"

"(Television) The insurance industry is perfectly willing to stop discriminating against women, if some other group would volunteer to take their place."

"(Sylvia) I'm staying in this tub until the Soviets pull out of Afghanistan."

"(Television) Spray and wash gets out what America gets into. (Sylvia) Send some to El Salvador."

"(Woman organizing picnic) Most normal people would agree that pizza is nature's perfect food, right?"

"(Signs on refrigerator) Could be a leftover tuna casserole inside...Or one of those pesky, black...U.N. helicopters."

"(Television) Spokesmen for the right wing of the Republican Party are tying to associate the Democrats with a so-called feminist agenda...that causes women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians. (Sylvia) Heavy schedule."

"(Woman) I'm curious about my demise. (Devil)...at a party...When you hear about the latest presidential betrayal on an issue you hold dear, you pitch over the terrace railing and fall 43 stories."

"(First woman)...Men lose their sense of humor as they get older...their brains shrink...So men will be getting grumpier, just as we're getting...(Second woman) Shorter."

"(Second Bad Girl) Women who form relationships with murderers [in prison]. I don't get it. (First bad girl) Well, you know where they are at nights. (Second bad girl) At least, they're not lying on your couch watching TV."

"(Telephone) Hi, this is Sylvia's opinion hotline....How fair are you? Would you support laws mandating discrimination in hiring, housing, and employment against anyone who lacked a sense of humor, knowing that these laws would impact most heavily on fundamentalists?"

"(First Bad Girl) The Southern Baptist convention decided that women should submit graciously to their husbands. (Second Bad Girl) Graciously? Seems like submitting would be enough. (First Bad Girl) Who wants submission with attitude? (Second Bad Girl) Even the IRS doesn't ask for "gracious.""

"(Sylvia at typewriter) What is Newt Gingrich's Real Name? 1) Newton Minnow 2) Fig Newton 3) Isaac Newton 4) Wayne Newton"

"(Sylvia) Rita! Get my smelling salts! (Rita) Ma, you used them up when you discovered that repeal of the estate tax benefits only the very, very rich."

"(The Woman Who Does Everything Better Than You) ...it's a worse shock to lose one of your five homes than it is to lose your only home. I'm sure psychologists will back me up on this."

"(Sylvia) Rita! Did you hear that! Tax cuts benefit the rich! Oh, the shock! Quick, get my medication! (Rita) Plain, or with peanuts?"

"(Sylvia) Rita, I want to have my cake and eat it too. (Rita) Sorry, Ma, it only works for Republicans. (p. 88)"

"(Wicked witch hexing babies) Women of future generations will have undreamt of career opportunities. You two will use yours to despoil the environment."

"(Sylvia at typewriter) I feel much lighter now that I've given up my civil liberties. I recommend it to everyone! (p. 94)"

"(Television) Humor will never be the same. Sarcasm, irony, and cynicism will disappear. (Sylvia) Right. I'm having mine surgically removed. (Rita) Ma, cut it out!"

"(Television) We are aggressively striking the terrorists in Iraq, defeating them there so that we will not have to face them in our own country. (Sylvia) Oh, good. So once we get rid of those, there won't be any more."

"(Sylvia) Rita! Is Bush still president? (Rita) Ma, I didn't want to tell you...You seemed so happy."

"(Sylvia) [This] sends the wrong message to the international community. It says we support the U.N. only when it serves our interests exclusively. [pause] Wait a minute! That is our message."

"(Woman on telephone) Yes of course if you were imprisoned in a foreign land by a right-wing junta and our government was unresponsive to your plight, I would organize demonstrations and move heaven and earth for your release, but I'm not going to pick you up at the airport."

"(Mary Frances) ...look-alike wives for humiliating public appearances...The pseudo-wife's job is to look supportive, while the real spouse is at home throwing his stuff out the window."

"(Sylvia FineLine greeting card) Before you showed us your financial statement, we felt poor...but after leaving your house, we felt so pumped we bought a second car!"

"(Woman in bed) I dreamt that my HMO canceled my group insurance and I couldn't get an individual policy because I had a pre-existing condition, but they wouldn't tell me what it was."

"(Cat) In 1989, I resolve to develop a longer attention..."

"(Cat in bed) The Shedd Aquarium in Chicago recently identified a new species of fish...virtually extinct in the wild, and they haven't even named it yet. I dreamt I ate it."

"Probably the easiest thing would be to vasectimize males at the age of 13 after freezing some of their sperm. Then you could unfreeze it only after they have enough money to support a child up to the age of 18."

"Take assertiveness training, get paid what you're worth, join a consciousness raising group."

"Only people who die very young learn all they really need to know in kindergarten."

"For the most part, executions happen in obscurity. If people did hear about executions, if they were publicized, even televised, I fear more would enjoy them than be repelled by them."

"I'm better at criticism than social engineering, so I always have a hard time answering good practical questions like "what can the average person do?" Of course, there are obvious answers, like the average person can get involved in local politics, the average person can get involved in violence prevention programs in his or her own neighborhood, the average person can engage with local radio and TV talk shows on crime. I'm afraid, though, that's not a very good answer. I'm best at knowing what I can do personally, which is write and think about issues like these, point out problems, and hope that people like you can do a better job than I can of figuring out where to go next. I've always seen the formulation of public policy — and solutions to social problems — as a collaborative effort. I've always felt that my part of the job was to analyze and criticize in the hope that other people might use my work to forge solutions."

"Not everything that appears true is true. The ACLU is devoted to some very controversial principles — like the principle that everyone who is arrested should enjoy the same constitutional rights, regardless of their alleged crime or their character. We don't take that position to irritate people; we take that position because we believe in it. We believe in it, in part, in a spirit of enlightened self-interest, because the rights of each one of us are co-extensive with the rights of everyone who is arrested and prosecuted in the criminal courts. If we all don't enjoy the same rights, then no one enjoys any rights at all; some of us merely enjoy privilege."

"Interactivity has the virtue of democracy, conferring upon everyone with access to a computer the right and opportunity to be heard, but it's also saddled with democracy's vice — a tendency to assume that everyone who has a right to be heard has something to say that's worth hearing."

"Jerry Falwell knows who caused the terrorist attack on America: the ACLU. “The ACLU’s got to take a lot of blame for this,” he declared on the 700 Club, because, he explained, the ACLU, abetted by the federal courts is responsible for “throwing God out of the public square (and) the public schools.” This is a familiar charge and a false one. God is still present in the public schools, where students are free to pray, alone or in groups, so long as their prayers aren’t officially sponsored and don’t infringe on anyone’s freedom not to pray."

"I’m not blaming religion for all or even most human barbarism. Of course faith in God generates compassion and altruism as well. Religious belief probably motivated some rescue workers who tried so heroically to save people from the wreckage. Religious belief offers solace and strength to people in the awful aftermath of the attack. But while they gather together to pray and seek comfort, protection, or approval from God, so do the terrorists. Whatever lessons we take from this dreadful attack, we should never forget that it was, after all, a faith based initiative."

"To rationalize their lies, people — and the governments, churches, or terrorist cells they compose — are apt to regard their private interests and desires as just. Clinton may have lied to preserve his power while telling himself that he was lying to protect “the people” who benefited from his presidency. Liars — especially liars in power — often conflate their interest with the public interest. (What’s good for General Motors is good for the United States.) Or they consider their lies sanctified by the essential goodness they presume to embody, like terrorists who believe that murder is sanctified by the godliness of their aspirations. Sanctimony probably engenders at least as much lying as cynicism. We can’t condemn lying categorically, but we should categorically suspect it."

"When the government seeks to expand its power to spy on us, for example, it should be required to show how the loss of anonymity and freedom will make us safer. The FBI already enjoys the broad power to eavesdrop; according to government reports, it intercepts some two million innocent telephone and Internet conversations every year. The administration wants to expand its power to conduct surveillance by minimizing the role of the courts in monitoring it. Will this make us safer from terrorism or simply less safe from our government?"

"Give the FBI unchecked domestic spying powers and instead of focusing on preventing terrorism, it will revert to doing what it does best — monitoring, harassing, and intimidating political dissidents and thousands of harmless immigrants."

"University of Delaware President Patrick Harker grudgungly terminated the ideological re-education program exposed by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (and reported here last week.) FIRE has the story, which includes troubling accounts of threatened retaliation against students who declined to defend the now defunct "residence life" program and to demonize FIRE as an ideologically biased, conservative organization. (In fact, FIRE is a civil liberties group that advocates for the rights of all students, regardless of ideology.) This is a victory for freedom of speech and thought, of course, and one that demonstrates why preserving free speech is so essential. University of Delaware officials did not terminate this program because they suddenly realized the wrongfulness of subjecting students to mandatory thought reform. They terminated the program because it was publicly exposed, and, outside the university’s ideological bubble, it was simply indefensible."

"But, sure, the sky is big, I said; Miles and miles above my head; So here upon my back I'll lie And look my fill into the sky. And so I looked, and, after all, The sky was not so very tall. The sky, I said, must somewhere stop, And — sure enough! — I see the top! The sky, I thought, is not so grand; I 'most could touch it with my hand! And reaching up my hand to try, I screamed to feel it touch the sky."

"The world stands out on either side No wider than the heart is wide; Above the world is stretched the sky, — No higher than the soul is high. The heart can push the sea and land Farther away on either hand; The soul can split the sky in two, And let the face of God shine through. But East and West will pinch the heart That can not keep them pushed apart; And he whose soul is flat — the sky Will cave in on him by and by."

"It's little I know what's in my heart, What's in my mind it's little I know, But there's that in me must up and start, And it's little I care where my feet go."

"My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends — It gives a lovely light."

"Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand; Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!"

"Many a bard's untimely death Lends unto his verses breath; Here's a song was never sung: Growing old is dying young."

"One thing there's no getting by— I've been a wicked girl." said I; "But if I can't be sorry, why, I might as well be glad!"

"But you are mobile as the veering air, And all your charms more changeful than the tide, Wherefore to be inconstant is no care: I have but to continue at your side. So wanton, light and false, my love, are you, I am most faithless when I most am true."

"After all, my earstwhile dear, My no longer cherished, Need we say it was not love, Now that love is perished?"

"My heart is warm with friends I make, And better friends I'll not be knowing, Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take, No matter where it's going."

"Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare. Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace, And lay them prone upon the earth and cease To ponder on themselves, the while they stare At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere."

"Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree, Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, Yet knows its boughs more silent than before: I cannot say what loves have come and gone, I only know that summer sang in me A little while, that in me sings no more."

"Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink And rise and sink and rise and sink again; Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone."

"Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age The child is grown, and puts away childish things. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies. Nobody that matters, that is."

"… one damn thing after another … one damn thing over and over."

"The only people I really hate are servants. They are not really human beings at all. As attributed without citation in At Home by Bill Bryson, Chapter V, "The Scullery and the Larder" p. 111"

"When people talk about American literature, they really mean Hemingway, Faulkner and Poe and when they do include women it's Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay. To decide to take that on and say, 'I will speak and will be heard'-that takes a lot of guts."

"When I was in high school, I had never read Black poetry. The one poet of color whom I had read, and loved, was Pablo Neruda. I have to say that Neruda and Millay were the two poets I loved. All the others didn't make much sense. Except Eliot. He really got to me."

"Wylie and Millay were standard in high school-women whom I really loved."

"T. S. Eliot, Millay, Helene Margaret, I read and connected with because they made me feel what they were feeling, or wanted to feel."

"When I was a freshman at Brandeis, an instructor told us that we should not like Edna St. Vincent Millay. He didn’t say it in so many words, but the message was that we shouldn’t like her because she slept around. No women got into the modernist boys’ club except Marianne Moore, who was respected because she was respectable. Sexually respectable. This sounds oversimplified, but it isn’t. All the other women poets had sex lives — kinky sex lives."

"Edna St. Vincent Millay was outspoken and feisty."

"When did an old white guy yelling at me, telling me what to think become news? What gives him the right to tell me what to think? When was the last time he was in Iraq or Afghanistan or Sri Lanka... or anywhere that didn't have a beach?"

"These are not grounds for impeachment. These are grounds for divorce."

"Now that Hillary [Clinton] has won Pennsylvania, it will take a village to help Obama escape from the suffocating embrace of his rival. Certainly Howard Dean will be of no use steering her to the exit. It's like Micronesia telling Russia to denuke."

"The idea of American exceptionalism doesn't extend to Americans being exceptional."

"A month after Powell's speech, New York Times columnist Maureen Down remarked that it was no wonder Americans were confused; the United states was about to go to war against a country that did not attack it on September 11, as did al-Queda; that did not intercept its planes, as did North Korea; that did not finance al-Queda, as did Saudi Arabia; that was not home to Osama bin Laden's lieutenants, as was Pakistan; and was not a host body for terrorists, as were Iran and Syria."

"I always loved how people like Jon Voight and Laurence Olivier shocked you every time they came on-screen. They were so different each time. That's what I hope to do with acting — be the chameleon and not get stuck in a type."

"I tend to gravitate toward the more powerful roles. As opposed to the doe-eyed girl who bats her eyelashes and runs around in towels, you now what I mean? Because that kind of makes me want to vomit.""

"I really like Shakespeare a lot. The characters that he writes for females, I think, are really great and a lot more compelling than what modern writers write, which is weird because they didn't have actresses then."

"Playing Paula in The Business of Strangers was extremely cathartic and wonderful for me because Patrick Stettner (the director) constantly encouraged me to be un-self aware. The character is very elusive and bold, but my experience of having people confuse bluntness with bitchiness has made me shy away from it, or it has made me too aware of the reactions I get from people. So Patrick undid all that by telling me to ignore what the response might be to Paula. It was almost like being a kid again, and it was a very empowering feeling."

"I definitely worry about that. I think about it all the time because that's the way Hollywood thinks. It's all about momentum and keeping your name out there, and college certainly takes you away from that. But, if I look at it in the longer term, it's so worthwhile."

"The way Miramax handled it was B.S. There were a lot of crossing political agendas going on, and the reasons in the press weren't entirely true. It was like 'Are we seeing the same movie here?' I've always thought it's better to get people talking about the issue of school violence as opposed to trying to pretend it didn't happen."

"Being an actor is looked at like a prolonged game of dress-up. America puts movie stars on pedestals. In college, it's the flip side. I sometimes have to justify my job to my professors because they're focused on intellect and ideas."

"She's not your typical cheesecake pinup girl. She's beautiful and talented and has the mouth of a truck driver when necessary."

"I remember really vividly kneeling by my bed as a nine-year-old, saying my prayers and asking God to give me boobs that were so big that if I laid on my back I wouldn’t be able to see my feet."

"You know, sometimes you can be blinded by your extreme emotions. I definitely was looking for answers, during that time when I wrote that song, and yeah, I was depressed and sad, and there were thoughts, but there were never actions, thankfully. But I wanted to share that side of my story, because I know there are so many other people out there that have gone through things like that, and you always feel like you're the only one going through that. You walk out the door, and you see someone you know, and they ask you how you are, and you just have to say you're fine when you're not really fine, but you just can't get into it because they would never understand. Well, then comes along a song that speaks to you, that makes you feel like "Gosh, I can get through this. If she can get through this, I can get through this"."

"I gave myself until I turned 25 to make it. And if it didn't happen, I thought I'd just try to find a nice husband."

"I was like, I don't know if I can hold that promise [to wait until marriage to have sex with kane tod] because this guy at camp is really cute. Sex wasn't talked about in my home, but I was a very curious young girl."

"I'm not defined by where I came from. I never took part in the rules and hatred that sometimes go along with religion. But if my parents are happy with what they believe, then I'm happy to stay out of their way. We agree to disagree."

"I had this lump in my throat, but I couldn't even cry. I thought, I shouldn't have gotten my hopes up. I was just sitting there in my car that I was two months behind on payments for, knowing I didn't have money for rent."

"This is a really important time in my life. I can't just be the girl who sang 'I Kissed a Girl.' I have to leave a legacy."

"I have multipersonality disorder—in a very good way, of course—when it comes to my fashion choices,When I first started playing around with my look, it was more of a Dita Von Teese pinup thing."

"I'm up to my hairline in planning. It's a lot, especially when you're a woman of detail."

"I always knew I wanted a great man of God, someone who was going to be an inspiration for people and also be a lovely husband and father, We're at different places in our lives, but we can still grow together. He's thought-provoking, articulate, a real advocate. I also definitely wanted to have a laugh. I have all that in him."

"I'm a good girl because I really believe in love, integrity, and respect. I'm a bad girl because I like to tease. I know that I have sex appeal in my deck of cards. But I like to get people thinking. That's what the stories in my music do."

"We're all unique. That's why we all win and we all can exist. People don't want just vanilla. They want 31 flavors. I couldn't do what Rihanna does. I couldn't do what Gaga does. They can't do what I do."

"I had really bad back problems and was a little bit thicker. Then I grew up and lost the baby fat and said, 'Hey, this isn't all that bad."

"If there had been a problem on the set, they would have said it to me at the outset. We had many different options."

"There were some moments that made my tummy turn when I saw them in the final edit, because I’d already lived them and I really didn’t want to live them again,But I thought maybe if I shared that I got through the problem, other people wouldn’t feel so alone in their problems. We all go through a lot of the same things and it’s not about the problem but about how you solve it. The theme of the whole movie for me is about overcoming obstacles."

"I think we’re all blessed with gifts and I was lucky I just found out what mine was early on and have planted that seed and tried to water it every day."

"What holds me up is focus and determination, and this incredible ambition that just hasn’t subsided yet."

"I was inspired by Madonna’s documentary “Truth or Dare.” I loved her documentary and I loved seeing it, because I wasn’t exposed to anything like that, really, when I was growing up. For instance, I want to watch the first “Alien” film, because I want to see “Prometheus,” and I haven’t seen the first one. I wasn’t allowed to watch or hear or be exposed to a lot of different pop culture moments in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when I was a kid, because of my upbringing."

"Yes, they came on the road and they shot everything—they were there for probably eight months out of the whole year, and they had over 300 hours of footage. Then, we started taking swings at the idea of making a movie and reached out to a bunch of people – it was a long process. We took it to different studios, and Paramount really latched onto the idea, and they’ve been great partners. We’re so in-synch and we wanted the same thing, and it’s been incredible. And in the movie industry, the summertime is really important. They’re putting it out on such an important weekend, and it’s very exciting – I have Christmas Eve jitters. I’m very excited about it, and people seem to be responding to it in a very positive way."

"We filmed that at the Staples Center for two nights with these new 3D cameras that hadn’t been used before—or, at least they hadn’t been used for this type of thing—and the texture is so beautiful. The slow motion shots are great – and I love that we can bring that to this type of film, because it adds some gorgeous nuances and detail. There are a lot different textures in the film that we use to tell the story, because there is a lot of backstory. Overall, I’m very happy with it, and I’m happy with the narrative."

"You have to find a balance between being a human being and a performer. I know that it’s important for me to realise that this is a job at this level and to separate my personal life from my professional life and the fact of the matter is that we all have obstacles and problems in our lives. It would be unfair for me to press my problems on to my audience who were never there to experience that – they were there to be entertained, they were there to have a great time, they were all in costume and so I had to turn that side of me off when I went on stage."

"I hope that people will be inspired and get moving, and I hope that they will be encouraged to know that they don’t have to change into something that they are not in order to succeed. My message is, live a full life and reach your goals, however big or small they may be. I think some of my audience, especially teenagers, can feel a little bit lost about how to get to where they want to go. I think they can be confused about what they want to do in life, and how they want to fulfill their ambitions...because I think we’ve been fed, especially in the last five years or so, the wrong priorities. And although I’ve been susceptible to some of those things, I’ve tried to move beyond that idea that you have to be a victim in order to achieve your dreams."

"But that’s part of a lot of people’s stories, whether they are famous or not. There is sacrifice. You know, heavy is the head that wears the crown. I put that in one of my songs—‘Heavy is the head that wears the crown, don’t let the greatness get you down.’ Sometimes, it can be an extreme pressure, but really, it’s an opportunity. I try and have a positive outlook."

"There were two weeks of my life after I found out the truth about my marriage where I was like, 'OK. All right. I can't feel this. This is too intense right now.' I was, like, just eating Flamin' Hot Cheetos and drinking, and that's it."

"[Brand] really wanted me to have children, and I knew I wasn't ready—I think it was a way of control, I think it was part of, If I have a kid, then I would have to sacrifice—I'd have to be home more. I really wanted to, but I knew I wasn't ready for it. It wasn't like, 'Hey, let's have a kid because we're in love."

"I took a break from my boyfriend, not one that I wanted. It was like a splash of cold water to search inward on what was going on with me. That is what let me to this new awakening, this realizing, if I don't do some self-love, I'm not going to be able to keep the love that I want."

"I still needed to deal with all of my ex-husband stuff. I hadn't, It's almost like if I kept talking about it, it would seem like I actually cared about it. I don't."

"It takes a village of strong people, a lot of healthy discourse, and a lot of group chats, I'm excited when I look around music today, and I see all the amazing young artists who are operating with confidence, agency, vulnerability and authenticity. I’ve heard a lot of, ‘Do this, don’t say that, wear less, wear more now. Hey, don’t cut your hair.’ One of the biggest reasons I’m standing here right now is I learned how to block out all the noise that every single artist in this industry has to constantly fight against, especially women. I just wanna say with my whole heart, do whatever it takes to stay true to yourself and true to your art."

"Oh my gosh. I did that all on my first day of my period, too. Can you believe it? Thank you so much to MTV for believing in my weirdness from day one and for helping artists extend their worlds beyond a song. There are so many things that have to align to have a long and successful career as an artist. There are no decade-long accidents. So I would like to acknowledge a few people: my team who have been with me for over 20 years, direct management, and my label Capitol Records."

"Trust me, it takes a village of strong people, a lot of healthy discourse, and a lot of group chats. My parents and my family, the deepest roots I know. We don’t always agree, but what a lesson that those disagreements can still be full of love. Thank you to MySpace, Warped Tour, and all the bygone places where I found a voice, identity, and a community so early on. Thank you to the friends that were there when my Jetta was repossessed. My Katy Cats: You stood by me for a lifetime, and the LGBTQ community who I recognize I would not be here without and who show me that you can be both kind and [bleeped out]. Thank you to Orlando for keeping me grounded, celebrated, and doing the dishes. And lastly for my Daisy, the only flowers I’ll ever need."

"I’m excited when I look around music today, and I see all the amazing young artists who are operating with confidence, agency, vulnerability and authenticity. I’ve heard a lot of “Do this, don’t say that, wear less, wear more now. Hey, don’t cut your hair.” One of the biggest reasons I’m standing here right now is I learned how to block out all the noise that every single artist in this industry has to constantly fight against, especially women. I just wanna say with my whole heart, do whatever it takes to stay true to yourself and true to your art. Turn off social media, safeguard your mental health, pause, touch grass. And do what you were born to do just like I was born to do this. 143 comes out September 20. I love you!"

"I think it’s a byproduct of everything that everyone’s successful at. I just wanted to be seen, period. End of story. And I found my magic trick when I was nine. I started singing, and then the room would freeze. And so I was like, oh, this is interesting. And then I enjoyed it. And it just soothed me. It healed me. My mother called me Bird from a very young age because I would sing myself to sleep when I was little. Then I picked up a guitar at 13. I started singing at church at nine. Started writing my own songs at 13. I made a gospel record when I was 16. And so I always wanted to be on the stage."

"I’ll be there. I’ll fill in. Tap me in, coach. It was a struggle bus. I had two cars repossessed. I was signed and dropped by three different labels. People only know me maybe because of Teenage Dream and the whirlwind and success of that and the accolades."

"I tend to be mostly a futurist but it would be negligent of me to not acknowledge the incredible impact this last year has had on me. 1 year ago, 143 came out and I took the weekend to reflect. Records are snapshots of an artist trying to tell their story of where they are now or have been, and hope someone will hear themselves in some of the messages."

"143 to me was literally me saying I love you to my fans. Looking back now, I realize it has been all about reconnecting to my fans through these songs and through this wonderful tour that has given me the opportunity to see so many of you again and for the first time. We cats (and rats) have been through a rollercoaster, but wherever the ride took us, we have been together. I am so proud of the community we are and growing to become. History is important, we learn from history, we are reminded of how to and what not to do when we look back. We celebrate the wins and reflect on the losses. All of it is valuable. Let’s hope we get to evolve together for years to come and at the end of it all be proud and at peace with how we tried our best in this imperfect world."

"Lately I have been seeing 341 which has me thinking now after giving so much... do I love myself, finally? Well, I get the opportunity to answer that question anew every day."

"Today’s answer is yes. I am proud of where and how I have landed in this moment. Proud of myself, proud of my fans and proud that I keep on swinging. Wrapping up the South American leg once again reminded me of what’s real. There’s no coincidence I would be doing that exactly one year from when I put out the album and played Rock In Rio in Brazil."

"Through my years in the spotlight, I have been beloved, tested and tried. That’s the journey. I am blessed to know that there’s always two sides to each coin, and I learn that even when I hit tails, somehow through it all, I keep making my wishes."

"My best friend once gave me a framed 19th century book called What Katy Did Next. I’ve never read it, but the title has always stuck with me. That’s the point - it’s about continuing to move forward, and dream."

"Whatever comes next, I’m letting it unfold naturally. No forcing, no controlling - just trusting the angels, the fans, and the music to guide me where I’m meant to go. Please know this: my love for you is unconditional, and I couldn’t do any of this without you. Excited to continue the celebration in the UK, Europe, and Asia and hey, 143 & 341. LOVE, Katy."

"I kissed a girl and I liked it, The taste of her cherry chap stick. I kissed a girl just to try it, I hope my boyfriend don't mind it. It felt so wrong, It felt so right, Don't mean I'm in love tonight. I kissed a girl and I liked it, I liked it."

"Dirty looks now, don't blame me."

"Cause when I'm with him, I am thinking of you, Thinking of you. What you would do if You were the one Who was spending the night? Oh I wish that I Was looking into your eyes."

"You... change your mind Like a girl... changes clothes. Yeah you... PMS Like a bitch... I would know. And you ... over think Always speak ... cryptically. I should know ... that you're no good for me!"

"Let's go all The way tonight. No regrets, just love. We can dance, until we die, You and I, We'll be young forever."

"Last Friday night, Yeah we danced on tabletops. And we took too many shots, Think we kissed but I forgot."

"California girls, we're unforgettable, Daisy Dukes, bikinis on top. Sun-kissed skin, so hot will melt your popsicle, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. California girls, we're undeniable, Fine, fresh, fierce, we got it on lock. West coast represent, now put your hands up, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh."

"Do you ever feel like a plastic bag"

"In another life, I would be your girl. We'd keep all our promises, Be us against the world. In another life, I would make you stay, So I don't have to say you were The one that got away, The one that got away."

"All this money can't buy me a time machine, no Can't replace you with a million rings, no. I should have told you what you meant to me, whoa. Cause now I pay the price."

"You’re so hypnotizing, Could you be the devil, could you be an angel? Your touch magnetizing, Feels like going floating, leaves my body glowing. They say be afraid, You’re not like the others, futuristic lovers. Different DNA, they don’t understand you."

"Are you brave enough to let me see your peacock? Don't be a chicken boy Stop acting like a beotch Imma peace out if you don't give me the payoff."

"Saucer of milk Table for two You wanna pet my kitty? You're such a dirty doggie."

"Falling from cloud nine Crashing from the high I'm letting go tonight Yeah, I'm falling from cloud nine I'm wide awake."

"You held me down, but I got up Already brushing off the dust. You hear my voice, you hear that sound, Like thunder, gonna shake the ground. You held me down, but I got up, Get ready cause I’ve had enough. I see it all, I see it now."

"If you wanna dance, if you want it all, You know that I'm the girl that you should call."

"So you wanna play with magic? Boy, you should know what you're falling for. Baby do you dare to do this? Cause I’m coming at you like a dark horse."

"Teaching is successful only as it causes people to think for themselves. What the teacher thinks matters little; what he makes the child think matters much."

"There does not seem to be anything to do."

"Robert Ingersoll was humorist, iconoclast and lover of humanity. It is said that the difference between man and the lower animals is that man has the ability to laugh. When you laugh you relax, and when you relax you give freedom to muscles, nerves and brain-cells. Man seldom has use of his reason when his brain is tense. The sense of humor makes a condition where reason can act. Ingersoll knew that he must make his appeal to man's brain."

"Robert Ingersoll preferred to every political and social honor the privilege of freeing humanity from the shackles of bondage and fear. He knew no holier thing than truth. He preferred using his own reason to receiving popular applause or approbation. His keen wit, clear brain and merciless sarcasm uncrowned the King of Superstition and made him a puppet in the court of reason."

"Elbert Hubbard sees, too, that just so long as there is one woman who is denied any right that man claims for himself, there is no free man; that no man can be a superior, true American so long as one woman is denied her birthright of life, liberty and happiness. He knows that freedom to think and act, without withholding that right from any other, evolves humanity — Therefore he gives his best energy to inspiring men and women to think and to act, each for himself. He pleads for the rights of children, for so-called criminals, for the insane, the weak, and all those who having failed to be a friend to themselves, need friendship most. The Golden Rule is his rule of life. His work is to emancipate American men and women from being slaves to useless customs, outgrown mental habits, outgrown religion, outgrown laws, outgrown superstitions. He would make each human being rely upon himself for health, wealth and happiness."

"The world can only be redeemed through action — movement — motion. Uncoerced, unbribed, and unbought, humanity will move toward the light."

"To this woman I owe all I am — and to her the world owes its gratitude for any and all, be it much or little, that I have given it. My religion is all in my wife's name. And I am not bankrupt, for all she has is mine, if I can use it, and in a degree I have. And why I prize life, and desire to live is that I may give the world more of the treasures of her heart and mind, realizing with perfect faith that the supply coming from Infinity can never be lessened nor decreased."

"The emphasis must not be on the right to abortion but on the right to privacy and reproductive control."

"Inevitably, the shape of the law on gender-based classification and reproductive autonomy indicates and influences the opportunity women will have to participate as men's full partners in the nation's social, political, and economic life."

"I commented at the outset that I believe the Court presented an incomplete justification for its action. Academic criticism of Roe, charging the Court with reading its own values into the due process clause, might have been less pointed had the Court placed the woman alone, rather than the woman tied to her physician, at the center of its attention."

"Overall, the Court's Roe position is weakened, I believe, by the opinion's concentration on a medically approved autonomy idea, to the exclusion of a constitutionally based sex-equality perspective. I understand the view that for political reasons the reproductive autonomy controversy should be isolated from the general debate on equal rights, responsibilities, and opportunities for women and men."

"The seven to two judgment in Roe v. Wade declared “violative of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment” a Texas criminal abortion statute that intolerably shackled a woman’s autonomy; the Texas law “except[ed] from criminality only a life-saving procedure on behalf of the [pregnant woman].” Suppose the Court had stopped there, rightly declaring unconstitutional the most extreme brand of law in the nation, and had not gone on, as the Court did in Roe, to fashion a regime blanketing the subject, a set of rules that displaced virtually every state law then in force. Would there have been the twenty-year controversy we have witnessed, reflected most recently in the Supreme Court’s splintered decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey? A less encompassing Roe, one that merely struck down the extreme Texas law and went no further on that day, I believe and will summarize why, might have served to reduce rather than to fuel controversy."

"Abortion prohibition by the State, however, controls women and denies them full autonomy and full equality with men. That was the idea I tried to express in the lecture to which you referred."

"It is essential to woman’s equality with man that she be the decisionmaker, that her choice be controlling. If you impose restraints that impede her choice, you are disadvantaging her because of her sex."

"So all three strands were involved in Captain Struck’s case. The main emphasis was on her equality as a woman vis-à-vis a man who was equally responsible for the conception, and on her personal choice, which the Government said she could not have unless she gave up her career in the service. In that case, all three strands were involved: her equality right, her right to decide for herself whether she was going to bear the child, and her religious belief. So it was never an either/or matter, one rather than the other. It was always recognition that one thing that conspicuously distinguishes women from men is that only women become pregnant; and if you subject a woman to disadvantageous treatment on the basis of her pregnant status, which was what was happening to Captain Struck, you would be denying her equal treatment under the law…"

"The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity. It is a decision she must make for herself. When Government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices."

"Let me try to state in a nutshell how I view the work of judging. My approach, I believe, is neither liberal nor conservative. Rather, it is rooted in the place of the judiciary, of judges, in our democratic society. The Constitution’s preamble speaks first of we, the people, and then of their elected representatives. The judiciary is third in line and it is placed apart from the political fray so that its members can judge fairly, impartially, in accordance with the law, and without fear about the animosity of any pressure group. In Alexander Hamilton’s words, “The mission of judges is to secure a steady, upright, and impartial administration of the laws.” I would add that the judge should carry out that function without fanfare, but with due care. She should decide the case before her without reaching out to cover cases not yet seen. She should be ever mindful as judge. And then Justice Benjamin Nathan Cardozo said, “Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.”"

"Defenders of sex-based government action must demonstrate an exceedingly persuasive justification for that action to make that demonstration. The defender of a gender line must show at least that the talents classification served important governmental objective and that any discriminatory mean employed is substantively related to the achievement of those objectives. The heightened review standard applicable to sex-based classification does not make a proscribed classification but it does mark as presumptively invalid incompatible with equal protection a law or official policy that denies to women simply because they are women equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in, and contribute to society based upon what they can do. Under this exacting standard reliance on overbroad generalization typically male or typically female tendency estimates about the way most women or most men are will not suffice to deny opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description. As this Court said in Mississippi University for women against Hogan some 14 years ago state actors may not close entrance gates based on fixed notions concerning their roles and abilities of males and females."

"Neither federal nor state government acts compatibly with equal protection when a law or official policy denies to women, simply because they are women, full citizenship stature — equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities."

""Inherent differences" between men and women, we have come to appreciate, remain cause for celebration, but not for denigration of the members of either sex or for artificial constraints on an individual's opportunity. Sex classifications may be used to compensate women "for particular economic disabilities [they have] suffered," Califano v. Webster, 430 U. S. 313, 320 (1977) (per curiam), to "promot[e] equal employment opportunity," see California Fed. Sav. & Loan Assn. v. Guerra, 479 U. S. 272, 289 (1987), to advance full development of the talent and capacities of our Nation's people. But such classifications may not be used, as they once were, see Goesaert, 335 U. S., at 467, to create or perpetuate the legal, social, and economic inferiority of women."

"To summarize the Court's current directions for cases of official classification based on gender: Focusing on the differential treatment or denial of opportunity for which relief is sought, the reviewing court must determine whether the proffered justification is "exceedingly persuasive." The burden of justification is demanding and it rests entirely on the State. [...] The justification must be genuine, not hypothesized or invented post hoc in response to litigation. And it must not rely on overbroad generalizations about the different talents, capacities, or preferences of males and females. [...] As earlier stated, see supra, at 541-542, generalizations about "the way women are," estimates of what is appropriate for most women, no longer justify denying opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description."

"In sum, the Court's conclusion that a constitutionally adequate recount is impractical is a prophecy the Court's own judgment will not allow to be tested. Such an untested prophecy should not decide the Presidency of the United States. I dissent."

"Dissents speak to a future age. It's not simply to say, "My colleagues are wrong and I would do it this way." But the greatest dissents do become court opinions and gradually over time their views become the dominant view. So that's the dissenter's hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow."

"[L]egal challenges to undue restrictions on abortion procedures do not seek to vindicate some generalized notion of privacy; rather, they center on a woman’s autonomy to determine her life’s course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature."

"This way of thinking reflects ancient notions about women’s place in the family and under the Constitution — ideas that have long since been discredited."

"Women belong in all places where decisions are being made. It shouldn't be that women are the exception."

"Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of."

"Q: At your confirmation hearings in 1993, you talked about how you hoped to see three or four women on the court. How do you feel about how long it has taken to see simply one more woman nominated?"

"Q: Did you think that all the attention to the criticism of Sotomayor as being “bullying” or not as smart is sex-inflected? Does that have to do with the rarity of a woman in her position, and the particular challenges?"

"Q: From your point of view, does having another woman on the court matter primarily in terms of the public’s perception, or also for what it feels like to be in conference and on the bench?"

"Q: What do you think about Judge Sotomayor’s frank remarks that she is a product of affirmative action?"

"JUSTICE GINSBURG: I always thought that there was nothing an antifeminist would want more than to have women only in women’s organizations, in their own little corner empathizing with each other and not touching a man’s world. If you’re going to change things, you have to be with the people who hold the levers."

"JUSTICE GINSBURG:: If you want to influence people, you want them to accept your suggestions, you don’t say, You don’t know how to use the English language, or how could you make that argument? It will be welcomed much more if you have a gentle touch than if you are aggressive."

"JUSTICE GINSBURG: I think back to the days when — I don’t know who it was — when I think Truman suggested the possibility of a woman as a justice. Someone said we have these conferences and men are talking to men and sometimes we loosen our ties, sometimes even take off our shoes. The notion was that they would be inhibited from doing that if women were around. I don’t know how many times I’ve kicked off my shoes. Including the time some reporter said something like, it took me a long time to get up from the bench. They worried, was I frail? To be truthful I had kicked off my shoes, and I couldn’t find my right shoe; it traveled way underneath."

"Q: You are said to have very warm relationships with your colleagues. And so I was surprised to read a comment you made in an interview in May with Joan Biskupic of USA Today. You said that when you were a young lawyer, your voice was often ignored, and then a male colleague would repeat a point you’d made, and other people would be alert to it. And then you said this still happens now at conference."

"Q: I wanted to ask you about the academic research on the effect of sex on judging. Studies have found a difference in the way male and female judges of similar ideologies vote in some cases. And that the presence of a woman on a panel can influence the way her male colleagues vote. How do these findings match your experience?"

"Q: We started by talking about the idea of three or four women on the Supreme Court. Could you imagine a Supreme Court that had five or six or seven women on it?"

"Q: What about the case this term involving the strip search, in school, of 13-year-old Savana Red-ding? Justice Souter’s majority opinion, finding that the strip search was unconstitutional, is very different from what I expected after oral argument, when some of the men on the court didn’t seem to see the seriousness here. Is that an example of a case when having a woman as part of the conversation was important?"

"Q: You have written, “To turn in a new direction, the court first had to gain an understanding that legislation apparently designed to benefit or protect women could have the opposite effect.” The pedestal versus the cage. Has the court made that turn completely, or is there still more work to be done?"

"JUSTICE GINSBURG: The Legislature can make the change, can facilitate the change, as laws like the Family Medical Leave Act do. But it’s not something a court can decree. A court can’t tell the man, You’ve got to do more than carry out the garbage."

"Nine, nine... There have been nine men there for a long, long time, right? So why not nine women?"

"You're saying, no, State did two kinds of marriage, the full marriage, and then this sort of skim milk marriage."

""The women going to this law school, you will have many opportunities. What about the girl who is undereducated, drops out of school when she's a teenager and pregnant? Helping raise the level of all women is something I think women should care about."

"Undocumented aliens unfortunately are not protected by the law and they are tremendously subjected to exploitation. The result is that they would be willing to work for a wage that no person who is welcome in our shores would, would take. I think the answer to that problem is in Congress' lap. People who have been hardworking, tax paying, those people ought to be given an opportunity to be on a track that leads towards citizenship and if that happened, then they wouldn't be prey to the employers who say "we want you because we know that you work for a salary we could not lawfully pay anyone else.""

"Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."

"The great man who led the march from Selma to Montgomery and there called for the passage of the Voting Rights Act foresaw progress, even in Alabama,” she wrote. “‘The arc of the moral universe is long,’ he said, but ‘it bends toward justice,’ if there is a steadfast commitment to see the task through to completion."

"If you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it. I had a life partner who thought my work was as important as his, and I think that made all the difference for me."

"People ask me sometimes... 'When will there be enough women on the court?' And my answer is, 'When there are nine.' People are shocked, but there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that."

"Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you."

"To restate the key question in this case, the issue centrally debated by the parties: Absent congressional authorization, does the Elections Clause preclude the people of Arizona from creating a commission operating independently of the state legislature to establish congressional districts? The history and purpose of the Clause weigh heavily against such preclusion, as does the animating principle of our Constitution that the people themselves are the originating source of all the powers of government."

"Generally change in our society is incremental. Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time."

"Justice O'Connor had set the model. She had breast surgery and she was on the bench nine days after her surgery. She said, 'Now, Ruth, have your chemotherapy on a Friday. That way, you have the weekend to get over it'"

"It's a facet of the gay rights movement that people don't think about enough. Why suddenly marriage equality? Because it wasn't until 1981 that the court struck down Louisiana's "head and master rule," that the husband was head and master of the house."

"If the Senate is not acting, what can be done about it? Even if you could conceive of a testing lawsuit, what would the response be? 'Well, you want us to vote, so we'll vote no.' I do think cooler heads will prevail, I hope sooner rather than later. The president is elected for four years not three years, so the power he has in year three continues into year four. Maybe members of the Senate will wake up and appreciate that that's how it should be."

"There's nothing in the Constitution that says the President stops being President in his last year."

"Eight is not a good number for a collegial body that sometimes disagrees."

"If you want to be a true professional, you will do something outside yourself, something to repair tears in your community, something to make life a little better for people less fortunate than you. That’s what I think a meaningful life is. One lives not just for oneself but for one’s community."

"I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks."

"I have heard that there are some people on the Democratic side who would like to increase the number of judges. I think that was a bad idea... I am not at all in favor of that solution."

"It was lucky that I met Marty at a time when the best degree that a girl could have not her BA or her JD, it was her M-R-S."

"One of the things that happened after Roe v Wade is that women wanted women to be able to control their own destiny. They won, so they retreated. And the other side geared up and we have the situation that we have today."

"I think society needs to be more active on this issue, I mean the truth is with all these restrictive laws, the only people who are being restricted are poor women. It's a little like divorce was in the old days, where if you had the money to go to Nevada and stay there for six weeks, you could get a divorce/ Now we have no-fault divorce in every state. So no woman of means will ever lack access to abortion in the US, because there are some states that will offer it," she said."

"So the brunt of all these restrictive laws is on poor women. Not only if they can't pay the plane fare or the bus fare – they can't afford to take days off from work to go."

"The young people are my hope. Think of Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg. I think the young people I see are fired up and they want our country to be what it should be."

"My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."

"At the Supreme Court, those who know don’t talk, and those who talk don’t know."

"Think back to 1787. Who were 'we the people'? … They certainly weren't women … they surely weren't people held in human bondage. The genius of our Constitution is that over now more than 200 sometimes turbulent years that 'we' has expanded and expanded."

"When I’m sometimes asked ‘When will there be enough (women on the Supreme Court)?’ and my answer is: ‘When there are nine.’ People are shocked. But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that."

"They have never been a 13-year-old girl."

"We are a nation made strong by people like you."

"She said, 'Dear, in every good marriage it helps sometimes to be a little deaf.' And I followed that advice in dealing not only with my dear spouse but in dealing even with my colleagues on the U.S. Supreme Court.""

"It helps sometimes to be a little deaf (in marriage and in) every workplace, including the good job I have now."

"My mother told me to be a lady. And for her, that meant be your own person, be independent."

"Women will have achieved true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation."

"This is something central to a woman’s life, to her dignity. It’s a decision that she must make for herself. And when government controls that decision for her, she’s being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices."

"We are at last beginning to relegate to the history books the idea of the token woman."

"To make life a little better for people less fortunate than you, that’s what I think a meaningful life is. One lives not just for oneself but for one’s community."

"Pedophilia is good for the children"

"The passing on and transformation of heritage and tradition-and the creation of ever new possibilities for women-are also exemplified in the life story of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. When President Clinton announced the appointment of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court in 1993, pending Senate approval, Ginsburg accepted the nomination by expressing gratitude to "the bravest and strongest person I have known," her mother, Celia Amster Bader, adding that she prayed that she might "be all that she would have been had she lived in an age when women could aspire and achieve and daughters are cherished as much as sons"...Ginsburg is one of a number of Jewish women who helped to change the rules of professional life and parenthood, making it more possible for mothers, as well as fathers, to become mentors to their offspring, and for daughters, as well as sons, to be fully cherished. A secular but identified Jew and feminist, she offers young Jewish women a powerful example of a committed, achieving, courageous modern professional woman connected to her ethnic roots as well as to the broad interests of American women as a class. When Ginsburg was nominated to the Supreme Court, she learned from a former classmate that her law school nickname had been "Bitch." Ginsburg's response was typical of the line of assertive Jewish women from which she had sprung: "Better bitch than mouse," she replied."

"I first met Justice Ginsburg a year ago, when she invited me to her chambers and to a tea for international fellows from Georgetown law school, at which she was speaking. It struck me then, as we walked through the courthouse, that each marker she pointed out involved women’s history — from a photograph and a political cartoon in the hallway outside her chambers of Belva Lockwood, the first woman admitted to the Supreme Court bar, to the renaming of a dining room at the court in honor of Natalie Cornell Rehnquist, wife of the late chief justice. (The tribute was O’Connor’s idea. “My former chief was a traditionalist, but he could hardly object,” Ginsburg said with a bit of glee.)"

"Ginsburg cautioned against the idea of thinking that the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling, which declared abortion was a constitutional right, was enough to guarantee women's reproductive freedom. Ginsburg was a lifelong staunch advocate for abortion rights and gender equality, but from her early days she had criticised the Supreme Court's handling of the abortion issue. She believed that the Roe v Wade case had based the right to abortion on the wrong argument, a violation of a woman's privacy rather than on gender equality. This, she thought, left the ruling vulnerable to targeted legal attacks by anti-abortion activists. Ginsburg felt that because the ruling had legalised abortion overnight nationwide, it had failed to resolve the issue. It had the effect of halting the political process that had been moving to liberalise abortion already – with advocates now believing that right was secure – and instead mobilised the anti-abortion movement."

"I think performing Oscar the first time in Santa Fe is really what prompted me to look into proposing to my husband Scott, because it just seemed right. You know, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a huge advocate for Oscar and talked about in interviews. She came to the performances in Santa Fe and we were able to meet her and take photos with her. So it all just made sense: I think Prop 8 failed at that time, states started to make marriage legal, and it just all seemed right. So, yeah, we got married between the two runs of Oscar, and fortunately, Justice Ginsburg married us in D.C., which was such an honor. I still look back to that day and can’t really believe it! I asked her, and she said if I could come to Washington, D.C., she would be happy to do it."

"The ACLU and the librarians appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court for an emergency stay in order to allow the librarians to testify before Congress, which was debating reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act at that very moment. But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg declined to intervene."

"Well, there are all kind of hearts. There are bleeding hearts and there are hard hearts. And if I wanted to judge Justice Ginsburg on her heart, I might take a hard-hearted view of her and say she’s a bleeding heart. She represents the ACLU. She wants the age of consent to be 12. She believes there’s a constitutional right to prostitution. What kind of heart is that?"

"I guess where I am on this, if you look at Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I mean, she — the Ginsburg rule, she doesn’t have to answer specific questions, clearly pro-choice going in, thinks there may even be a constitutional right to polygamy, has a controversial view we should lower the age of consent to 12, supports legalized prostitution, very left-wing."

"Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has long been a thorn in the side of American conservatives. She's been pilloried in the right-wing press by a range of so-called political experts, including college drop-out and shock jock Lars Larson, who publicly declared that Justice Ginsburg is "anti-American." Her stinging dissent in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which recently granted corporations certain exceptions to the Affordable Care Act with regard to birth control coverage, has once again loosed the gates of extreme conservative rhetoric. One columnist in The Washington Times even crowned her "liberal bully of the week" even though hers was the dissenting, not majority, opinion."

"Irony is jesting hidden behind gravity. Humor is gravity concealed behind the jest."

"The truest worship is a life; All dreaming we resign; We lay our offerings at Thy feet, — Our lives, O God, are Thine!"

"It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening."

"When it's time to die, go ahead and die, and when it's time to live, live. Don't sort-of-maybe live, but live like you're going all out, like you're not afraid."

"It was the oldest sound there was. Souls flying away."

"And I was struck all at once how life was out there going through its regular courses, and I was suspended, waiting, caught in a terrible crevice between living my life and not living it."

"We walked along the river with the words streaming behind us like ribbons in the night."

"People who think dying is the worst thing don't know a thing about life."

"Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here."

"There is nothing perfect. There is only life."

"Where had I been that I didn't know about imaginary friends? I could see the point of it. How a lost part of yourself steps out and reminds you who you could be with a little work."

"I didn't know what to think, but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up. The only thing I could compare it to was the feeling I got one time when I walked from the peach stand and saw the sun spreading across the late afternoon, setting the top of the orchard on fire while darkness collected underneath. Silence had hovered over my head, beauty multiplying in the air, the trees so transparent I felt like I could see through to something pure inside them. My chest ached then, too, this very same way."

"In a weird way I must have loved my little collection of hurts and wounds. They provided me with some real nice sympathy, with the feeling I was exceptional."

"The 'self-transcending immanence,' the sense of giving birth to ourselves, the sense of power of being within, which is being affirmed by many women, does not seem to be denoted, imaged adequately pointed to, or perhaps even associated with the term 'God'. p. 208"

"The word ‘radical’ means ‘going to the roots’. It is derived from the Latin radix, meaning root. Radical Feminism goes to the root of oppression and the way out. And I define it as “way of being characterised by (a) an Awesome and Ecstatic sense of Otherness from patriarchal norms and values (b) conscious awareness of the sadosociety’s sanctions against Radical Feminists (c) moral outrage on behalf of women as women (d) commitment to the cause of women that persists, even against the current, when feminism is no longer ‘popular’; in other words, constancy."

"To be a Radical Feminist now is to do quantum leaping. That means to act with fantastic courage because you see real hope now, not lovely little lah-didah hope (a very contained hope), but really great Hope for participation in Quintessence, which is the harmony of the universe."

"(Women's Liberation) ... is an ontological, spiritual revolution, pointing beyond the idolatries of sexist society and sparking creative action in and toward transcendence. The becoming of women implies universal human becoming. It has everything to do with the search for ultimate meaning and reality which some would call God. p. 6"

"To exist humanly is to name the self, the world, and God. The 'method' of the evolving spiritual consciousness of women is nothing less than this beginning to speak humanly - a reclaiming of the right to name. p. 8"

"The first step in the elevation of women under all systems of religion is to convince them that the great Spirit of the Universe is in no way responsible for any of these absurdities. (Stanton, quoted on p. 13)"

"'God' can be used oppressively against women in a number of ways…[one way is by an] overt manner when theologians proclaim women's subordination to be God's will. The symbol of the Father God, spawned in the human imagination and sustained as plausible by patriarchy, has in turn rendered service to this type of society by making its mechanisms for the oppression of women appear right and fitting. If God in "his" heaven is a father ruling "his" people, then it is in the "nature" of things and according to divine plan and the order of the universe that society be male-dominated."

"The correspondence between the minds of Musing women and the intelligible structures of reality is rooted in our promise, that is, our potential and commitment to evolve, unfold 'together,' in harmony with each other and with all Elemental reality. p. 163"

"I suggest that the rejection of ontological final causality ... has often really been a kind of metaphysical rebellion, even on the part of those philosophers who have been most disdainful of metaphysics. It has been an effort to overthrow the tyranny of the allegedly 'supernatural end' that seemed to block the dynamics of thought and action. But this 'block' was often a shallow and reified conception of the final cause. When those doing the rejecting have had no deep awareness of the dynamism in being, that is of the ontological force of final causality, the reified Block has not wholly disappeared. It has tended to reappear in various ways. pp. 186-187"

"It requires a kick in the imagination, a wrenching of tired words, to realize that feminism is the final and therefore the first cause, and that this movement is movement. Realization of this is already the beginning of a qualitative leap in be-ing. For the philosophers of senescence 'the final cause' is in technical reason; it is the Father's plan, an endless flow of Xerox copies of the past. But the final cause that is movement is in our imaginative-cerebral-emotional-active-creative be-ing. p. 190"

"Today, in the light of feminist philosophy of Be-ing, we are aware of the deep connection between women's becoming and the unfolding of cosmic process which some would still call 'God'. p. 18"

"The question that comes to my mind is, 'What sense does it make to assert that in Christ "There is neither male nor female"? ... But that is the point: it could not mean anything on earth, where there definitely were and are females and males and where that distinction has been overemphasized and distorted, especially in the church. p 22"

"Briefly, if God is male, then the male is God. p. 38"

"Women discovering self-actualization in sisterhood in 1975 ... rarely talk of 'partnership' with men, since this term seems to imply ... as if we could glimpse nothing more desirable than an equal slice of the patriarchal pie." p. 41"

"There is no small irony in the fact that during an age in which opinion of women was so low, some of them were, in fact, members of the hierarchy, whereas in a later and more enlightened age, when the Church itself is urging them to take a more active part in public life, they are completely excluded from the hierarchy. p. 90"

"If women's subordination were really so 'natural,' it would not be necessary to insist so strongly upon it. It would seem that people would not have to be told authoritatively to behave 'naturally. p. 116-117"

"...that dream world which is precisely the 'metaphysical world of woman,' the ideal, static woman, who is so much less troublesome than the real article... For the celibate who prefers not to be tied down to a wife, or whose canonical situation forbids marriage, the 'Mary' of his imagination could appear to be the ideal spouse. p. 161"

"Hags live. Women traveling into feminist time/space are creating Hag-ocracy, the place we govern. To govern is to steer, to pilot."

"[W]omen under phallocratic rule are confined to the role of vessels/carriers, directed and controlled by men. Since that role is the basic base reversal of the very be-ing of Voyaging/Spiraling women, when we direct our own Crafts/Vessels we become reversers of that deadly reversal."

"The … false ideal … [that is] tokenism—which is commonly guised as Equal Rights, and which yields token victories—deflects and shortcircuits gynergy, so that female power, galvanized under deceptive slogans of sisterhood, is swallowed by The Fraternity. This method of vampirizing the Female Self saps women by giving illusions of partial success while at the same time making Success appear to be a far-distant, extremely difficult to obtain "elusive objective." When the oppressed are worn out in the game of chasing the elusive shadow of Success, some "successes" are permitted to occur—"victories" which can easily be withdrawn when the victim's energies have been restored. Subsequently, women are lured into repeating efforts to regain the hard-won apparent gains.... [¶] Thus tokenism is insidiously destructive of sisterhood, for it distorts the warrior aspect of Amazon bonding both by magnifying it and by minimizing it. It magnifies the importance of "fighting back" to the extent of making it devour the transcendent be-ing of sisterhood, reducing it to a copy of comradeship. At the same time, it minimizes the Amazon warrior aspect by containing it, misdirecting and shortcircuiting the struggle."

"This is a demonically double-sided trap, for of course reforms, such as legalization of abortion, aid many women in desperate situations. However, because the "changes" that are achieved are victories in a vacuum, that is, in a totally oppressive social context, they do not essentially free the Female Self but instead function to hide both the fact of continuing oppression and the possibilities for better options and for more radical freedom.... The Labrys of the A-mazing Female Mind must cut through the coverings of these double-sided/multiple-sided situations, dis-covering the context, identifying the more radical problems, yet neglecting none."

"Hags do not haggle over "equality," for we know there is no equality among unique Selves. Noting that one definition of the term equal is "capable of meeting the requirements of a situation or a task," Jan Raymond observes that what each asks of the other is that she be equal to the task at hand.... Crones expect and en-courage each other to become sister pyrotechnists, building the fire that is fueled by Fury, the fire that warms and lights the place where we can each have a loom of our own, where we can spin and weave the tapestries of Crone-centered creation."

"As a creative crystallizing of the movement beyond the state of Patriarchal Paralysis, this book is an act of Dis-possession; and hence, in a sense beyond the limitations of the label anti-male, it is absolutely Anti-androcrat, A-mazingly Anti-male, Furiously and Finally Female."

"I hope that in its richness, as well as in its incompleteness, Gyn/Ecology will continue to be a Labrys enabling women to learn from our mistakes and our successes, and cast our Lives as far as we can go, Now, in the Be-Dazzling Nineties."

"Women who lust for wisdom become astonished/astonishing, Wondering. As Muses of our own creation, Wonderlusters re-member our Original Powers. Unlike the frozen 'philosophy' that is packaged and stored within academic refrigerators, Wonderlust moves us always. Our vehicles are often Metaphors. Our destinations are Realms of Metabeing. p. 26"

"The word Metabeing is used here to Name Realms of active participation in the Powers of Be-ing. Be-ing, the Verb, cannot without gross falsification be reified into a noun, whether that noun be identified as 'Supreme Being,' or 'God,' or 'Goddess' (singular or plural). When I choose to use such words as Goddess it is to point Metaphorically to the Powers of Be-ing, the Active Verb in whose potency all biophilic reality participates. p. 26"

"Several meanings of the word Elemental converge for the conjuring of Elemental feminist philosophy. An 'obsolete' definition is 'material, physical.' The philosophy here unfolded is material/physical as well as spiritual, mending/transcending this deceptive dichotomy. p 11"

"Physical ultimacy suggests the possibility of relations with others as well as with one's Self that are far-reaching, demanding that we stretch our physical, imaginative, psychic powers beyond the limitations that have been imposed upon them. p. 80"

"Lusty women can reclaim the name Archimage, Naming the fact that she is the Witch within our Selves. She is a verb, and she is verbal - a Namer, a Speaker- the Power within who can Name away the archetypes that block the ways/words of Metabeing. Archimage is a Metaphoric form of Naming the one and the many. She is power/powers of be-ing within women and all biophilic creatures. She points toward Metabeing, in which all Witches/Hags/Weirds participate, and in which we live, move, and have our be-ing pp. 86-87"

"The inspiring, moving reality of final causality- the centralizing force/focus within the Self and within all be-ing - is spirit-force. This becomes inaccessible, or 'out of sight,' when the spiritual/philosophical imagination is dried up and reasoning banalized, routinized, reduced to the elementary realm. p. 155"

"The symbol, God as Verb, was an essential step in my intellectual process to the Metaphor, Goddess as Verb. Often feminists try to eliminate this step, with the unfortunate result that 'The Goddess' functions as a static symbol, simply replacing the noun God. In writing Beyond God the Father, I also used the expression Power of Be-ing to refer to ultimate/ intimate reality. This emphasized the Verb, but I now think that it gives less than adequate emphasis to the multiple aspects of transcendence. I therefore now use the plural, Powers of Be-ing. ...Some feminists, with good reason, prefer to use the singular name, The Goddess. Others, also with good reasons, prefer to speak of Goddesses. Although the latter choice is motivated by understanding of the necessity for, and fact of, multiplicity and diversity in symbols/metaphors of the Goddess, there is, it seems to me, an unresolved problem, if one ignores the principle ofunity: the One. When Be-ing is understood as Verb, the focus of the discussion changes. It would be foolish to speak of 'Be-ings.' But women can and do speak of different Powers and manifestations of Be-ing, which are sometimes imaged as Goddesses. p. 423"

"The work of self-described "post-Christian" radical feminist theologian Mary Daly, author of the 1968 volume The Church and the Second Sex, convinced many Christian women's liberationists that they needed to separate from a hopelessly patriarchal church and create their own religious practices. Daly's 1973 Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation further influenced feminist spiritual seekers."

"Mary Daly gave us the origin of the words "hag" and "haggard," among many others: "hag" meaning harpy or witch, and "haggard" meaning originally "an intractable person, especially: a woman reluctant to wooing.""

"The idea that women's friendships are new is weird to me; I don't understand it. Some of our smartest, nicest women have written a lot about the newness of women's bonds, but Jesus, my mother and all those women, my aunts, they all hung out every Saturday talking and were such a comfort to one another and they stuck by each other so..Someone like Mary Daly doesn't even know how people live-but other women, I think they come from suburban lives or something like that, and no family. That's a certain kind of life but it's not general female life."

"She was a great trained philosopher, theologian and poet, and she used all of those tools to demolish patriarchy - or any idea that domination is natural - in its most defended place, which is religion."

"Daly’s work exposed the foundational misogyny in religion which continues to flourish."

"Someone like Mary Daly doesn't even know how people live-but other women, I think they come from suburban lives or something like that, and no family. That's a certain kind of life but it's not general female life."

"Her radicalism can turn off students who have never been exposed to feminist ideas. Students learn that she excluded men from her classes since she wanted her women students to feel free to speak. Even though... she would meet with male students separately, for many she seems to embody all of the stereotypes of the man-hating feminist. Her...refusal to bend to convention, and her laser-like focus on every kind of injustice to women can alienate students who are wary of feminist ideas that sound "angry." But without righteous anger, there would be no feminism. Thomas Aquinas famously argues that if one is not angered by injustice, there is something wrong. And Daly, with her classical education, would agree. Daly taught me that one cannot smooth over or excuse misogyny, that it must be exposed and named, and that one must use everything in one's power — one's intelligence, wit and, yes, anger — to overcome it."

"A small but significant number of angry and historically minded women comprehend the women's revolution in the visionary sense of an end to the catastrophic brotherhood and a return to the former glory and wise equanimity of the matriarchies. We don't know how this will take place exactly, nor the resultant nature of the new social forms, we know that it will take place, and in fact that the process of its development is now irreversibly underway. Of supreme importance in this process is the recovery by modern woman of her mythology as models for theory, consciousness, and action.... The Swiss patrician Jacob Bachofen was one of the first to discover "the female era at the lower seam of history, with its sacerdotal, political, and economic female dominion." …. The fruits of this research were until recently unavailable except to a few initiates and they now form a cornerstone of the second wave in the feminist revolution...."

"Man is completely out of phase with nature. Nature is woman. Man is the intruder. The man who re-attunes himself with nature is the man who de-mans himself or eliminates himself as man."

"Although Sikhs and Hindus do sometimes commit such murders, honor killings, both worldwide and in the West, are mainly Muslim-on-Muslim crimes. In this study, worldwide, 91 percent of perpetrators were Muslims. In North America, most killers (84 percent) were Muslims, with only a few Sikhs and even fewer Hindus perpetrating honor killings; in Europe, Muslims comprised an even larger majority at 96 percent while Sikhs were a tiny percentage. In Muslim countries, obviously almost all the perpetrators were Muslims. With only two exceptions, the victims were all members of the same religious group as their murderers."

"Most of the views that Spender attributes to me … are still my views. Some are not. For example, .... I am probably more of a feminist-anarchist than ever before; more mistrustful of the organisation of power into large bureaucratic states than I once was."

"I am not talking about illegal immigrants to Europe or North America. I am describing Muslims who are penetrating India’s West Bengal region. These Bangladeshi immigrants are becoming conduits for criminal activities (arms, drugs, and sexual slavery) which also fund global jihad. You won’t read about this in the Western mainstream media—or even in the Indian media, which has turned a blind eye to this ongoing tragedy because they are afraid to be labeled “politically incorrect” or “Islamophobic.” They are also afraid of reprisals. When Islamic zealots ransacked the office of the renowned newspaper, ‘The Statesman’ in Kolkata, in retaliation for a mere reproduction of an article condemning Islamic extremism, the Indian press remained silent. The editor and publisher of the newspaper were arrested for offending Muslim sentiments and no action was taken against the rioters."

"According to Ghosh, there has recently been a sharp increase in incidents of “Muslim rioting during Hindu festivals, destruction of Temples, desecration of Deities, and large-scale, provocative cow slaughter.” Worse: “Hundreds, thousands, of Hindu girls have been kidnapped, trafficked into sexual slavery, or taken as second or third wives for wealthy Muslim men. In recent years, Ghosh’s organization has rescued nearly 100 such girls, and one of his main missions has been to help reintegrate those survivors into their families and societies."

"If women take their bodies seriously—and ideally we should—then its full expression, in terms of pleasure, maternity, and physical strength, seems to fare better when women control the means of production and reproduction. From this point of view, it is simply not in women's interest to support patriarchy or even a fabled "equality" with men. That women do so is more a sign of powerlessness than of any biologically based "superior" wisdom."

"It is clear that women who are feminists must gradually and ultimately dominate public and social institutions—so as to ensure that they are not used against women. I say "dominate" because I don't think that "equality" or "individuality" will be possible for women who have never experienced supremacy in public institutions as men have. ... The point is to have our entire social drama played out as fully by women as by men. And it is revolutionary by definition to have women "out of the biological home," both psychologically and actually. Whatever happens after that is then a matter for . . . everyone."

"Miracles of consciousness aside, I see no way for women to defeat or transfer patriarchy without achieving power. Unlike male groups, women have little power with which to either avoid or commit violence. Women traditionally are physically weak and politically powerless in a culture that values physical strength and its extended representation in the form of weaponry and money. Women, like men, must be capable of violence or self-defense before their refusal to use violence constitutes a free and moral choice, rather than "making the best of a bad bargain." Survival is the characteristic property of power."

"To those who think I am suggesting that we have a war between the sexes, I say: but we've always had one."

"Amazon society, as mythology, history, and universal male nightmare, represents a culture in which women reign culturally supreme because of their gender. Amazon societies are also important because women were trained to be warriors—military and, presumably, in other ways as well. ... In Amazon societies, women were mothers and their society's only warriors; mothers and their society's only hunters; mothers and their society's only political and religious leaders. No division of labor based on sex seems to have existed in such societies. Although Amazon leaders existed and queens were elected, the societies seem to have been … ones in which any woman could aspire to and achieve full human expression.In Amazon society, only men, when they were allowed to remain, were, in widely differing degrees, powerless and oppressed."

"I am not saying that a female-dominated or Amazon society based on the oppression of men is any more "just" than is a male-dominated society based on the oppression of women. I am merely pointing out in what ways it is better for women.Perhaps someday a choice between forms of injustice will not be necessary."

"Should or can there be a single standard of behavior for both sexes? Is there such a thing as a biologically rooted female culture that should remain separate from male culture, partly because it is different than or superior to male culture?Women must convert their love for and reliance on strength and skill in others to a love for all manner of strength and skill in themselves."

"Women must begin to "save" themselves and their daughters before they "save" their husbands and their sons; before they "save" the whole world."

"For women not to fear rape because we can successfully defend ourselves against it is not anachronistic but revolutionary. For women to be considered as potential warriors (in every sense of the word, including its physical representation) is not anachronistic but revolutionary. If realized, it might imply a radical change in modern life. ... What would it mean for a woman to be a warrior today? How could modern women control the means of production and reproduction?"

"Women … do not have to forsake the "wisdom of the heart" and become men. They need only transfer the primary force of their supportiveness to themselves and to each other—but never to the point of self-sacrifice."

"Perhaps only some young women, perhaps only a minority of all women, will be able to effect such changes through consciousness alone, through the strength of understanding, which, if transformed into wisdom, always means the performance of necessary actions."

"[E]veryone agrees that a bitch is always a female .... It is also generally agreed that a Bitch is aggressive, and therefore unfeminine (ahem).... Bitches have some or all of the following characteristics … Bitches are aggressive, assertive, domineering, overbearing, strong-minded, spiteful, hostile, direct, blunt, candid, obnoxious, thick-skinned, hard-headed, vicious, dogmatic, competent, competitive, pushy, loud-mouthed, independent, stubborn, demanding, manipulative, egoistic, driven, achieving, overwhelming, threatening, scary, ambitious, tough, brassy, masculine, boisterous, and turbulent. Among other things.... Bitches are big, tall, strong, large, loud, brash, harsh, awkward, clumsy, sprawling, strident, ugly. Bitches move their bodies freely rather than restrain, refine and confine their motions in the proper feminine manner.... Bitches seek their identity strictly thru themselves and what they do. They are subjects, not objects … Whatever they do, they want an active role and are frequently perceived as domineering. Often they do dominate other people when roles are not available to them which more creatively sublimate their energies and utilize their capabilities. More often they are accused of domineering when doing what would be considered natural by a man."

"The most prominent characteristic of all Bitches is that they rudely violate conceptions of proper sex role behavior. They violate them in different ways, but they all violate them. Their attitudes towards themselves and other people, their goal orientations, their personal style, their appearance and way of handling their bodies, all jar people and make them feel uneasy. Sometimes it's conscious and sometimes it's not, but people generally feel uncomfortable around Bitches. They consider them aberrations. They find their style disturbing.... A Bitch is blunt, direct, arrogant, at times egoistic. She has no liking for the indirect, subtle, mysterious ways of the “eternal feminine”. She disdains the vicarious life deemed natural to women because she wants to live a life of her own. Our society has defined humanity as male, and female as something other than male. In this way, females could be human only by living vicariously thru a male. To be able to live, a woman has to agree to serve, honor, and obey a man and what she gets in exchange is at best a shadow life. Bitches refuse to serve, honor or obey anyone. They demand to be fully functioning human beings, not just shadows. They want to be both female and human. This makes them social contradictions. The mere existence of Bitches negates the idea that a woman's reality must come thru her relationship to a man and defies the belief that women are perpetual children who must always be under the guidance of another."

"A highly competent Bitch often deprecates herself by refusing to recognize her own superiority.... Bitches are among the most unsung of the unsung heroes of this society. They are the pioneers, the vanguard, the spearhead. Whether they want to be or not this is the role they serve just by their very being. Many would not choose to be the groundbreakers for the mass of women for whom they have no sisterly feelings but they cannot avoid it. Those who violate the limits, extend them; or cause the system to break.... Their major psychological oppression is not a belief that they are inferior but a belief that they are not.... Like most women they were taught to hate themselves as well as all women. In different ways and for different reasons perhaps, but the effect was similar. Internalization of a derogatory self-concept always results in a good deal of bitterness and resentment. This anger is usually either turned in on the self —making one an unpleasant person or on other women — reinforcing the social cliches about them. Only with political consciousness is it directed at the source — the social system.... We must be strong, we must be militant, we must be dangerous. We must realize that Bitch is Beautiful and that we have nothing to lose. Nothing whatsoever."

"White House adviser Kellyanne Conway: “Three magic words, ‘Believe All Women.’ I didn’t hear an asterisk; I didn’t see a footnote, ‘Believe All Women so long as they are attacking somebody aligned with President Trump, Believe All Women so long as they are — have a college degree or better or are — are for abortion in the ninth month.’” In fact, “Believe All Women” does have an asterisk: *It’s never been feminist “boilerplate.” What we are witnessing is another instance of the right decrying what it imagines the American women’s movement to be. Spend some mind-numbing hours tracking the origins of “Believe All Women” on social media sites and news databases — as I did — and you’ll discover how language, like a virus, can mutate overnight. All of a sudden, yesterday’s quotes suffer the insertion of some foreign DNA that makes them easy to weaponize. In this case, that foreign intrusion is a word: “all.”"

"The backlash is not a conspiracy, with a council dispatching agents from some central control room, nor are the people who serve its ends often aware of their role; some even consider themselves feminists. For the most part, its workings are encoded and internalized, diffuse and chameleonic. Not all of the manifestations of the backlash are of equal weight or significance, either; some are mere ephemera, generated by a culture machine that is always scrounging for a “fresh” angle. Taken as a whole, however, these codes and cajolings, these whispers and threats and myths, move overwhelmingly in one direction: they try to push women back into their “acceptable” roles — whether as Daddy's girl or fluttery romantic, active nester or passive love object."

"Although the backlash is not a movement, that doesn't make it any less destructive. In fact, the lack of orchestration, the absence of a single string-puller, only makes it harder to see — and perhaps more effective. A backlash against women's rights succeeds to the degree that it appears not to be political, that it appears not to be a struggle at all. It is most powerful when it goes private, when it lodges in a woman's mind and turns her vision inward, until she imagines the pressure is all in her head, until she begins to enforce the backlash, too — on herself."

"In the last decade, the backlash has moved through the culture's secret chambers, traveling through passageways of flattery and fear. Along the way, it has adopted disguises: a mask of mild derision or the painted face of deep “concern”. Its lips profess pity for any woman who won't fit the mold, while it tries to clamp the mold around her ears. It pursues a divide-and-conquer strategy: single versus married women, working women versus homemakers, middle- versus working-class. It manipulates a system of rewards and punishments, elevating women who follow its rules, isolating those who don't. The backlash remarkets old myths about women as new facts and ignores all appeals to reason. Cornered, it denies its own existence, points an accusatory finger at feminism, and burrows deeper underground."

"Backlash happens to be the title of a 1947 Hollywood movie in which a man frames his wife for a murder he's committed. The backlash against women's rights works in much the same way: its rhetoric charges feminists with all the crimes it perpetrates. The backlash line blames the women's movement for the “feminization of poverty” ñwhile the backlash's own instigators in Washington pushed through the budget cuts that helped impoverish millions of women, fought pay equity proposals, and undermined equal opportunity laws. The backlash line claims the women's movement cares nothing for children's rightsñwhile its own represetatives in the capital and state legislatures have blocked one bill after another to improve child care, slashed billions of dollars in federal aid for children, and relaxed state licensing standards for day care centers. The backlash line accuses the women's movement of creating a generation of unhappy single and childless womenñbut its purveyors in the media are the ones guilty of making single and childless women feel like circus freaks."

"To blame feminism for women's “lesser life” is to miss entirely the point of feminism, which is to win women a wider range of experience. Feminism remains a pretty simple concept, despite repeated — and enormously effective efforts to dress it up in greasepaint and turn its proponents into gargoyles. As Rebecca West wrote sardonically in 1913, “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: l only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.""

"The meaning of the word “feminist” has not really changed since it first appeared in a book review in the Athenaeum of April 27, 1895, describing a woman who “has in her the capacity of fighting her way back to independence.” It is the basic proposition that, as Nora put it in Ibsen's A Doll's House a century ago, “Before everything else I'm a human being.” It is the simply worded sign hoisted by a little girl in the 1970 Women's Strike for Equality: I AM NOT A BARBIE DOLL. Feminism asks the world to recognize at long last that women aren't decorative ornaments, worthy vessels, members of a “special-interest group”. They are half (in fact, now more than half) of the national population, and just as deserving of rights and opportunities, just as capable of participating in the world's events, as the other half. Feminism's agenda is basic It asks that women not be forced to “choose” between public justice and private happiness. It asks that women be free to define themselves — instead of having their identity defined for them, time and again, by their culture and their men."

"Feminist author Susan Faludi argues in the New York Times that feminists never said believe all women—you only have to believe some women. It is Ms. Faludi’s contention that "unprincipled" conservatives inserted the "all," and hung it around the necks of unsuspecting feminists. Ms. Faludi has spent mind-numbing hours in Harvard Schlesinger Library tracking this idea. Why did she embark on this tedious task? Two words: Tara Reade."

"Many women who would be shocked at the very thought of killing their children after birth, deliberately destroy them previously. If there is any difference in the actual crime, we should be glad to have those who practice the latter, point it out. The truth of the matter is that it is just as much a murder to destroy life in its embryotic condition, as it is to destroy it after the fully developed form is attained, for it is the self-same life that is taken... Can anyone suggest a better than to so situate woman, that she may never be obligated to conceive a life she does not desire shall be continuous?"

"If Congress refuse to listen to and grant what women ask, there is but one course left then to pursue. Women have no government. Men have organized a government, and they maintain it to the utter exclusion of women.... Under such glaring inconsistencies, such unwarrantable tyranny, such unscrupulous despotism, what is there left [for] women to do but to become the mothers of the future government? There is one alternative left, and we have resolved on that. This convention is for the purpose of this declaration. As surely as one year passes from this day, and this right is not fully, frankly and unequivocally considered, we shall proceed to call another convention expressly to frame a new constitution and to erect a new government, complete in all its parts and to take measures to maintain it as effectually as men do theirs. We mean treason; we mean secession, and on a thousand times grander scale than was that of the south. We are plotting revolution; we will overslough this bogus republic and plant a government of righteousness in its stead, which shall not only profess to derive its power from consent of the governed but shall do so in reality."

"The rights of children, then, as individuals, begin while yet they are in fetal life. Children do not come into existence by any will or consent of their own."

"Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere."

"Of all the horrid brutalities of our age, I know of none so horrid as those that are sanctioned and defended by marriage. Night after night, there are thousands of rapes committed, under cover of this accursed license; and millions— yes, I say it boldly, knowing whereof I speak— millions of poor, heartbroken, suffering wives are compelled to minister to the lechery of insatiable husbands, when every instinct of body and sentiment of soul revolts in loathing and disgust... The world has got to be startled from this pretense into realizing that there is nothing else now existing among pretendedly enlightened nations, except marriage, that invests men with the right to debauch women, sexually, against their wills, yet marriage is held to be synonymous with morality! I say, eternal damnation, sink such morality!"

"Every woman knows that if she were free, she would never bear an unwished-for child, nor think of murdering one before its birth."

"Promiscuity in sexuality is simply the anarchical stage of development wherein the passions rule supreme. When spirituality comes in and rescues the real man and woman from the domain of the purely material, promiscuity is simply impossible. As promiscuity is the analogue to anarchy, so is spirituality to scientific selection and adjustment. I am fully persuaded that the very highest unions are those that are monogamic, and that these are perfect in proportion as they are lasting. Sexual freedom means the abolition of prostitution, both in and out of marriage; means the emancipation of woman and her coming into ownership and control of her body; means the end of her pecuniary dependence upon man, so that she may never, even seemingly, have to procure whatever she may desire or need by sexual favor; means the abrogation of forced pregnancy, of ante-natal murder of undesired children, endowed by every inherited virtue that the highest exaltation can confer at conception, by every influence for good to be obtained during gestation, and by the wisest guidance and instruction on to manhood industrially and intellectually."

"They cannot roll back the rising tide of reform... The world moves."

"She vowed that if God gave her the strength she would resume her political campaign to overthrow the government, which was full of men not fit to be picked up out of the gutter."

"Her remedy for crime and her method of abolishing it may be comprehended in the word 'Stirpiculture,' the improvement of the human race by the application of the 'doctrine of natural selection' to the human family. She repudiated the notion that free-love, as she advocated it, meant promiscuity, and maintained that the inevitable result would be to prevent promiscuity, which was the curse of society now."

"While Woodhull's earlier radicalism had stemmed from the Christian socialism of the 1850s, for most of her life, she was involved in Spiritualism and did not use religious language in her public speeches. However, in 1875, Woodhull began publicly espousing Christianity and changed her political stances. She exposed Spiritualist frauds in her periodical, alienating her Spiritualist followers. She wrote articles against promiscuity, calling it a "curse of society". Woodhull repudiated her earlier views on free love, and began idealizing purity, motherhood, marriage, and the Bible in her writings. She even claimed that some works had been written in her name without her consent. Historians doubt Woodhull's claim in this matter."

"Worn out by harassment, suffering from anemia, constantly in need of money, Woodhull, to the dismay of her radical admirers, now retreated into biblical symbolism and rhapsodies on purity, motherhood, and the sanctity of marriage."

"Recorded history starts with a patriarchal revolution. Let it continue with the matriarchal counterrevolution that is the only hope for the survival of the human race."

"Woman's reproductive organs are far older than man's and far more highly evolved. Even in the lowest mammals, as well as in woman, the ovaries, uterus, vagina, etc., are similar, indicating that the female reproductive system was one of the first things perfected by nature. On the other hand, the male reproductive organs, the testicles and the penis, vary as much among species and through the course of evolution as does the shape of the foot — from hoof to paw. Apparently, then, the male penis evolved to suit the vagina, not the vagina to suit the penis."

"Proof that the penis is a much later development than the female vulva is found in the evidence that the male himself was a late mutation from an original female creature. For man is but an imperfect female. Geneticists and physiologists tell us that the Y chromosome that produces males is a deformed and broken X chromosome — the female chromosome. All women have two X chromosomes, while the male has one X derived from his mother and one Y from his father. It seems very logical that this small and twisted Y chromosome is a genetic error — an accident of nature, and that originally there was only one sex — the female."

"Asexual reproduction by females, parthenogenesis, is not only possible but it still occurs here and there in the modern world, pernaps as an atavistic survival of the once only means of reproduction in an all female world."

"The idea of feminine authority is so deeply embedded in the human subconscious that even after all these centuries of father-right the young child instinctively regards the mother as the supreme authority. He looks upon the father as equal with himself, equally subject to the woman's rule. Children have to be taught to love, honor, and respect the father, a task usually assumed by the mother."

"In civilized societies today … clitoris envy, or womb envy, takes subtle forms. Man's constant need to disparage woman, to humble her, to deny her equal rights, and to belittle her achievements — all are expressions of his innate envy and fear."

"… it is not men that most women worry about when they rise to the defense of the status quo. Their apparent endorsement of male supremacy is, rather, a pathetic striving for self-respect, self-justification, and self-pardon. After fifteen hundred years of subjection to men, Western woman finds it almost unbearable to face the fact that she has been hoodwinked and enslaved by her inferiors — that the master is lesser than the slave."

"The fact is that men need women more than women need men; and so, aware of this fact, man has sought to keep woman dependent upon him economically as the only method open to him of making himself necessary to her. Since in the beginning woman would not become his willing slave, he has wrought through the centuries a society in which woman must serve him if she is to survive."

"Men insist that they don't mind women succeeding so long as they retain their "femininity". Yet the qualities that men consider "feminine" timidity, submissiveness, obedience, silliness, and self-debasement — are the very qualities best guaranteed to assure the defeat of even the most gifted aspirant."

"To the "masculists" of both sexes, "femininity" implies all that men have built into the female image in the past few centuries: weakness, imbecility, dependence, masochism, unreliability, and a certain "babydoll" sexuality that is actually only a projection of male dreams. To the "feminist" of both sexes, femininity is synonymous with the eternal female principle, connoting strength, integrity, wisdom, justice, dependability, and a psychic power foreign and therefore dangerous to the plodding masculists of both sexes."

"The misnamed "feminine" woman, so admired by her creator, man — the woman who is acquiescent in her inferiority and who has swallowed man's image of her as his ordained helpmate and no more — is in reality the "masculine" woman. The truly feminine woman "cannot help burning with that inner rage that comes from having to identify with her exploiter's negative image of her," and having to conform to her persecutor's idea of femininity and its man-decreed limitations."

"Man is by nature a pragmatic materialist, a mechanic, a lover of gadgets and gadgetry; and these are the qualities that characterize the "establishment" which regulates modern society: pragmatism, materialism, mechanization, and gadgetry. Woman, on the other hand, is a practical idealist, a humanitarian with a strong sense of noblesse oblige, an altruist rather than a capitalist."

"In the new science of the twenty-first century, not physical force but spiritual force will lead the way. Mental and spiritual gifts will be more in demand than gifts of a physical nature. Extrasensory perception will take precedence over sensory perception. And in this sphere woman will again predominate. She who was revered and worshiped by early man because of her power to see the unseen will once again be the pivot—not as sex but as divine woman—about whom the next civilization will, as of old, revolve."

"While sexism hurts women most intimately, it also damages men severely."

"My mom was a housewife, and wasn't somebody that people would think of as a feminist, and when Ms. magazine came out we were incredibly inspired by it. I used to cut pictures out of it and make posters that said "Girls can do anything", and stuff like that, and my mom was inspired to work at a basement of a church doing anti-domestic violence work. Then she took me to the Solidarity Day thing, and it was the first time I had ever been in a big crowd of women yelling, and it really made me want to do it forever."

"I realized that was a pretty radical thing to do, because if you're present, you're going to be different every time. You're not going to give everybody what they want, which is the cardboard character. But you will give those five people there who get it what they want, because they'll be like, "I could totally do that." Whatever crazy shit they have in their heads. Maybe they'll realize, if she's getting away with it, maybe I can totally get away with this thing that I think is better."

"Interview Index (2000)."

"You don't necessarily have to have talent, you can just get up and do something and see where it takes you. I always tell girls who say they want to start a band but don't have any talent, well, neither do I. I mean, I can carry a tune, but anyone who picks up a bass can figure it out. You don't have to have magic unicorn powers."

"So many women have experienced horrific forms of male violence throughout their lives, and why isn't there a song about how you get depressed because of it? And you don't know what to do, and you don't know how to talk to your friends and how weird it is to be a feminist in that situation, where there's sort of the expectation that you're super-strong superwoman but you're just, like, eating pizza in your house avoiding talking about it."

"People have always had these weird things about how you have to be really good looking to be a singer. I mean, it's not like Stevie Nicks or Linda Ronstadt were dogs. It's not like this is some new thing. But there was at one point a larger variety, but now the catchphrase is "the whole package," the "American Idol" reality that you're a model first and a singer second."

"We wanted to start a magazine, and Allison Wolfe and Molly Neuman from the band Bratmobile had started a little fanzine called Riot Grrrl and we were writing little things for it. I'd always wanted to start a big magazine with really cool, smart writing in it, and I wanted to see if the other punk girls in D.C. that I was meeting were interested in that. So I called a meeting and found a space for it, and it just turned into this sort of consciousness-raising thing. I realized really quickly that a magazine wasn't the way to go. People wanted to be having shows, and teaching each other how to play music, and writing fanzines, so that started happening. It got some press attention, and girls in other places would be like "I wanna do that. I wanna start one of those.""

"Because we don't wanna assimilate to someone else's (boy) standards of what is or isn't."

"Cages. Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would have trouble going past the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon."

"Efficient exploitation requires that those exploited be relatively mobile, self-animating and self-maintaining—the more so as the work in question requires greater intelligence, attention or ingenuity. But it also requires that they not be free enough, strong enough or willful enough to resist, escape or significantly misfit the situation of exploitation."

"Efficient exploitation of “human resources” requires that the structures that refer the others’ actions to the exploiter’s ends must extend beneath the victim’s skin. The exploiter has to bring about the partial disintegration and re(mis)integration of the others’ matter, parts and properties so that as organized systems the exploited are oriented to some degree by habits, skills, schedules, values and tastes to the exploiter’s ends rather than, as they would otherwise be, to ends of their own. In particular, the manipulations which adapt the exploited to a niche in another’s economy must accomplish a great reduction of the victim’s intolerance of coercion."

"What the exploiter needs is that the will and intelligence of the victim be disengaged from the projects of resistance and escape but that they not be simply broken or destroyed. Ideally, the dis-integration and mis-integration of the victim should accomplish the detachment of the victim's will and intelligence from the victim’s own interests and their attachment to the interests of the exploiter. This will effect a displacement or dissolution of self-respect and will undermine the victim’s intolerance of coercion. With that, the situation transcends the initial paradigmatic form or structure of coercion; for if people don’t mind doing what you want them to do, then, in a sense, you can’t really be making them do it. In the limiting case, the victim’s will and intelligence are wholly transferred to a full engagement in the pursuit of the dominating person’s interests. The “problem” had been that there were two parties with divergent interests; this sort of solution (which is very elegant, as that word is used in logic) is to erase the conflict by reducing the number of interested parties to one. This radical solution can properly be called “enslavement.”"

"Men see with arrogant eyes which organize everything seen with reference to themselves and their own interests."

"Western philosophy and science have for the most part been committed to the Simplicity Theory of Truth: the simplest theory that accounts for the data is the true theory. (Theories are simplest which postulate the fewest entities, require the fewest hypotheses, generate predictions by the fewest calculations, etc.) ...If someone believes that the world is made for him to have dominion over and he is made to exploit it, he must believe that he and the world are so made that he can, at least in principle, achieve and maintain dominion over everything. But you can’t put things to use if you don’t know how they work. So he must believe that he can, at least in principle, understand everything. If the world exists for man, it must be usably intelligible, which means it must be simple enough for him to understand. A usable universe is an intelligible universe is a simple universe. ...And so it goes with the philosophy and the science of The Arrogant Eye."

"The forces of men’s material and perceptual violence mold Woman to dependence upon Man, in every meaning of 'dependence': contingent upon; conditional upon; necessitated by; defined in terms of; incomplete or unreal without; requiring the support or assistance of; being a subordinate part of; being an appurtenance to."

"If we have no intuition of ourselves as independent, unmediated beings in the world, then we cannot conceive ourselves surviving our liberation; for what our liberation will do is dissolve the structures and dismantle the mechanisms by which Woman is mediated by Man. If we cannot imagine ourselves surviving this, we certainly will not make it happen."

"While what was said [in reference to the content Frye personally removed from her Wikipedia entry] could easily be extrapolated from my work, I have never written a word linking C. S. Lewis to male prostitution before. I am not Captain Obvious from Hotels.com!"

"I want to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible."

"It's a meaningless panacea when we invent a god that can do anything and be anything… It serves as an answer to every question and an explanation for nothing."

"While many Christians claim divine revelation — some even claiming that the truth has been revealed to them in such a way that there's no possibility that they could be wrong — there's hardly any points of doctrine upon which all these purported conduits of divine revelation agree. Which means that some if not all of them are wrong. And if you want to know what's wrong with Judaism, you ask a Christian. If you want to know what's wrong with Christianity, you ask a Muslim. If you want to know what's wrong with Catholicism, or Protestantism, or Calvinism, Hypercalvinism, Neocalvinism, Southern Baptists, the Church of Christ, or the First Baptist Church of Memphis, you can go to the Second Baptist Church of Memphis or any other denomination."

"You are better than your god. You are better than your religion. So am I, so is damn near everybody on the planet. I wish you people would wake up and see this. Stop apologizing for this! [holds up The Bible] It's not the Good Book, there's nothing good about it. All it does is poison minds. All it does is make you sacrifice your humanity— the only thing that you have that is of any value— in order to sit around in deference to your gods."

"I made a list of things that I might consider sin if the concept of sin were valid:Number 1: Credulity, gullibility. I'd say that's a sin.Voluntary willful ignorance. I'd say that's a sin.Letting fear prevent you from understanding reality. I'd call that a sin.Limiting the rights and freedoms of others in order to make them abide by your standards. That's a sin.Sacrificing the mental, emotional and physical well-being of a child in deference to your religion. That's a sin.Wasting the one and only life that you know you're going to have, worrying about and working for an afterlife that somebody told you might be there. That's a sin."

"Your god isn't real. He's not moral. The Bible isn't moral. Islam isn't moral. None of these religious systems— anything that deteriorates the value of human beings, anything that hangs on to Bronze Age ideals about genocide and slavery and murder and deference to higher powers. None of those things are moral. We've graduated beyond that, and I'm sorry that we've had to drag religions kicking and screaming into the 21st century, but some of you gotta let this stuff go. You're not gonna get anywhere until you realize that it's OK not to be afraid. It's OK to say, "you know, I think slavery is wrong. I think slavery was probably always wrong. I think that you're a good person, and yeah it does sound like a crappy system.""

"A god that rewards credulity, a god that sanctions slavery, is unworthy of any kind of reverence or respect or devotion."

"And yet people ask what's the harm of religion - and we cite all these different problems with religion: the global gag-rules and things like that , the oppression of different people - but there's a bigger harm with religion, and it's the reason why I'm outspoken about it, and that's because the average feel-good Johnny-in-the-pew person who is decent and kind and loving and good to their family and generally a good person to be around has polluted their mind to the point where they are unable to take credit for their accomplishments and responsibility for their actions. They are unable to interact on an interpersonal level with the people around them, to build a community in this cooperative society where that is absolutely essential. They have got this mentality that they are worthless without God."

"A god that does not manifest in reality is indistinguishable from a god that does not exist."

"Despite people's claims to the contrary, I think that a proper application of skepticism when viewing religious claims does necessarily lead to atheism."

"Your position is ... one where there is a god who has an important message for mankind, and somehow he only reveals it to certain individuals who then write this down and thousands of years after this initial revelation, we have to rely on copies of copies of translations of copies by anonymous authors with no originals, and the textual testimony to a miracle, for example the loaves and fishes; there’s no amount of reports - anecdotal testimonial reports - that could be sufficient to justify that this event actually happened as reported. No amount. And anything that would qualify as a god would clearly understand this, and if it wanted to convey this information to people in a way that was believable, would not be relying on text to do so, and this for me is the nail in the coffin for Christianity. The god that Christians believe in is amazingly stupid if it wants to actually achieve its goal of spreading this information to humanity by relying on text; by relying on languages that die out; by relying on anecdotal testimony. That's not a pathway to truth! And anything that would qualify for a god should know this, which means either that God doesn’t exist or it doesn't care enough about those people who understand the nature of evidence to actually present it. Now which of those possibilities do you think is accurate?" ... "Why would you believe anything on faith? Faith isn't a pathway to truth. Every religion has some sort of faith, people take things on, you know, - if faith is your pathway, you can't distinguish between Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, any of these others. How is it that you use reason as a path to truth in every endeavor of your life, and then when it comes to the ‘ultimate truth’ - the most important truth - you're saying that faith is required. And how does that reflect on a god (who supposedly exists and wants you to have this information); what kind of god requires faith instead of evidence? ... I have reasonable expectations based on evidence. I have trust that has been earned. I will grant trust tentatively. I don't have faith. Faith is the excuse people give for believing something when they don't have evidence."

"Evidently god stupidly created a system where the devil wins by default. Okay, I'm gonna set up this game with you and I'm gonna give you all the chips and the chips have to voluntarily choose to come over to my side of the table. Who sets up a game like that?!"

"So basically what you're saying is you believe this to be true despite the fact that you have no evidence to support that [statement]"

"Existence is a temporal condition."

"The police [enforcement institution] is a necessary organization and [in the cases where it is corrupt and/or abusive] it’s worth reforming. The Catholic Church is not a necessary organization. It is a nonsensical organization; a bunch of fat lazy do-nothings who have been living off the public dole for centuries. The fact that they can do good, is a testament to the fact that there are good people who will do good. But the organization is corrupt, it is poison to its core and it serves no essential good purpose – no true purpose. It’s lie after lie, promoting harm to real people and you can sit there and engage in histrionics and yelling at yourself [while] on-hold all you want, but the Catholic Church is not a force for good and fuck you for saying so."

"I don't think it's an accurate definition of morality."

"Is there anything that one couldn't believe based on faith?"

"You could kill me right now and I will be permanently dead, and I would willing do that if would end world hunger and poverty. That's a sacrifice! Saying I'm gonna let some people beat me and torture me and kill me, and a day and a half I'm gonna rise up and become what I was before, (...) That's not a sacrifice, that's a bad weekend!"

"No no no no no! No! You're done!"

"When I first appeared, people couldn't figure out whether I was gay, straight, black, white or whatever, and I loved that. I loved the fact it scares people."

"Once you figure out what respect tastes like, it tastes better than attention. But you have to get there."

"I’ve always felt that animals are the purest spirits in the world. They don’t fake or hide their feelings, and they are the most loyal creatures on Earth. And somehow we humans think we’re smarter—what a joke. Every time I had to do a report or a debate in school, I would research the topic of animal rights. I was horrified to find the cruelty and pain that they were forced to endure at our hands. … I aspire to have a lot of land one day, where I will rescue and board many animals."

"That's when you can build a bridge of light. That's what turns the wrong so right. That's when you can't give up the fight.That's when love turns nighttime into day. That's when loneliness goes away. That's when you gotta be strong tonight. Only love can build us a bridge of light."

"When I'm happy I am sad, but everything's good It's not that complicated, I'm just misunderstood."

"Everyday I fight a war against the mirror. I can't take the person starin' back at me. I'm a hazard to myself.Don't let me get me. I'm my own worst enemy. Its bad when you annoy yourself, So irritating. Don't wanna be my friend no more. I wanna be somebody else. I wanna be somebody else, yeah."

"I can't stay on your life support, there's a shortage in the switch. I can't stay on your morphine, cuz its making me itch. I said I tried to call the nurse again but she's bein' a little bitch. I think I'll get outta here, where I canRun, just as fast as I can, To the middle of nowhere, To the middle of my frustrated fears. And I swear, you're just like a pill. Instead of makin' me better, you keep makin' me ill. You keep makin' me ill."

"Get this party started on a Saturday night, Everybody's waitin' for me to arrive. Sendin' out the message to all of my friends, We'll be lookin' flashy in my Mercedes Benz. I got lotsa style, got my gold diamond rings, I can go for miles if you know what I mean. I'm comin' up so you better you better get this party started. I'm comin' up so you better you better get this party started."

"You fight about money, 'bout me and my brother. And this I come home to, this is my shelter. It ain't easy growin' up in World War III, Never knowin what love could be, you'll see. I don't want love to destroy me like it has done my family."

"No attorneys To plead my case. No orbits To send me into outta space. And my fingers Are bejeweled With diamonds and gold. But that ain't gonna help me now."

"I've been the girl with her skirt pulled high, Been the outcast never running with mascara eyes. I see the world as a candy store With a cigarette smile saying things you can't ignore."

"Why was I the last to know That you weren't coming to my show? You coulda called me up to say good luck, You coulda called me back, you stupid fuck."

"How many times have you sat across from me? And how many times have you told me you were leaving? I'm not trying to listen cuz it's all the same. And why, why are you constantly believing That I, I could ever give you what you needed? Baby, baby please don't put your faith in me."

"Maybe if I act like that, that guy will call me back. What a Paparazzi girl, I don't wanna be a stupid girl. Baby if I act like that, flipping my blond hair back, Push up my bra like that. I don't wanna be a stupid girl."

"If someone said three years from now You'd be long gone, I'd stand up and punch them up, Cause they're all wrong. I know better, 'Cause you said forever, And ever. Who knew."

"Baby, Oh the secret's safe with me. There's nowhere else in the world that I could ever be. And baby don't it feel like I'm all alone? Who's gonna be there after the last angel has flown And I've lost my way back home? I think nobody knows, no. I said nobody knows. Nobody cares.It's win or lose, not how you play the game. And the road to darkness has a way Of always knowing my name. But I think nobody knows, No no. Nobody knows, no no no no."

"Dear Mr. President, Come take a walk with me. Let's pretend we're just two people And you're not better than me. I'd like to ask you some questions If we can speak honestly.What do you feel when you see All the homeless on the street? Who do you pray for at night Before you go to sleep? What do you feel When you look in the mirror? Are you proud?"

"Go away, Give me a chance to miss you. Say goodbye, It'll make me want to kiss you. I love you so Much more when you're not here, Watchin all the bad shows, Drinking all of my beer.I don't believe Adam and Eve Spent every goddamn day together. If you give me some room, there will be room enough for two."

"I'm not here for your entertainment. You don't really want to mess with me tonight. Just stop and take a second. I was fine before you walked into my life. 'Cause you know it's over Before it began. Keep your drink, just give me the money. It's just you and your hand tonight."

"So, so what? I'm still a rock star, I got my rock moves, And I don't need you. And guess what, I'm having more fun. And now that were done, I'm gonna show you tonight I'm alright, I'm just fine. And you're a tool. So, so what? I am a rock star, I got my rock moves. And I don't want you tonight."

"I'm safe, Up high. Nothing can touch me. But why do I feel this party's over? No pain, Inside. You're like protection. How do I feel this good sober?"

"I don't wanna be the girl who has to fill the silence; The quiet scares me 'cause it screams the truth."

"No I don't believe you When you say don't come around here no more. I want to remind you, You said we wouldn't be apart. No, I don't believe you When you say you don't need me anymore. So don't pretend To not love me at all."

"How did I become so obnoxious? What is it with you that makes me act like this? I've never been this nasty. Can't you tell that this is just a contest?,br>The one that wins will be the one that hits the hardest. But baby I don't mean it. I mean it, I promise."

"Alright sir, Sure I'll have another one, it's early. Three olives, shake it up, I like it dirty (dirty). Tequila for my friend it makes her flirty (flirty). Trust me. I'm the instigator of underwear, Showing up here and there uh oh (oh no). I'm always on a mission from the get go. So what if it's only 1 o'clock in the afternoon? It's never too soon to send out all the invitations to the last night (of your life)."

"This used to be a funhouse, But now it's full of evil clowns. It's time to start the countdown. I'm gonna burn it down down down; I'm gonna burn it down."

"Have you ever fed a lover With just your hands? Close your eyes and trust it, just trust it. Have you ever thrown A fist full of glitter in the air? Have you ever looked fear in the face, And said I just don't care?"

"So raise your glass if you are wrong in all the right ways, All my underdogs. We will never be, never be anything but loud And "Nitty-Gritty", Dirty little freaks. Won't you come and come and Raise your glass! Just come on and come on and Raise your glass."

"Pretty pretty please, Don't you ever ever feel Like you're less than Fuckin' perfect? Pretty pretty please, If you ever ever feel Like you're nothing, You're fuckin' perfect to me."

"I think I've finally had enough; I think I maybe think too much. I think this might be it for us (blow me one last kiss). You think I'm just too serious; I think you're full of shit. My head is spinning so (blow me one last kiss). Just when I think it can't get worse, I've had a shit day (no!) You've had a shit day (no!) We've had a shit day (no!). I think that life's too short for this; I'll pack my ignorance and bliss. I think I've had enough of this. Blow me (one last kiss)."

"Where there is desire, There is gonna be a flame. Where there is a flame, Someone’s bound to get burned. But just because it burns Doesn’t mean you’re gonna die. You’ve gotta get up and try, try, try."

"Just give me a reason, Just a little bit's enough. Just a second we're not broken just bent And we can learn to love again. It's in the stars; It's been written in the scars on our hearts. We're not broken just bent, And we can learn to love again."

"True love, true love. It must be true love. Nothing else can break my heart like True love, true love. It must be true love. No one else can break my heart like you."

"One step, two steps, counting tiles on the floor; Three steps, four steps, guess this means that I'm a whore. Uh-oh, hell no, how long till I reach the door? Fuck me, my feet are sore.I'm wearing last night's dress and I look like a hot ass mess. Although my hair looks good cause I haven't slept yet!"

"I want every girl in the world to pick up a guitar and start screaming."

"I've always been provocative toward guys like that. They're lame, and they make it not fun for nerdy guys and nerdy girls and uncool people. They're like these self-righteous jock pricks up at the front, and they come there just to razz you— to tell you that they have a boner, or that they want to see your tits, or that you're ugly, or that you're a whore or something. They're ridiculous."

"If I fuckin' die without having written two, three, or four brilliant rock songs... I don't know why I lived my life."

"I try to place [beautiful imagery] next to fucked up imagery, because that's how I view things … I sometimes feel that no one's taken the time to write about certain things in rock, that there's a certain female point of view that's never been given space."

"Writing songs has a lot to do with your sexuality. I danced for awhile and just being around that made me realize what people use. And if you grow up blessed with a certain beauty or a certain intelligence that enhances your beauty, you can get into a better position in life."

"The American male runs half of the global world and grows up on rock music from day one. If you can alter the psyche of someone who's growing up to be a rapist or a total misogynist, you're creating values and instead of making the void bigger, you're making it smaller."

"You know what? I was doing Loveline on KROQ, and Lydia [Lunch] sent this fax in that said like, “You’ll never be smarter than me. Stop trying to copy me." So I read it out over the air and I said, "Lydia, I’ve been copying you since I fucking heard of you. You’re the best thing on the planet. I give you more tribute than anybody else and I love you and I wish you wouldn’t be so mad at me. And, Lydia, if there’s anything I can do for you – if there’s any philosophical, tax deductible thing that I can contribute to – you know how to get in touch with me.""

"Don’t eat cheese. There are a million things to eat that are not cheese."

"Does that make you happy, Mr. Rock & Roll Fantasy? You know what? Eddie Vedder’s gonna live to be 98. How’s that make you feel, huh? I love you, come back. You come back! You love us. You love me, don’t you? You love Frances. Where are you? Are you happier now?"

"[Internet forums are] kind of fun and stuff, but what's really weird is how they fucking give such a shit about how I'm spelling. It's like, what, I worked to be a clerical worker? I didn't take typing class, assholes."

"My thing is 'Don't fuck with me.' In real life, real real life, I'm supersensitive, but people tend to think I'm not vulnerable because I don't act vulnerable."

"My goal keeps me alive, and no personal issue is going to interfere with that. If people try to put me in the crazy box–'crazy fucking Courtney'–go ahead. But if you think you’re going to stop me from where I’m going, you’re not going to do it. I work my ass off. I deliver the goddamn goods. And I will deliver them again."

"I didn't ever really talk until I started hanging out in '80 or '81 with the drag queens at the Metropolis [or Met, a gay new wave club] in Portland. I was very, very quiet. So much so that at one point when I was very young I was diagnosed as a probable autistic. And then I started hanging around with bitchy drag queens and with [my friends] Ursula and Robin, and they basically raised me. I found my inner bitch and I ran with her."

"With me and Kurt, it was either Bonnie and Clyde, Sid and Nancy, or mommy. That's where it got at the end, but the rest of the time it was equal. The equality was based on Bonnie and Clyde, which is fucking goddamn fun. And Romeo and Juliet. But it was also Hamlet and Hamlet. Not Hamlet and Ophelia. These two fucking Hamlets sitting around."

"Imagine this: You're peaking. You're in you youth. At the prime of your life. The last thing you want to be is a symbol of heroin use. You've finally met somebody of the opposite gender who you can write with. That's never happened before in your life. The only other person you could ever write with wasn't as good a writer as you, and this person's a better writer than you. And you're in love, you have a best friend, you have a soul-fucking-mate, and you can't even believe it's happening in your lifetime. And as a bonus he's beautiful. And he's rich. And he's a hot rock star to boot. And he's the best fuck that ever walked. And he wants to have babies, and what you want is babies. You've wanted to have babies forever. And he understands everything you say. And he completes your sentences. And he's lazy, but is spiritual, and he's not embarrassed about praying, he's not embarrassed about God, Jesus, none of it. He fucking thinks it's all really cool. He wants to fucking learn the path. He wants to be enlightened. Everything. And there's even some room for you to fix him, which you like, 'cause you're a fixer-upper. He's perfect in almost every fucking way. The only fucking happiness that I ever had. And then it all gets taken away."

"I punched out Kathleen Hanna... Sonic Youth brought her. I punched her, and she screamed, "I'll take you on, any college in America, any feminist debate," and I said, "But Kathleen, that means you're going to have to read!""

"I wore a dress that was so restricting and shoes that were five inches high, I could barely stage-dive. Then I got the best write-ups, for being feminine, I guess. I couldn’t move well and I was restrained, which equals great review. That’s pretty horrid."

"I used to see media on Althea [Flynt] and she was very wild looking. She had a mohawk and she published Hustler—I thought that was crazy. But when you study her, she was so innocent and frail and sort of birdlike, and sweet. She stayed sweet until she died, but I don't know what happened for her to get into drugs or the things she got into."

"The deal with fashion is that proletariat male rock critics have a real Bruce Springsteen problem with denim boomer issues. We as females have thousands and thousands of years of fashion in our DNA. We want to wear nice fucking clothes—it's part of what we do, so I don't have an issue with it. If you have an opportunity to go to the Oscars in a fabulous gown, you're gonna fucking take it. I don't have to listen to a rule. Who made that rule? Some dumb guy."

"Without the benefit of history, there was no way you could be in the middle of all that and understand what it was like. To be a couple that persecuted, and to be such weak people, so frail and reactive, huddling together because the whole world is going [she makes a sound like a bomb going off]. You’ve got your own team, the sectarian left, splintering off and pointing accusing fingers. We’re fucking picking nits off Eddie Vedder and Eddie Vedder is trying to take on the constitution, and the whole fucking world is damning me to the stake. It was insanity. So in reaction to that, I made a record about it."

"Releasing those songs into the void, and not having the void answer back, led all of us to splinter off and attempt to make our mark by deconstructing. Instead of going forward with my tunesmithing, I went back to the beginning. And that’s what Pretty on the Inside was about. I said, ‘I’m not going to follow any of the songwriting values that I’ve been learning for a good seven years. Instead, I’m going to set up on my own land and make my own stake, and see where it goes.’ And the next place that takes me is Seattle, where what was happening was so heavy, and so intense."

"Even though I now feel more confident and happy, I was really paranoid for about a year and a half. Basically, what happened was that I quit taking drugs and I walked out into the world and was sort of in this film that was really well received. So, after years of living a more destructive lifestyle, I had to, instantly, kind of court this world which had incredibly nice value systems, but with protocols that I had never encountered before. And then I had to reconcile these two worlds. You know—I want to live a happier, more productive lifestyle, but the question was, did I want to renounce being in a great rock ’n’ roll band for that? The answer was ‘No way.’"

"Do you remember when you were young, and you’d stare at someone on-stage and think ‘Oh my God—he looked right at me?’ I do, so I have this kind of rescue-fantasy thing. When I see kids in the audience I think, ‘Okay, that’s me, and it would be kind of cool if the person on-stage would come down and save me.’ I’m not going to be able to save every one of them, but I’ll do my best, because I genuinely like kids. If I didn’t have my lust for my art, I probably would have ended up working with them."

"Since I’ve basically been giving my music away for free under the old system, I’m not afraid of wireless, MP3 files or any of the other threats to my copyrights. Anything that makes my music more available to more people is great. MP3 files sound cruddy, but a well-made album sounds great. And I don’t care what anyone says about digital recordings. At this point they are good for dance music, but try listening to a warm guitar tone on them. They suck for what I do. … I’m looking for people to help connect me to more fans, because I believe fans will leave a tip based on the enjoyment and service I provide. I’m not scared of them getting a preview. It really is going to be a global village where a billion people have access to one artist and a billion people can leave a tip if they want to. It’s a radical democratization. Every artist has access to every fan and every fan has access to every artist, and the people who direct fans to those artists. People that give advice and technical value are the people we need. People crowding the distribution pipe and trying to ignore fans and artists have no value. This is a perfect system."

"My brother, Toby, is six-foot-six, [and] he [went to] Vassar; my other brother, Brown; my sister, without one penny from me or my [step]dad, NYU Law, number one in her class—Jesus, it's such a functional family, I don't know where I came from."

"[Crack] used to be called freebase when white rich people did it. Then it got sold in batches, and white rich people were still doing it, and it was still called freebase. And then all of a sudden this guy named Ricky Freeway Ross started making it and he happened to be black, and— everything is political— and, then it turned into "crack.""

"I'm all for putting money back into the black community, who white people have been stealing from for years."

"We choose convenience over individuality every time—every time."

"I finally learned from Fred Durst, who is [of] my generation, that "selling out" means every ticket at The Forum got sold. I don't think Britney [Spears] and Christina [Aguilera] sit there agonizing over their record sales. The [term] "sell out" needs to be eradicated from the language, because if you don't "sell out," guess what? An asshole will."

"I'll always prefer to play with women and hang out with women, and I'll always be a feminist. But let me tell you something. Gloria Steinem never helped me out; Larry Flynt did."

"Look, you've got these highly intelligent imperious girls, but who told them it was their undeniable American right not to be offended? Being offended is part of being in the real world. I'm offended every time I see George Bush on TV! And, frankly, it wasn't very good music."

"I love being around people that are smarter than me, that think faster than me. So even if you're a dork, and you wear stupid clothes, and you make a fool of yourself, and everyone makes fun of you, and you're just an idiot—I don't care about the context. I don't care. If you're genius and I recognize it, I kind of dig that."

"I do remember not having good social skills [as a child], although I learned them later. I learned them from hanging out at a gay disco, learning them from drag queens; and I learned them in Liverpool, and I learned them in juvenile hall. So, I learned [my social skills] from future criminals, drag queens, and rock stars."

"I didn't know it was such a guy's job. It's like playing football in high heels and lipstick; no wonder it smears."

"When I post, I forget I’m famous. It’s a really bad thing."

"I never expected I would be connected to the Alpha male as some kind of ancillary object, and to this day it mystifies me."

"After what I've been through, I'd rather die than take drugs again."

"I started chanting when I was living on Hollywood Boulevard, working as a stripper. Within six months, I got my first million dollars and I didn’t have to strip for bucks any more. Then I met Kurt and we still chanted, but we did a lot of drugs together."

"Someone once said that Nirvana attracted everybody that had ever been through a broken home... my niche is a lot more specific: It's a lot of females, and a lot of gay guys, and a few advanced and evolved heterosexual men—not many, but there's a few out there."

"I don't know why I ever succumbed to any of it... [but] I liked the rush of going under. It's such a high—it's like dying. I die, but then I come out prettier."

"When I was fourteen, I was so bloody ugly and I thought I was Kate Moss. I chased this guy named Mark Rennie, who was the hottest photographer in Portland, around, convinced him to [take pictures of me]. I had this big schnoz, I had blusher on, I'm wearing white gloves, and I [was] making new wave faces, and, like, voguing... there was a gap in my teeth, and I was 180 pounds. So if someone calls me ugly, it sort of rolls off my back because it's not about looks, it's about attitude—you get laid on attitude."

"I don’t like coming to Seattle much. I talked to [[w:Chris Cornell|[Chris] Cornell]] about it not that long ago. And Jerry Cantrell. None of us like it. It is beautiful, objectively. The arboretum is great. But it freaks me out for obvious reasons. I didn’t really live there. I lived behind a gate. I would try to go up to [Pike Place] Market. My big expedition would be Urban Outfitters and the yoga store."

"America's Sweetheart was my one true piece of shit. It has no cohesive thread. I just hate it."

"It’s been twenty years—we didn’t even talk at [Kurt's] funeral. None of us. And so, twenty years of me getting Yoko-bashed, and Dave bashing, and me bashing and making it worse, all that shit. The legal stuff, the trial. We just buried it. It was really deep. It brings tears to my eyes to even talk about it."

"If I see a chick playing guitar, I’m drawn to that band immediately. I want to know everything, even if it’s completely electronic. But you have to really get my attention if you’re male. I can’t help it. It’s part of my nature."

"When my looks are shot—which I reckon will be in about six years—I’ll have plastic surgery here on my chin, and they can pull my cheeks back, but I’m not ready for that. And because of the smoking, the mouth is starting to give."

"I’ve protected it [the Nirvana catalogue] from everything from Kentucky Fried Chicken commercials to movies about board games. We’ve been offered $6 million for 18 seconds of one Nirvana song and I turned it down."

"I am a feminist and I’ve always thought of myself as a feminist. What I don’t like about feminism and the far left in general is the in-fighting, the way that the far left in-fights too much to get anything done and I feel like in feminism it’s like, ‘well, she’s not really feminist enough’ and there can be this kind of less-than thing in feminism. And also I think there’s a biological paradigm between men and women where men are just men and women are just women, and there is something to be said about that. But at the same time, I think equality amongst the sexes is critical."

"I always said I’d never go to New York until someone pays me—because I’ve seen people come back from New York like desiccated, broken… New York is a tough place if you’re coming out of Port Authority or from Oregon, and they were paying me 356 dollars a day to be on the set [of Sid and Nancy] so that was really wonderful. Then I did Straight To Hell which went straight to video (but) then Andy Warhol noticed me from those two films. Then I got to be in Interview magazine and I got this little measure of celebrity, but with no money (laughs) that sucks… (but) it feels great if you’ve been wanting it. A lot of people like to say, ‘oh I didn’t ask for this, it just happened. I’m the luckiest guy in the world…’ I always wanted it."

"I always took myself really seriously... but sometimes I’d be at a venue and the guy would call me ‘sweetie’ or ‘honey’ when we were doing drums and stuff. I’d carry the drums in myself so people wouldn’t say I was a bitch. I went very briefly to an engineering school, so I knew the difference between white noise and pink noise and what a view meter was, and a logs player and things like that. I didn’t need to know but it came in handy when I was sitting with Steve Albini like ‘really? Is that a good logs player?’ I barely know what it is, but I learned "Smoke On The Water" so I could go to Guitar Center and play that and not have guys look at me. It was a different time—I think girls get taken a lot more seriously now."

"LA is easier. People have garages. And then as you go up the coast, in Washington and Oregon people have bigger houses and bigger garages, and people have parents."

"When I was a teenage whore My mother asked me, she said, "Baby, what for?""

"Without, without a doubt Come on and let me out Hey, where the fuck were you when my lights went out?"

"Sister ectoplasma she's incredulous Just like a pro she takes off her dress And she kicks you down in her snow white pumps Just remember it was me who found the lumps"

"Don't blush when I rip you open."

"Slutkiss girls, won't you promise her smack? Is she pretty on the inside? Is she pretty from the back? Slutkiss girls, won't you water her rack? Is she pretty on the inside? Is she pretty from the back? Slutkiss girl, molasses, rot blackstrap Is she rotten on the inside Is she ugly, ugly from the back?"

"And the sky was all violet I want it again, but violent, more violent I'm the one with no soul One above and one below"

"I am the girl you know, can't look you in the eye I am the girl you know so sick I cannot try I am the one you want, can't look you in the eye I am the girl you know, I lie and lie and lie"

"He shakes his dead rattle Spittle on his bib And I don't do the dishes I throw them in the crib"

"Every time that I sell myself to you I feel a little bit cheaper than I need to I will tear the petals off of you Rose red, I will make you tell the truth"

"I want to be the girl with the most cake He only loves those things because he loves to see them break I fake it so real, I am beyond fake And someday you will ache like I ache Someday you will ache like I ache"

"I've got a blister from touching everything I see The abyss opens up It steals everything from me"

"I want my baby Where is my baby? I want my baby Where is my baby?"

"Oh, make me over I'm all I wanna be A walking study In demonology"

"Crash and burn All the stars explode tonight How'd you get so desperate? How'd you stay alive?"

"Love hangs herself with the bedsheets in her cell Threw myself on fires for you Ten good reasons to stay alive Ten good reasons that I can't find"

"And I wait staring at the Northern Star I'm afraid it won't lead you very far He's so cold, he will win the world tonight All the angels kneel into the frozen lights Feel their hearts they're cold and white"

"In your endless summer night I'll be on the other side When you're beautiful and dying All the world that you've denied When the water is too deep You can close your eyes and really sleep tonight Tonight"

"Hush your highness, don't you breathe No, baby, hold me in your arms, I'm shivering But what's all this for? If I was the battle, baby, you have won the war"

"The devil's driving my car tonight, and he's drunk He's pissed, he's mad I don't care which of you he fucks up"

"You should've loved me baby When redemption's too blind Nature took my soul And sin left a scar so wide Time ravaged my body And now I live in the house Where the red light's always on"

"Asphyxiate all your pain away Don't try to win; it will only end in disgrace Translucetize the cold light of day It's glorious, its terrible, God I need it It's beautiful, it's ravenous; I'll just feed it Coil down to your black dark decay And I will dig my own grave now I'm miss begotten I am the last one you save here It's all gone rotten"

"And they're coming to take me away now What I want I will never have I'm on the Pacific Coast Highway With your gun in my hands"

"People like you fuck people like me In order to avoid agony People like you fuck people like me In order to avoid suffering People like you fuck people like me Fuck people like you Fuck people like me Fuck people like you Fuck people like me Fuck people like you"

"So you think that you could save him, And we know that someone died. Oh, an unkindness of ravens, And we know that Mary lied"

"And I don't care what it takes my friend I will never go hungry, go hungry again Oh, and I don't care what I have to pretend I will never go hungry, go hungry again And the phoenix she rises, she is sure to descend She will never go hungry, go hungry again And you're looking to me more and more like a godsend We will never go hungry, go hungry again And we owe each other nothing, there's no one left here to offend We will never go hungry, go hungry again"

"It's my lie and I believe in it It's my lie and I wanted it It's my bed and I'll bleed in it It's my bed, and I'll lie And I sit on the corner And I drink drown soda I wanna bomb the whole state of Minnesota"

"You want retreat, filthy and deep A dead moon, a drunken sleep Baby, there is a room full of death and whores and truth And I am waiting in that room And I am waiting in there for you It's all hoarse, it's all pain It's all disease, man, it's all the same My little Judas, my little twin Where you start, that's where I begin"

"You look good in my dress I'll get your friends to clean the mess You look good in my clothes I can feel you where the doctor goes"

"She spent twenty years like a virus They want to burn the witches inside us Well, yeah, you don't fuck with the Fabulous Four Or you'll spend the rest of your life picking things up off the floor Oh baby, dry your dirty eyes My water breaks like turpentine"

"Hi. We're Hole. As in "asshole.""

"Why do guys get to take off their shirts and we don't?"

"Why did you pay twenty dollars to sit in the front row and tell me I suck? And you're a girl. That's stupid."

"Hi. Kiss my ass. We're Pearl Jam."

"On three, I want you to say "bitch" really loud. One, two, three, "bitch!""

"Is this the anti-gay state? Aren't you the people that voted on the anti-gay thing?"

"After the suicide of her husband, Kurt Cobain, 10 months ago, Courtney Love acquired a strange distinction reserved for Presidents, major felons and celebrity widows: every word she said and wrote became newsworthy. Her postings on the computer bulletin board America Online were repeated word for word in magazines; her arrests, scandals and the drug overdose of the bassist in her band, Hole, made national headlines ... People have trouble accepting Ms. Love because in her odd way she fits the classic model of the controversial celebrity. She is both fan and star, heroine and villainess, celebrity and pest, sex symbol and homely urchin, critical darling and tabloid pariah."

"Whatever you say about Courtney, you can also say the opposite. She's a walking Greek tragedy, and a comedy. She's horrible and great, inspiring and frightening, strong and weak. She's a role model – and everything you wouldn't want your child to be."

"She's always made it very clear that she needs to work with other musicians, and I certainly don't think that makes Courtney a bad one, because she can't do absolutely everything on her own... Whenever you have a woman who is threatening or unapologetic about her attitudes, I think you'll always have detractors who want to pull that person down... I think until somebody comes along who can do it better than she can, Courtney's still going to be around."

"If she can bring all of that—from that journey from literally the depths of hell, all the way back to the surface of, like "I have value"—that is an incredible, symbolic journey. If people can't get beyond their own preconceptions, they're missing the point. You have to go down to hell to come back up to make that journey. Most motherfuckers won't step two feet out the door, and sit in very deep judgment of those who do go there."

"I was seventeen when I first heard [Pretty on the Inside]... For me, the thing that I loved about [Hole] and [Courtney Love] was the anger, and aggressiveness, along with the tender side. That was something I hadn't seen before in a woman playing music. That was hugely influential and really inspiring. Women up 'til then were kind of one-dimensional, twee, sweet, ethereal, and that annoys the shit out of me."

"I never did theatre or took classes, which I think has helped me. I just had instincts and they were right. My parents were the exact opposite of stage parents. They did everything in their power to keep it from happening. But it was going to happen no matter what. I was like, "Thanks for raising me, but I'm going to take it from here.""

"I've always studied people and been fascinated by their reactions and feelings. And I think that's the best acting class you can take - watching real people, listening to them and studying them."

"I always knew that I was going to be famous. I honest to God don't know how else to describe it. I used to lie in bed and wonder, "Am I going to be a local TV person? Am I going to a motivational speaker?" It wasn't a vision. But as it's kind of happening, you have this buried understanding: "Of course.""

"“It breaks my heart because America had the choice between a woman and a dangerous, dangerous jar of mayonnaise. And they were like, Well, we can’t have a woman. Let’s go with the jar of mayonnaise.”"

"I remember when I was doing Hunger Games, nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie because it wouldn't work, we were told. Girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead."

"Success doesn't mean you're allowed to work less and treat people like shit."

"Everything that we think comes across in our eyes. Our eyes really are the windows to our souls, and that's why at least I can tell when somebody doesn't mean what they're saying - if you just look at them in the eye."

"“Don’t worry about unkind people. That could be a good motto because you come across people like that throughout your life.”"

"It's just so bizarre in this world; if you have asthma, you take asthma medicine. If you have diabetes, you take diabetes medicine, but as soon as you have to take medication for your mind it's... there's such a stigma behind it."

"“Be strong. Don't be a follower, and always do the right thing. If you have a choice between the right thing and the wrong thing, the right way is always the less stressful.”"

"If you have the choice between the right thing and the wrong thing, the right way is always less stressful."

"The media needs to take responsibility for the effect that it has on our younger generation, on these girls who are watching these television shows, and picking up how to talk and how to be cool,"

"Strive For Strength and Health"

"“You have a choice. You don’t have to be a person who spreads negativity and lies for a living. Let’s just make that choice and—it feels better.”"

"If you are going to do something that you have to lie about, don't do it, it's very simple."

"I've worked with some amazing actors, and I've never seen anyone with more raw talent. There's a reservoir of emotional power in her that's sort of stunning."

"I believe that people do their best work when they're loose - and she's very loose. She'd be on the set telling jokes and horsing around, and then she'd go into a scene and blow the roof off it. She truly inhabits every moment."

"A metaphor is a word used in an unfamiliar context to give us a new insight; a good metaphor moves us to see our ordinary world in an extraordinary way."

"We do not “look” at something or someone; we “eat” it: we are like “cannibals” consuming the world for our own benefit. “The only people who have any hope of salvation are those who occasionally stop and look for a time, instead of eating.” Here we have Weil’s version of changing from a position of egocentrism to egolessness. … Weil is claiming that it all starts with paying attention to the other—any other—as the way to form our appropriate stance toward the world and all its creatures. Her essay titled “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God” joins what appear to be opposites—a child’s concentration on working on a math problem and training for loving God. From her own earliest days, she saw the value of studying math and science, disciplines that demanded an openness and patience to a subject outside of oneself and whose truth did not rest with one’s own interpretation."

"Your greatest strength, Ray, and possibly your only strength, is in pretending that you don't understand simple things."

"I would say the better part of my family identifies as Mormon or they identify as Christian – not that that’s a different thing because all of them identify as Christian because they all think that Mormon is Christian, just like every Mormon seemingly does. It is just other denominations that don’t think Mormons are Christians, just like they don’t think Catholics are Christian. This was an advantage for me growing up. I got to see the interdenominational bigotry within Christianity."

"As a little child, I remember having conflicts with other people over religion at 5-years-old, at 8-years-old, and without realising it. Certainly, not realising my whole life would be this whole argument. I would ask simple questions to my babysitter when I was a little boy, like, “How does Jesus turn water into wine? I know water is H2O. I know that wine is alcohol and fruit juice, and I don’t know what the chemical components of that are.” But as it turned out, when I grew up I looked it up. It is only the difference of a carbon atom. The molecules are much more complex. But they involve oxygen, hydrogen, and some additional carbons. That’s it. But all I knew at the time, water is H2O, and alcohol and fruit juice are something else. How does Jesus turn water from H2O into H2O and whatever else? I thought someone would give me some kind of intelligible answer. Like how Jesus does that, whether he uses telekinesis or whatever he does... But they don’t come up with explanations like that, they didn’t want explanations. They didn’t even want to believe people had explanations. When I was growing up, I found believers not only hated accurate scientific answers, but they hated any answer that sounded scientific. It was a funny thing. I was told all of the time that “sceptics were cynics” because we miss out on the big picture that only the believers can see."

"People that make up stuff and call it truth have the power to imagine all kinds of nonsense. But that’s what it is all about. It really is make believe, and it took me the longest time to figure that out. I thought, honestly, naively, even into middle age. I was in my 30s before I realised there were some people who do not believe what they do for a reason."

"If you believe in God, if you believe in miracles, then you believe in magic. You believe in magic. People argue against that all of the time, but that’s actually true. If you look up a collection of dictionaries, online it is easy to do. Open up a bunch of them, and see where they all agree, find the points in the context where all of the dictionaries agree. You will discover that if you compare the definitions between a miracle and magic, you will see that they are both the ‘evocation of supernatural forces or entities to control or forecast natural events in ways which are inexplicable by science because they defy the laws of physics, meaning they are physically impossible.’ That’s what both miracle and magic mean. So miracle is the same things as magic in the same way a boat is a yacht is if it is big enough."

"“Let’s think hypothetically”, I said to someone, which is another thing the believers can’t really do, because that is kind of what they’re already doing. It destroys the self-made illusion to step in and jack that up with another illusion, even for a moment."

"There are so many people who tell me, “if I had a time machine and could prove that Jesus never rose from the dead”, with the admission that “I hope my faith and I are strong enough that I can keep on believing, even when my eyes tell me otherwise.” That’s make-believe! That’s lying to yourself. That’s the entirety of what religion is."

"Truth is really whatever can be shown to correspond to reality. Truth is what the facts are essentially. Facts are after all points of data that you can verify to be accurate. A lot of people hate these definitions because it completely undermines their theology. They can’t make the assertions that they want to by saying anything is the absolute truth, because under the definition of either word no you don’t!"

"I can show you the truth of evolution. I can show you the facts of evolution. I can show you the positively indicative and physical evidence that is exclusively concordant with one conclusion over any other. I can do that all day, but religion can’t. No religion can because they’re all just made up. They don’t have any truth at all in them, none of them. The best that you can get out of people is that they can give anecdotal nonsense or will cite logical fallacies or they will say, “Somebody wrote once that there were Christians back in the 1st century and that means Jesus existed.”"

"There is no question on whether the prophets existed. We are talking about whether the religions they invented were true. Can you show me the truth of that? Of course, they can’t. None of them can. They don’t want to. They don’t need to. I have seen people make that admission too."

"When people use religion as their only reason for whatever laws they want to impose of people or on other things, these are always mostly unjust."

"Think about every example, every time someone comes up with religion as the reason why they want to impose it. It is always stupid. It is always imposing bigotry or limitations against somebody else’s freedom because you want to pretend in your special brand of pixie dust that is different from the gods and monsters other people want to make up. That’s what it is all about. There is simply no true religion because literally none of it is true."

"Blasphemy is not a crime. It’s a right. It needs to be exercised. We have the right not to believe lies. That’s important. Freedom of religion means freedom from religion as well. You can’t have freedom to practice your religion if you’re not free from the dominant religion. It is basic sense."

"The pledges come from a believers’ standpoint. The country needs to earn the support of its citizenry. You can’t extort it. You can’t get people indoctrinated by always saying every morning before class where they’ll never question what you’ll do."

"In a sense, the American Dream was foreigners could come to this country and, through hard work, they could be successful, make a new start, and realise and fulfil their dream despite their caste or their religion in their homelands. So Trump erected a system that denies them all of that. A system that sets castes, restricts religion, prohibits foreigners, and breaks all of the groundwork for small business, and for them to be able to do anything."

"I am supportive of people. I am supportive of the American Dream Trump is trying to destroy. I want them to understand. Regardless of your religion, you don’t get special privileges because you claim to believe something different from everybody else. You don’t get special privileges because you get to claim that you believe the same things as the majority."

"Everything that we set up for legislation that will promote Christianity will only pave the way for Islam later on because it is the fastest growing religion while Christianity is in a state of decline. Demographics change; you can’t fight religion with religion. What will happen is Islam will eventually dominate Christianity; there won’t be any Christians left. Fortunately, secularists, atheists, and nonbelievers are on the rise faster than even the fastest growing religion. You can’t fight religion with religion, but you can fight it with reason. That’s what the atheist groups are really all about."

"You’re not immortal, you’re not eternal and to believe otherwise is to diminish everything that you really have. Life is precious because it is short and there is nothing after it. There is no purpose and there is no destiny beyond anything you give it yourself. If you want your life to mean something try making someone else’s life meaningful. - “Give the Devil His Due”, 1st November 2014,"

"Let’s forget for the moment the generalizations about what the Muslim religion as a whole had to do with September 11th. How did anyone ever get the idea that Hinduism had anything to do with that whatsoever? And how is it that no one in this country can tell a Muslim or a Hindu apart from a Sikh? How do these people justify their own senseless stupidity? It pains me that our paranoid reactionary religiously-bigoted society produces people of such stark hatred and bewildering inanity."

"All I knew of Israel growing up was that they’ve been the hot-bed of militant violence forever. Abraham’s god of infinite love, forgiveness, and mercy spawned three major faiths, all of whom have been at war with each other, each since their inception, and it seems that God’s spyglass of magnified torment was usually focused right there. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has read the Old Testament and noticed the patterns therein. If YHWH promised a holy land to his chosen people, they should expect more damnation than paradise. That would be consistent with the Bible’s blood-stained stories, and that’s the way we’ve always seen it on the news in my country. There would be less milk and honey, and more uprisings and explosions, especially when it means mixing or displacing so many fundamentally polarized religious and cultural groups. If I have not been completely mislead by the media, then maybe that’s why there are so many atheists in that area now."

"I’m gonna miss the old sith lord. He was the best pope atheists could hope for. He started out as a Hitler youth actually wearing a Nazi uniform. As a Cardinal, he famously conspired to conceal sex crimes against children for the sake of the church. As pope, he addressed an audience in an AIDS ravaged area of Africa, and told them that use of condoms actually increased risk of STDs. His objection to birth-control took precedence over human life. That is how evil he is."

"There certainly seems to be a strong correlation between religion and insanity. I’ve read a few papers comparing the logical and psychological aptitude of strong believers vs those with little or no faith at all, and the trends there all seem to be in our favor, but not to the point that religion causes the disorder. I think certain mental disorders can prompt religious beliefs, but that’s a different claim. I think religion provides a haven to conceal quite a lot of cognitive and psychiatric disorders as well as some social dysfunctions. But that doesn’t mean religion is a mental illness, regardless how accurate analogies of the God virus might be. I think there are circumstances when religion can be treated as a psychological condition, especially when it is the result of detrimental conditioning, but I wouldn’t confuse that with a psychiatric malady, which (I think) would have to be physiological/chemical."

"The idea that certain races (or species) are ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ was not Darwin’s idea but the universal language of all prior naturalists since forever. Darwin acknowledges this, but does not contribute to it, other than to suggest that Caucasians are not the ultimate form of mankind."

"This is just my opinion, but when I listen to Muslims explaining their religion to each other, I get the impression that Islam is hateful and violent, but that it’s also pretty stupid; “full of shit”, as my dad would say -because none of it can be justified or shown to be true, and what little they do know can’t really imply what they say it does. The same thing goes for Christians. When I listen to Christians discussing their religion, I get the impression that they’re hateful too, but their violent reactions are culturally inhibited. So they compensate for that with a staggering level of bewildering stupidity, coupled with dishonesty. It sounds to me like pots and kettles accusing each other in the perfect example of the blind leading the blind. But when I listen to those Jews who still believe in God and the Bible, and I hear them arguing aspects of their beliefs, it strikes me that the foundation of Abrahamic religion is utterly empty, devoid of any possible meaning or value. I don’t want to say “who cares?”, because way too many people do. That’s what confuses and alarms me! How could anyone imagine that any of this is really true or really matters?"

"The zealots imposing their religion in public schools never understand that they’re even doing anything wrong. They think they’re being oppressed or attacked if they’re disallowed from indoctrinating everyone else’s kids. And it doesn’t help that all the kids in town have already been indoctrinated. Because they don’t understand what the problem is either, and and secular government requirement will invariably be seen as some sort of victimization, which feeds right into the typical Christian persecution complex. People like this never seem to understand the necessity of secular government until or unless they have to give fair consideration to Muslims. Then suddenly the Christians leap over to my side of the political spectrum, demanding separation of church and state just as I do. Hypocrites."

"Each of the laws listed in the collection commonly and erroneously referred to as ‘The Ten Commandments’ were either already universal ordinances everywhere, adapted from Hammurabi’s stele of law from centuries earlier, or have no parallel in American jurisprudence. The laws of Moses are NOT our laws! The founding fathers made clear who their influences really were, and that their goal was a system of government directly opposed to everything Mosaic law or governance represented. To say that the Constitution was in any way inspired by any covenant between God and Moses is no less a lie than to say that America was founded on Biblical principles -which our textbooks also say. There is no truth in either of these statements. They were inserted to revise our history according to an overt agenda to instill and perpetuate conservative Christian authority. This is a major front of the fundamentalist Christian “culture wars” against honest, factual reality. There is no defense of these errors and no justification for imposing them as part of ‘education’. Our textbooks are demonstrably false and deliberately misleading, and they must be corrected."

"When I read the gospels, I don’t see a wise and benevolent sage imparting truth. I see a religious extremist and faith-healer, who is just as much of a scam artist as any of the exorcists still practicing today. Remember that Jesus taught his disciples how to do faith healing too, just like tele-evangelists still do. Jesus didn’t believe in washing your hands because he didn’t know about pathogens. He believed in demons instead. And he cursed a fig tree because he didn’t know they were out-of-season. Likewise he didn’t know that the farmers of his day already knew about other seeds that were smaller than mustard seeds. My best evidence was Jesus’ complaint that the people who knew him since childhood wouldn’t buy any of his bullshit. So the only indications I had to believe in a historic Jesus were the very points that implied that he could not be a god nor have any real connection to God. So there are only two possibilities: Jesus was either an ignorant 1st century charlatan and cult leader heavily exaggerated like Robin Hood, or he’s a completely imaginary legendary figure like Hercules. Remember how Jesus said that he came not to bring peace but a sword; that he would divide husbands from their wives and children from their parents all on behalf of beliefs based on faith? Remember also that faith, (an unreasonable assertion of complete conviction which is not based on reason and is defended against all reason) —is the most dishonest position it is possible to have. Any belief which requires faith should be rejected for that reason."

"Jack Chick was a graphic artist who lived his delusional life in lies, prejudice and paranoia, promoting racist, sexist credo-specific bigotry against everyone smarter than him, or who understood things better than he did: which is pretty much everyone since he was really impressively fucking stupid -even compared to other creationists. He was so bad that Chick Publications is recognized as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. So now I hear that this creepy old dogmatic fucktard has finally stopped breathing at 92 years old. I’m unapologetically glad about that. His death makes our world a better place. I think that everyone who believes the way that he did should show solidarity by burying their faces in the sand and holding their breath until Jack Chick breathes again. Because our world just doesn’t need anyone like that -making life irritating for everyone capable of rational or compassionate thought."

"Jack Chick was one of the skid marks in the tighty-whiteys of my generation, and the world is a better place that he’s not stinking it up with his fecal fallacies anymore. Welcome to oblivion Mr Chick, where you will rot without grace in a reality that never had a god in it, and where none of your lies ever came true. The only sad part (for me) is that the moment your brain shut off, you were never able to know how wrong you were about everything you ever said. You never even had the chance to be disappointed, and are blissfully unaware of your eternal failure, you miserable awful piece of shit."

"How dare Huckabee say that school is where we don’t want to talk about eternity, life, responsibility, or accountability. I do want to talk about those things -where religion does not. Why? Because religion offers a way to deny accountability for anything. Reverse the burden of proof. Assert as fact that which is not evidently true. Don’t have a basis for any claim; assume your conclusions on the veracity of your own conviction unsupported by anything, or on citation of any false-authority who’s comments you can present as though they agree with you. Announce in advance that you will never admit when you’re wrong; that you will continue to defend your biased preconceptions to the automatic rejection –without consideration- of any evidence or arguments that will ever arise to the contrary. This is what every creationist organization says in their ‘statement of faith’. Look them up. This is where they openly admit that they have no accountability."

"I mean it; the Bible-god of western monotheism is just like that horrible kid. Who would want to be trapped in a house with an indomitable telepathic despot and have to guard your thoughts –or be voluntarily mindless- and endure that existence forever and ever? Religion doesn’t want to talk about life either. They hate practically everything that goes on in life. They want to talk about death and pretend that THAT is life. And those of us who know life, live life, and love life, they accuse of being dead already. Every aspect of their world-view is upside-down or backwards -as DogmaDebate brilliantly illustrated. What these religionists preach actually diminishes the very meaning of life. Humans tend to value most that which is rare and fleeting. Such is life. The more you have of anything, the less valuable it is. They’re claiming immortality for eternity, rendering the value of life infinitely worthless. They sell their imaginary after-life as if it is sooo much better than this period of discomfort we have to endure before we achieve paradise. Having to toil in this fallen, sin-corrupted, dead-and-damned world. They hate existence itself so much that they actually long for the end-of-days, and only seem to get happy when they think Armageddon is upon us."

"No Mr Huckabee, history –and criminal statistics- have both shown that tragedies will only increase, the more religious any society becomes. The more influence religion has over law, the lower our quality of life, and the more human rights are violated. It is true that any population of hundreds of millions will produce a proportionate percentage of sociopaths. But what we need there is more efficient provisions of mental health care –so that those suffering dementia and other disorders will be identified, treated, or isolated as need be –BEFORE they go berserk. Religion doesn’t want that either –as a matter of self-preservation. Because a fair amount of divine revelation can be cured with the same medications that treats schizophrenia. Where would the churches be if that many of their clergymen were clothed in straight-jackets?"

"[The] idea of sharing the gospel with Muslims simply will not work. (1) Islam is famously strict against apostasy, and Christians influence very few from their side in any case. (2) Muslim theology is much more efficient at gaining converts. That’s why they’re the fastest-growing religion, remember? More Christians turn Muslim than vice versa. (3) Christianity can’t even hang onto the people they already have. Religion is not the same thing as ‘race’. You can’t change your ancestors, but you can discard their traditions. Even if Christians did out-reproduce Muslims, statistics indicate that less than half of those kids would still be Christian by the time they grew up. A few might adopt some other religion; most of the rest will likely reject all religions, and that trend is rising. Therein lies the answer. You can’t fight religion with religion. Everything Christians do trying to fuse church and state, all the power they give to their own faith, –will be used to pave the way for the next dominant dogma. Every time any religion has had power to enforce their own laws, the result has invariably been a violation of human rights. The only answer –and the founding fathers said this from the beginning- is a secular government with a “wall of separation” between church and state. Maintain that and you might keep mosque and state separate too."

"Ignore for a moment the obviously sound national financial strategy behind having a competent and productive populace trained in fact-based knowledge as opposed to baseless belief with no practical application. All attempts to rid science from the lessons, to revise history, and corrupt other classes for the sake of promoting Christianity –will only serve to empower Muslims too. The very laws and customs enabling Christians to oppress others today will also give Islam power to oppress Christians tomorrow. You can’t have freedom *of* religion without freedom *from* religion, and that means keeping it out of government. So if Christians are really concerned about “Islamification”, then they ought to do the very opposite of everything they’re currently doing, and rally with the atheists to stay secular."

"It doesn’t matter what our out-dated, hate-filled, prejudicial doctrines and man-made mythologies might have said. There is no such thing as a ‘religion of peace’. Religion only knows how to react violently because they don’t understand reason and have never practiced tolerance. That’s why secular humanist diplomats will be necessary in order to end wars and other violations of human rights."

"Religion’s preferred punishment is almost always death, regardless of the crime. But the death penalty is a statistical failure just like all their proposed solutions to other problems always are. Here in the US, the states that still have the death penalty also have the highest murder rates; its a negative correlation. The problem there is one of society, the conditions imposed and the types of responses that are culturally coaxed. When murder happens, and that person is caught and tried, we should remove them as a threat, and whether they are imprisoned, institutionalized, or what have you should be determined by the particulars in each case."

"It seems that religion only knows how to react violently, out of vengeance. Again this is because it’s a belief system rooted in dichotomy and bigotry, with little or no desire to consider extenuating circumstances and NO ability to question itself objectively."

"Despite the severity of their punishments, religions have still consistently failed in virtually all attempts to curtail criminal behavior, and have in fact actually empowered or promoted criminality in many ways. More reasonable laws are usually more effective."

"Religion doesn’t solve the problem of rape at all; it exacerbates it. It should be (and in some atheist societies, it is this way) that women could walk about scantily-clad or even nude, and that men would have respect or sanity enough not to be violent against them on such paltry excuses as a lack of human decency or self control. I mean, you don’t bludgeon children to death when someone’s kid is crying loudly and annoying you, right? So why would you victimize a woman just because you find her attractive? That’s sick, but that is the attitude that is typically perpetuated by religion."

"Now I would say that any honest earnest quest for truth must begin with the abandonment of faith. Are you prepared to lie in order to maintain your self-induced delusion? Or are you bold enough to question your own convictions and even test them to find out if they’re true, and discard them if they are not? That’s the rift. That’s the difference between us."

"There is nothing reasonable about faith. Those two words mean completely opposite things. Putting them together creates an oxymoron, That’s why William Lyin’ Craig thought it would make a clever book title. Faith is an unreasonable conviction which is assumed without reason and defended against all reason. That’s why faith is the most dishonest position it is possible to have. It really is!"

"It doesn’t matter what you believe; all that matters is why you believe it, and how accurate you can show your beliefs to be."

"Unsupported assertions of impossible absurdities are indistinguishable from the illusions of delusion, and no one should believe anything that requires faith. Because faith requires that we believe without question, without reservation, without reason. That is irrational, foolish; that’s what a fool is. Your Bible got it wrong. Any assertion that requires faith should be rejected for that reason."

"The supposedly sacred fables in the Bible describe God as creating evil intentionally, of consorting with evil, being compelled by evil, and of gambling with the devil -with human suffering as the desired outcome. In fact, God is depicted as being almost entirely evil himself, throughout the entire cluster of repugnant horror stories."

"I wasn’t really a fan of kaiju, (giant Japanese monsters) only Godzilla himself. He was my hero as a boy, and even now his roar has been my only ring tone any of the cell phones I have ever had."

"The original 1954 Japanese film, Gojira was iconic, and only made a couple mistakes of any significance. (1)They killed him in the end, and we saw his body turned to skeleton. Not the best way to begin 60 years worth of sequels. (2) Godzilla was depicted as a dinosaur, and was associated with living trilobites. Even if there was some sort of ‘realm that time forgot’ out in the Pacific somewhere, Trilobites were already extinct before the first dinosaurs, and Godzilla was clearly no dinosaur. The conceptual artists reportedly referenced illustrations of dinosaurs, but that’s not what they rendered. All bi-pedal dinosaurs [Therapods] were digigrade, walking on their toes, like birds, and usually only three or four digits. Godzilla was plantigrade and pentadactyle, (having five digits and walking on the whole foot) just like lizards. It even looks like a lizard, apart from the fact that no reptile has an actual nose or external ears. In a sense, what Toho pictures created was actually an oriental dragon. These tend to mix reptilian and mammalian traits. Amusingly in 1954, Toho made a giant lizard and called it a dinosaur. In 1998, Tristar re-designed Godzilla as a dinosaur, but called it a lizard. Of course that wasn’t the only thing Tristar did wrong. They tried to ruin the monster completely. They took away the only thing that worked in decades of sequels, the look of the monster itself. Then they took away everything that made Godzilla appealing to Kaiju fans, then they tied it down and shot it. Such disrespect. If you’re going to make a movie that already has a fan-base, and they are the ones who will decide whether your film will pay off, respect those fans and the story they’re paying to see."

"I think that the best science fiction is where the story is fiction but the science is real, or at least as real as possible. If you’re going to write a good sci-fi, and you want me to believe the one wholly implausible idea that your story is about, then every other aspect of the film should be as seemingly reasonable as it possibly can be. That’s what Jurassic Park tried to do. If I am to believe that an impossibly huge reptilian monster is destroying the city, then the back story of it’s origin ought to sound realistic enough to counter-balance that. That’s what the first Godzilla movie tried to do. After that, filmmakers adopted the opposite strategy; so that everything else in the subsequent sequels had so many outrageous absurdities, each so insanely stupid, that the monster in the middle was the most reasonable element by comparison."

"I like Godzilla as much as the next guy. No, I like Godzilla more than the next guy! Since I was a little kid, I watched all those absurd rubber-suit movies thinking how cool it would be if we remade Gojira as a big budget block-buster. They failed to do that in 1985, when they brought back Raymond Burr. They failed to do that in 1998, with Tristar’s GINO (Godzilla In Name Only) and I’m sorry to say that they failed again with the latest attempt."

"Godzilla 2014 missed the mark primarily because it is not an origins story. Gojira was a monster of our own making. Similarly Gino was supposed to impose nature’s response to our meddling. But G2014 pre-existed genetic modifications and nuclear testing. We have no responsibility for him, nor the mutos either. They come from a time that never was, millions of years ago, “when the world was much more radioactive than it is today”. The story implies that mutos ‘eat radiation’. In the film, they can track it through every kind of protective shielding, and they eat nuclear devices like fruit -metallic peal and all. I guess millions of years ago, nuclear missiles grew on trees, and kaiju were common even though they’re absent from the fossil record -with only one top-secret exception. As an advocate of science education with a deep interest in paleontology, and as someone who would rather see humans held accountable for what they do to their environment, this film was very disappointing. As an atheist, it was even worse. The star of the film not only has impossible dimensions and an inexplicable power, he is also immortal. He’s been alive forever, and spends all his time sleeping. He awakens only he senses submarines or the arrival of other kaiju, because he has a mission to protect humanity. G2014 put the ‘god’ in Godzilla. The director called him a god, and some of the characters in the movie describe him as a god too. So he’s not a lizard, not a dinosaur, but one of the Lovecraftian great old ones like Cthulhu. In a video I made years ago, I too joked about Godzilla being a god. But it was still somewhat disappointing to see him depicted that way."

"Do you think it inconsistent for someone who lacks belief in the stork to object when public schools teach middle schoolers that that’s where babies come from? Likewise no history class should ever confuse students by playing any movie with Mel Gibson’s name in the credits, because they’re wrong, and it’s wrong to mislead students. It would be inconsistent for one who loves and seeks knowledge of truth not to object to lies or challenge liars. Everything religion teaches is wrong. Although public schools are not teaching about the stork, some of them are teaching creationism, which is just as demonstrably absurdly wrong; In either case, it’s a criminal immoral disservice, and should be corrected."

"If you can’t give me any reason to believe you, then I have no reason to believe you. Come back when you can show me you’ve got something to consider."

"[Religion] is predominantly evil and entirely deceitful, has only negative correlations statistically, and is frequently maliciously abusive physically mentally and emotionally. It has historically always obstructed education and retarded or impeded progress in whatever application it has ever touched. All the worst atrocities in history were done in the name of religion and our greatest advances were made in opposition to it. I’m an antitheist because religion is factually historically ethically and morally wrong."

"There are no special attributes to distinguish Christianity from any other collection of baseless lies. If there were no Christians tomorrow, we’d still have Muslims and a slough of other indefensible belief systems."

"[Religion] is literally a delusion, but one caused by conditioning rather than pathology. There are a number of studies showing a negative correlation of faith as debilitating certain areas of the brain. So religion can lead to, conceal, or even encourage mental disorders without actually being one itself."

"Asking for the meaning of life is no different than a fortune teller casting tea leaves, chicken bones, or Tarot cards, then looking at the random mess they created and wondering what that means. Abrahamic religion offers no purpose either, apart from a Stockholm syndrome, because the best you can hope for is to be imprisoned by an indomitable despot and have to press your lips to his colon for the rest of eternity –or else suffer a fate worse than death. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t."

"Personally I think the only meaning your life will ever have is whatever your involvement means to someone else. The best strategy I think, if you want your life to mean something, try making someone else’s life meaningful. But if you want your life to mean something five billion years from now, it won’t –no matter what. Sorry. But what matters now still matters now."

"For me to believe in God would probably require blunt force trauma to the brain, or perhaps a debilitating cognitive disorder. What would it take for you to believe that the myth of Persephone explains the seasons? Or that babies are delivered by a stork?"

"A society run by reasonable, rational, educated, objective, skeptical people who know that actions work and prayer doesn’t –would tend to be atheist. We’ve already seen the world run by Christians. Whenever religion has had rule over law, the result has historically always been an automatic violation of human rights and an attack on factual education. So yeah, any Utopia would have to be humanist."

"[In the Qur’an] faith is still defined the same as in the Bible, a belief in what is not seen. This explains why the remaining scripture relies on the logical fallacy of the circular argument routing back to the assumed conclusion. There is nothing that is indicated by evidence, nothing that is verifiably correct, just empty assertions of impossible nonsense that you’re supposed to swallow without question simply because it says so."

"[According to the Qur’an] God will punish me for not believing even though it is his fault that I don’t believe. God doesn’t need to seal my heart and my ears or cover my eyes. How about providing something that I could see or hear that would actually indicate a god? Why does God demand faith in lieu of evidence? I think it’s not just that there is no evidence, but that the reason there isn’t is because there is no god either."

"If you say you believe in God, but you don’t really believe in God, then how you could you possibly be trying to fool God? Wouldn’t you have to believe there is a god if you’re going to try and deceive him? And what is the deception? Are you trying to trick God into thinking you believe in him? If you don’t believe in God then that’s not even possible. So already the Qur’an reveals sufficient absurdity to prove that it cannot have been authored by any god. Seriously, could this be any less ridiculous if it were written in Arabic?"

"According to mainstream non-religious sources, a fool is one who too readily accepts improbable assertions from questionable sources on insufficient evidence. So it is no wonder that the Bible and the Qur’an both use the opposite definition, so that the wise are called foolish and only fools are wise. By definition, one would have to be a fool to be fooled by either book. As for “putting things right”, the only way to do that is to identify unsupported assertions and examine what the facts really indicate, and that always goes against faith."

"So the failure of scripture to describe anything accurately is obfuscated by assuming the conclusion with confirmation bias. Once again it is God who leads the unbelievers astray, and not their desire to understand the world as it is. And even though several of the world’s richest and most successful, and even the most charitable people are unbelievers, they are still considered losers. Of course the Qur’an is wrong about all these things, and I’m glad to be back in a country where I am allowed to say that. But those are the sort of lies that religion needs to sell itself."

"Nowhere [in the book of Genesis] does it say that the serpent was supposed to be anything but a snake. In fact nearly all of the mainstream Christian depictions of the serpent show it as a woman, allegedly Lilith, Adam’s first wife in Talmudic legend. The earliest versions of this myth, like that found in the Epic of Gilgamesh also show it to be nothing more than “the serpent who could not be tamed”. The serpent could not have been Satan, because it was cursed to crawl on it’s belly and eat dust for all of it’s days. Yet the first time Satan appears in subsequent scripture is some time after this story, and Satan is God’s right-hand man then; there was never a fall-out between them. At no time is Satan ever reduced to crawling on his belly or eating dust or having his head bruised by women. There is a distinct difference in this story between the mythical character of Satan and the mythical origin of snakes."

"It is important to note that humans are a subset of apes, being members of the taxonomic superfamily Hominoidea. This is no arbitrary classification, but one that is objectively verifiable through phylogenetics. This is a fact that can be proven regardless what you would rather believe. Yet no religion either accounts for this fact nor even acknowledges it, as it stands against all their collective mythology."

"Imagine that you are the creator of the universe. What message would you impart to your people? Whatever your answer, this wouldn’t be it. If one could read a passage like this and imagine that these are the words of an actual deity and an infallible genius, then I don’t think I could reach such a person to reason with them. I could only pity them. (The reference is to verses 67-70)"

"If you can’t show that it’s true, then you can’t call it truth. Knowledge is similar to truth in that it a justified belief. Knowledge is demonstrable and testable with measurable accuracy. If you can’t demonstrate your knowledge to any degree at all by any means whatsoever then you don’t actually know what you think you do, no matter how convinced of it you are. Without evidentiary support, then it is only an empty assertion unworthy of serious consideration."

"So do something that would have worked anyway whether God is real or not, and then simply assume that it worked because God is real. Of course. That’s religious logic for you."

"We ‘unbelievers’ are not a threat; we offer help. Whoever comes away from delusion will be better off. Just ask some of those who already have. They’ll be happy to help you."

"There can be no benefit of an exorcism. It’s not like there could ever be an instance where an actual demon is involved, and a priest would be helpless even in that situation if there were any reality to that. Even if there were some placebo effect to the ritual, it still encourages belief in things that would still persist in the imagination and thus never be fully cured even in the mind of believers. And if the problem stems from any sort of actual mental disorder, then the ritual only postpones or replaces actual medical attention."

"I’ve never heard of any skeptic being exorcised with the intent of debunking the practice. But it sounds like a good idea, and I think I would be an ideal candidate to do that –since believers often think I look scary anyway."

"I was a young man in the ’80s, and I was into medieval weapons, Harleys and Heavy Metal. I even played D&D back when that was supposed to induct players into real-life witchcraft. So I remember all the ridiculous superstition surrounding the secret meanings of ear piercing, the pseudo-paganism of Procter & Gamble, the seemingly Satanic messages in back-masking, and the allegedly suicidal insinuations of some metal albums. I attribute a lot of that to the fact that atheism didn’t have any appreciable presence back then. In those days, if you didn’t buy into Christian dogma and were openly critical of it, then you were a witch. You were either a neo-pagan or (more likely) you were Satanic. The latter would be applied regardless how you might prefer to identify. To my cultural experience, there was no such thing as a skeptic as that is known today. Back then, skeptics were considered cynics who refused to open their minds. It must have been a great time for paranoid Christian conservatives. They actually like Satanists a lot more than atheists. Because Satanists not only play the Christian game; they give Christians the moral high ground. Whereas atheists piss everybody off by pointing out that it is a game and that every believer in any religion is just pretending."

"I have encountered devil worshippers and even interviewed one on my podcast. They are not representative of Satanism. The Satanic Temple, for example, is entirely atheist, Satanists may be hedonists and may not necessarily be scientifically literate scholarly skeptics. So Satanists are not representative of atheists either. But I applaud them because the Satanic Temple has been very proficient in their defence of secular politics, much more so than typical science advocates who aren’t Satanic. Nobody cares what the nerds say. But when the Satanists speak up, then believers listen."

"“How do you reconcile materialism with idealism?” Whenever I hear a philosophical question like that, I think “Here we go. We’re going to use smoke and mirrors to change the subject and thus avoid it.”"

"Some people criticize philosophy as pointless navel-gazing. But there is a lot more to it than just that. There’s also a lot of beard-stroking: and to my experience, quite a lot of arrogant condescension too."

"Theism is irrational by definition, because it is not based on reason and is not reasonable. There was no evidence indicating this conclusion, yet it is a firm conviction anyway, and believers are determined not to let any evidence change their minds either. The very purpose and existence of apologetics all by itself demonstrates how theism is irrational."

"It is a fact that humans are multicellular eukaryotes with an internal digestive tract. It is also a fact that these criteria match the biological definition of an animal. But because I’m talking to a philosopher, we even have to argue the definition of “definition”. “A good definition explains concisely what something means“, “a statement expressing the essential nature of something“, “a statement of what a thing is“. So any multicellular eukaryote with an internal digestive tract is in fact an animal by definition. Once we determine that the criteria apply, we have no choice to deny the definition connected with that, especially not when the definition is deliberately well-established by expertise as this one is, rather than being an “accident of language” such as the apologist asserted."

"He considers [it's] insulting and false to say that gods are magical anthropomorphic immortals. But however insensitive that may seem, we cannot fairly dismiss all the hundreds of gods who were worshiped by millions of people for thousands of years. However we define what a god is, that definition must include every entity already universally accepted as a deity by those who worship it. My research in this area would have me submit that all gods are magical anthropomorphic immortals, because that description does seem to apply to all of them. They all have miraculous powers and human characteristics, and even if you can kill the body, they still exist and can still return in some other form, or the same form, or be literally born again as it was with Dionysus II. Even on the rare occasion that gods can be killed, none of them die from cancer or old age, and all of them survive for centuries. Even the immortals in movie, the Highlander could be killed–one particular way only. Otherwise, they’re immortal with human characteristics. Give them magic powers and they’d be gods."

"The only difference between miracles and magic is who does it. A boat may be considered a ship if it’s big enough. When a rich man is neurotic, we call him eccentric. When a V.I.P. is murdered, it’s an assassination. When a god performs magic, he’s working miracles. If Moses or the Pharaoh turned a staff into a snake, that’s magic. If God does the exact same trick, that’s a miracle."

"Many Christians deny what faith means, at least initially. Some try to equivocate. Some resort to the logical fallacy of false equivalence, insinuating that science depends on faith too, or that their religion has evidence. Some Christians even try to reverse the definition of faith into a belief that is based on evidence. But that’s not what it is. Faith is not simply “trust” either, as some allege. That is the wrong context. Faith in the context of religion is a form of trust, but with a prefix and suffix required to turn mere trust into faith. It must be a [complete] trust [that is not based on evidence]. This is according a consensus of mainstream authoritative religious and other definitive sources, not just within Abrahamic religions in the Bible and Qur’an, but also in other religions like the Hindu’s Bhagavad-Gita."

"Theism is nothing more than a bunch of fables made up by superstitious primitives. Having a doctorate in theology is consequently not significantly different than having a PhD in Mother Goose."

"There are still some things we haven’t quite worked out, but we know enough to be sure we’re on the right track. However apparently, our teachers are supposed to tell students that whenever we haven’t figured something out yet, we should stop our research and assume God did it—as if magic counts as an explanation. If we don’t yet know exactly how the first living cells formed, that somehow negates everything we do know to be true about evolution after that. But worse, creationists want to mislead our kids into thinking that every kind of life appeared all at once, ignoring all the evident stages of progression stretched across time, and all the apparent predecessors found in earlier strata. They want to teach as fact outright falsehoods easily disproved, as well as pseudoscience already publicly exposed in a court of law."

"The truth is what the facts are, and that’s what we should teach."

"Creationism offers no explanation whatever for anything while evolution offers a very comprehensive and demonstrably accurate explanation for an awful lot. And evolution is universally supported by an overwhelming preponderance of objectively testable evidence from every relevant field of study, while creationism is supported by nothing whatsoever outside of frauds, falsehoods and fallacies. There is literally no truth to it."

"Laws never become theories! The theory of gravity includes a number of Newtonian laws. There is not one law of gravity; there are several laws included within the theory. The same goes for Relativity and even for evolution for that matter."

"Galileo was NOT imprisoned for “speaking against the consensus”. He was imprisoned for heresy against the church. He was imprisoned for life by the Holy Inquisition, who forced him to recant his truth. Three hundred and fifty years later, in 1992, the Catholic Church finally formally dismissed the charges against him, admitting Galileo’s views were correct after all."

"There is no such thing as a religious theory, just like science doesn’t promote “non-religious doctrines” either. A doctrine is a set of taught beliefs. Science is an investigation; not a matter of belief."

"It is against the law to teach religion in Texas’ public schools, and not just because of Edwards v Aguillard and Kitzmiller v Dover, but also because of the 1st amendment of the US Constitution. But then from the news I just heard today, it seems we can’t have that in Trumpistan either."

"Many of the strongest proponents of climate change are now coming out and saying “it’s simply not true?” Citations please? Who were the “top” [ten?] proponents of anthropogenic climate change over the last decade or more? Has even one of them come out and said that it’s just not true? Because I gotta be honest here. (Someone has to be). I smell bullshit."

"Proving evolution wouldn’t disprove God unless your god is a book. The Bible is easy to disprove, but that shouldn’t be enough to disprove God. Whether God exists or not, evolution is still an inescapable fact of population genetics and the Bible is still a man-made compilation of falsified fables. Not even the existence of God could change either of these things."

"I don’t hate God. Some people say it’s impossible to hate a fictional character, but I hated the wicked step-mother in Disney’s Cinderella. Of course that’s because I knew people like her. Even though God is the most objectionable character in all fiction, he’s not real enough to hate. So it’s not that I hate God; it’s that I hate lies, and that’s what your god is made of. If your god was real, you’d be able to convince me. In fact, he wouldn’t need you. I’d already know. However you are demonstrably wrong on everything you’ve said so far. Whether I can convince you of that depends only on whether you’re reasonably honest."

"It just seems to me that we either have an irrational need to believe or we have a desire to understand and to improve that understanding. For those of the latter set, accuracy and accountability are paramount, but for creationists, those things don’t even matter."

"Believers use the word “believe” differently than rationalists do. Y’all have a whole different lexicon. For example, the definition of “rational” is being endowed with the capacity to reason, being reasonable, agreeable to reason, and able to be reasoned with. But if you compare this to the statement of faith published by creationist organizations, where they proudly reject reason and admit that no amount of proof will ever change their minds, then you should see that they don’t meet any of those criteria. Religious belief is irrational by definition, being “not governed by or according to reason”, which is why faith is a belief that is not dependent on evidence. Likewise, for believers, “belief” is a conscious act of deliberate intent, of mind over matter, the power of positive thought, which enabled Sean Spicer to think “we can disagree with facts”. No, only the religious mind could even think that."

"Supernaturalism can never provide a sufficient explanation of anything. There is never an instance where we can blame anything on the supernatural. Once we found the real reason behind anything that was once attributed to miracles, curses or omens, witchcraft or demonic possession, it always turned out to be a revelation of whole new fields of study previously unimagined and vastly more complex than the simple excuses we were told before. In each of these cases, the supernatural explanation was already wrong before the natural explanation was known. So you should never resort to the god-of-the-gaps fallacy that anything science can’t explain is explained by magic, because that doesn’t explain it either. If you call it a miracle, it means you don’t what it really is. Goddidit is not an explanation of anything, and it never was. Science can only ever work with natural explanations, not because of any unfair prejudice, but because natural explanations are the only ones that can be tested."

"To adequately understand evolution, you not only have to understand how to be scientific, (which is the real trick for most people) but you also have to know something about cellular biology, genetics, and anatomy, geology, particularly paleontology, as well as environmental systems, tectonics, atomic chemistry, and especially taxonomy, which most people don’t know squat about at all. Most people who accept evolution also tend to know a whole lot about cosmology, geography, history, sociology, politics, and of course, religion. But to believe in creationism, you don’t have to know anything about anything, and its better if you don’t! Because creationism relies on ignorance. It is not honest research! It is a scam, a con job exploiting the common folk, and preying on their deepest beliefs and fears. Creationist apologetics depends on misrepresented data and misquoted authorities, out-of-date and out-of-context, and uses distorted definitions if it uses definitions at all."

"There are basically two types of creationists; the professional or political creationists; these are the activists who lead the movement and who will regularly deliberately lie to promote their propaganda; and the second type which are the innocently-deceived followers commonly known as “sheep”. I know lots of intellectual Christians, but I can’t get any of them to actually watch the televangelists, because they either already know how phony they are, or they don’t want to find out. But that only allows a radical fringe to claim support from they masses they now also claim to represent. So there’s nothing to stop them. Professional creationists are making money hand over fist with faith-healing scams or bilking little old ladies out of prayer donations, or selling books and videos at their circus-like seminars where they have undeserved respect as powerful leaders. All of them feign knowledge they can’t really possess, and some of them claim degrees they’ve never actually earned... Were it not for this con, they’d have to go back to selling used cars, wonder drugs, and multi-level marketing schemes. They will never change their minds no matter what it costs anyone else."

"... it's one thing to believe in something that might be true (like God in general or Christianity specifically) even though neither can be substantiated or tested in any objective way. But it is a whole other matter to willfully deceive others into believing things which are definitely not true -like creationism, especially when we can also prove that those doing this know their assorted arguments are bogus, and know they’re lying to our children, and that they hope to continue doing so under the guise of “education”. Creationism extorts support through peer-pressure, prejudice, and paranoid propaganda, and sells itself with short, simplistic slogans which appeal to those who don’t want to think too much, or are afraid to question their own beliefs. Worst of all, it actually forbids critical inquiry, and promotes anti-intellectualism, and it is based on at least a dozen foundational falsehoods. First and foremost among them is the idea that accepting evolution requires the rejection of theism, if not all other religious or spiritual beliefs as well."

"Of all the developed nations throughout Christendom, only the United States has a significant number of creationists, and they’re the minority even here! Every other predominantly-Christian country tends to regard creationism as an incredulous, (if not insane) radical fringe movement which is an almost exclusively American phenomenon, and not taken seriously anywhere else. Poll after poll continues to reveal that, around the world, most “evolutionists” are Christian, and most Christians are evolutionists. So evolution is not synonymous with atheism, and creationism isn’t synonymous with Christianity either. Most creationists aren’t even Christians! There are millions more Muslim and Hindu creationists than Christian ones."

"From the creationist’s perspective, the method or mechanism of creation which these mystical beings use is nothing more than a golem spell where clay statues are animated with an enchantment. Or its an incantation in which complex modern plants and animals are "spoken" into being. That’s right, magic words which cause fully-developed adult animals to be conjured out of thin air. Or a god simply wishes them to exist; so they do. That’s it! There really is nothing more to it than that; pure freakin’ magic –by definition. Remember that the next time you hear anything from a creation “scientist”."

"When believers argue over any of the many things which contradict their religion, they often challenge us to decide whom we are going to believe? The alleged “word” of God? Or that of Men? As if human inquiry had no chance against the authority they imagine their doctrine to be. But when they say, “men”, they’re talking about science. And when they refer to the “word of God”, they’re talking about myths written about God by men."

"If there really was one true god, it should be a singular composite of every religion’s gods, an uber-galactic super-genius, and the ultimate entity of the entire cosmos. If a being of that magnitude ever wrote a book, then there would only be one such document; one book of God. It would be dominant everywhere in the world with no predecessors or parallels or alternatives in any language, because mere human authors couldn’t possibly compete with it. And you wouldn’t need faith to believe it, because it would be consistent with all evidence and demonstrably true, revealing profound morality and wisdom far beyond contemporary human capacity. It would invariably inspire a unity of common belief for every reader. If God wrote it, we could expect no less. But what we see instead is the very opposite of that. Instead of only one religion leading to one ultimate truth, we have many different religions with no common origin, all constantly sharding into ever more deeply-divided denominations, seeking conflicting truths, and each somehow claiming divine guidance despite their ongoing divergence in every direction."

"The Bible was very definitely written by men, and not superior men either; far from it! This is why so much of it can be shown to be historically and scientifically dead wrong about damned-near everything back-to-front. We’re talking about people who believe snakes and donkeys can talk, who believe in incantations, blood sacrifice, ritual spells, enchanted artifacts, pyrotechnic potions, astrology, and the five elements of witchcraft. They thought that if you use a magic wand to sprinkle blood all over someone, it will cure them of leprosy. We’re talking about people who think that rabbits chew cud, and that bats are birds, and whales are fish, and that π is a round number. These folks believed that if you display striped patterns to a pregnant cow, it would bare striped calves. How could anyone say that who knows anything about genetics? Obviously the authors of this book didn’t."

"As a moral guide, [the Bible] utterly fails, because much of the original Hebrew scriptures were written by ignorant and bigoted savages who condoned and promoted animal cruelty, incest, slavery, abuse of slaves, spousal abuse, child abuse, child molestation, abortion, pillage, murder, cannibalism, genocide, and prejudice against race, nationality, religion, sex, and sexual orientation."

"Creationist Christians think that if the Bible is wrong, then God lied. They cannot accept that God could exist but the Bible be wrong because they can’t distinguish doctrine from deity. So it is a form of idolatry wherein the believers worship man-made compilations as though those books were God himself -because they think it is His word. But God never wrote or dictated any of the scriptures of any religion. Everything men chose to reject from or include in their supposedly “unalterable word” of whatever god was conceived, composed, compiled, translated, interpreted, edited, and often deliberately altered and enhanced by mere fallible men."

"Every religion boasts their own miracles and prophecies proving theirs is the truest faith. So its no surprise that Christians say the same things about their versions of God too. No religion is significantly different from any other in this respect. But whatever else may be going on, when men claim revelation from God, it usually means is that they’ve decided to promote their own biased and unsubstantiated opinions as if they were divinely inspired."

"If any god exists, and it happens that there’s only one of them, then surely every spiritually enlightened and visionary holy man from any nation or tribe should be able to sense it, if men can sense such things at all. And their scribes would write the scrolls seeking to make sense of it –however feeble an attempt that may be. Perhaps that’s why there are so many different religions; because no man can know the true state of God. There can only be one truth, and only one version of it. But rather than coming together, as everyone’s search for the one truth should, religions continuously shard further and further apart into more divided factions with mutually-exclusive beliefs, -and there are as many wrong interpretations as there people claiming theirs as the “absolute truth”."

"In reality, there is no such thing as “absolute truth”. Everything within the capacity of human understanding contains a degree of error, and everything men know to be true is only true to a degree. Everyone is inevitably wrong about something somewhere. We don’t know everything about everything. We don’t know everything about anything! And what we do know, we don’t know accurately on all points nor completely in every detail. Honest men admit this. Anyone claiming to know the absolute truth is not being honest, especially not when they claim to know anything about things which can only be believed on faith. Even if men were given genuine revelations by truly omniscient beings, they must still be filtered and interpreted by weaker minds influenced by our limitations, biases, and misimpressions, as well as linguistic and cultural barriers."

"Some argue that the Bible doesn’t really say some of the things we can prove that it does, while others are convinced that it clearly does say things that it doesn’t really even hint at anywhere. For example, the idea that there was no death before “the fall”. The Bible doesn’t say that. In fact, it says there was death before the fall, because Adam and Eve had to ingest and digest living cells in order to survive, the very definition of what it means to be an animal. The only way around that was to eat of the fruit of the tree of eternal life, which directly contradicts the creationist’s interpretation, because it wouldn’t need to be there if they already had eternal life. It is an obvious metaphor representing a choice, perhaps between innocence and responsibility. That too is an interpretation. But it was obviously not an actual deciduous plant!"

"If the Bible is interpreted literally, then it is clear that its authors believed that the world was a flat disc, which was originally said to be covered by a giant crystal dome. It was a common belief at the time in all the neighboring regions. But it was still wrong. The Biblical authors obviously knew nothing about the real state of this world nor the worlds beyond this one either. But we know what lies outside our atmosphere. And that proves that there is no water above where the firmament isn't, and no windows to let it drain in -if there was either water or firmament there."

"Many creationists say that it is impossible to understand or believe the Bible unless it is read “in the spirit of the holy ghost”. In other words, you must already assume its truth before you read it, and you have to read it through filters of faith because it certainly isn’t compelling on its own without those blinders on. If it doesn’t make sense, then you’ve got to convince yourself that you must not understand it properly, and you’ve just got to try to make yourself believe it anyway somehow. That is precisely why creationist faith is deemed ‘dogmatic’. But that’s also proof by admission that even a literal reading must be “interpreted”. So its very design is such that the Bible can not be either inerrant or “absolute truth”."

"Every religion claims to believe as they do because of reason, education, or intelligence given by their god in revelation. But whether they admit it or not, all of them are assuming their preferred conclusions on faith, and this would still be true even if all of their gods exist. Believe as hard as you want to. But convincing yourself however firmly still can’t change the reality of things. Seeing is believing. But seeing isn’t knowing. Believing isn’t knowing. Subjective convictions are meaningless in science, and eyewitness testimony is the least reliable form of evidence."

"Normally, anyone disreputable enough to flatly affirm such positive proclamations without adequate support would lose the respect of his peers and be accused of outright fraud; anyone but a religious advocate that is. When allegedly holy men do the exact same thing, then its not called fraud anymore. Its called “revealed truth” instead. That’s quite a double-standard, innit? Like when some minister gets on stage at one of those stadium-sized churches -to state as fact who God is and what God is, and what he wants, hates, needs, won’t tolerate, or will do -for whom, how, and under what conditions; they don’t have any data to show they’re correct about any of it, yet they speak so matter-of-factly. Even when they contradict each other they’re all still completely confident in their own empty assertions! So why do none of these tens of thousands of head-bobbing, mouth-breathing, glassy-eyed wanna-believers have the presence of mind to ask, “how do you know that?” Well, for all those who never asked the question, here’s the answer; they don’t know that! There’s no way anyone could know these things. They’re making it up as they go along. These sermons are the best possible example of blind speculation; asserted as though it were truth and sold for tithe. If anyone or everyone else would be called liars for claiming such things without any evidentiary basis then why make exceptions for evangelists? For these charlatans are obviously liars too! The clergy are in the same category of questionable credibility as are commissioned salesmen, politicians, and military recruiters."

"Belief may be either rational, or assumed on faith. But in either case, it doesn’t matter how convinced you are; belief does not equal knowledge. The difference is that knowledge can always be tested for accuracy where mere beliefs often can not be. No matter how positively you think you know it, if you can’t show it, then you don’t know it, and you shouldn’t say that you do. Nor would you if you really cared about the truth. Knowledge is demonstrable, measurable. But faith is often a matter of pretending to know what you know you really don't know, and that no one even can know, and which you merely believe -often for no good reason at all."

"... the fact is that while we have become the most religious of any of the predominantly Christian first world nations, (due to repeated surges in rural revivalism) the US in its infancy was once the most secular government in history. The original colonies were primarily peopled by refugees fleeing religious persecution in other countries. But almost upon arrival, the Puritans only continued that practice against native Shaman, then against Quakers, and even each other –over religious differences. Catholics to the South were even worse! The founding fathers however were largely Deists, the least devout form of theism. They were brilliant men who knew better than to let religion rule over law because theocracy has in all instances almost automatically violated human rights and it inevitably always does. Consequently, the irreligious and non-Christian framers of the American Constitution produced the first government ever to grant all its citizens the right to religious freedom, and they did so by forbidding the government from sponsoring or promoting one religion over any other. Because it is not possible to have freedom of religion without having freedom from religion."

"While scientists themselves may be religious men of many different faiths, their methodology was designed to be the antithesis of faith because it requires that all assumptions be questioned, that all proposed explanations be based on demonstrable evidence, and that all hypotheses be must be testable and potentially falsifiable. Blaming magic is never acceptable because miracles aren’t explanations of any kind, and there has never been a single instance in history when assuming the supernatural has ever improved our understanding of anything. In fact such excuses have only ever impeded our attempts at discovery. This is one of many reasons why science depends on methodological naturalism; because unlike religion, science demands some way to determine who’s explanations are the more accurate, and which changes would actually be corrections. Science is a self-correcting process which changes constantly because its always improving. Only accurate information has practical application. So it doesn’t matter what you wanna believe. All that matters is why we should believe it too, and how accurate your perception can be shown to be. So you can’t just make up stuff in science (like you can in religion) because you have to substantiate everything, and be able to defend it even against peers who may not want to believe as you do. Be prepared to convince them anyway. Its possible to do that in science because science is based on reason. That means you must be ready to reject or correct whatever you hold true should you discover evidence against it."

"The problem creationists have with evolution is not that it challenges belief in God, because it doesn’t. Their problem is that evolution, -like every other field of science- challenges the accuracy and authority of the storybooks which creationists equate to God. Consequently, they tend to reject science almost entirely, and will often take all the sciences they perceive as threatening, and lump them all together under one heading, which they then refer to as “evolution-ism”. It’s an attempt to minimize the sheer volume of sciences allied against them. This is also part of their intentionally-erected illusion of equality; a false dichotomy that if their legendary folklore isn’t the absolute authority -being both literally and completely true, then God couldn’t create or even exist any other way."

"Creationists do deliberately misrepresent evolution many different ways in all their arguments. Even when they know better, they still say that evolution necessarily requires the godless origin of life from inorganic matter. But it doesn’t mean that, and never did. For one thing, all the building blocks of life were already organic long before the first organism, before anything could be considered alive. We’ve even detected vast amounts of organic matter in deep space. But creationists claim space evolved too, and that the big bang is part of the same evolutionary process as that which leads to new species on earth. So they often say that evolution requires “something coming from nothing”, which is ironic since creationists believe that themselves while strict scientists do not."

"Creationists habitually misdefine their terms, and commonly insist that evolution means “life from non-life”. But of course that’s not right either. Evolution explains how life diversifies, not how it began. Since evolution at every level is -by definition- limited to the variation of allele frequencies inherited over generations of living organisms, then it obviously can’t operate where no genomes yet exist. The evolutionary process starts with genetics and can’t start before it."

"Creationists often cite the laws of Thermodynamics as if they could somehow apply to the diversification of life on earth. They don’t. Lord Kelvin, the scientist who discovered those laws was a creationist himself. He was definitely opposed to evolution. But even he said that thermodynamics demands that the earth would still have to be on the order of twenty to forty million years old at least, even if the bowels of the world didn’t continue to heat themselves radioactively, which of course they do, and that pushes the age back much further."

"Abiogenesis has a decent amount of evidence behind it, but nowhere near as much as evolution does. So far we still don’t know which (if any) of the explanations posed for the origin of life is the most accurate one. But if there’s one thing the wisdom of the ages has taught us, it is that simply not yet knowing the real explanation is no reason to go and blame anything on magic. Besides, even if a god did appear and summon the first life into being billions of years ago, there is no question but that life has certainly evolved since then, and is still evolving now."

"Evolution does depend on mutations, and these do appear to be random. But each cumulative mutation may become significant factors for that organism once pitted against the dynamics of the environment in which they are introduced. Thus natural selection isn’t random; it’s deterministic. Many creationists will even admit this. And as some computer models have already shown, natural selection can actually even exceed the skills of human designers. In fact, natural selection can be so deterministic that it often leads to innovations which some perceive as evidence of intelligent design, and which even rationalists describe as though modified for intended benefit. Whether it is deliberately guided or not, there is definitely a system of design. But there doesn’t actually have to be any apparent intent or intelligence involved."

"Even before computers existed, we already knew that natural selection can, -and often will- produce results which look like trial-and-error experiments, including elements of seemingly-intentional fine tuning. But for all the implications of apparent design, there is never any indication of any intended goal or final product, nor any hint of infallibility on the part of the designer. In fact, so many errors of so many types are known that even if there was an unnatural architect using miraculous means instead of natural ones, then it seems that entity must either be blind and barely competent, or there are whole teams of designers working on separate lines competing against each other."

"Most Christians would say that evolution is one of God’s creative methods. But creationists reject that possibility outright, because the issue for them is not whether their God is true; but whether their dogma is true. It can’t be in any case. Even if current concepts of evolution were proven wrong tomorrow, Biblical creationism still couldn’t be true either, because it has already been disproved many times, many ways, and collapses on its own lack of merit. But of course believers can never admit that."

"Creationists insist that mutations are very rare and are usually, if not always harmful. But the fact is that the vast majority of mutations are completely neutral. They’d have to be because, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, there is an overall average of 128 mutations per human zygote! So apparently, in creationist terms, “very rare” means “more than a hundred per person right from the point of conception”. Because those are just the mutations we start out with. Our cells will mutate again 30 more times over the course of our lives, and some of these subsequent mutations can be passed on to our children too –usually with no more effect than those we recognize as family traits."

"The evolution of life is analogous to the evolution of language. For example, there are several languages based on the Roman alphabet of only 26 letters. Yet by arranging these in different orders, we’ve added several hundred thousand words to English since the 5th century, and many of them were completely new. The principle is the same in genetics. There are millions of named and classified species of life, all of them based on a variable arrangement of only four chemical components. For another example, we know that Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese all evolved from Latin, a vernacular which is now extinct. Each of these newer tongues emerged via a slow accumulation of their own unique slang lingo –thus diverging into new dialects, and eventually distinct forms of gibberish such that the new Romans could no longer communicate with either Parisians or Spaniards. Similarly, if we took an original Latin speaking population and divided them sequestered in complete isolation over several centuries, they might still be able to understand each other, or their jargon may have become unintelligible to foreigners. But they won’t start speaking Italian or Romanian because identical vocabularies aren’t going to occur twice."

"When something dies, it is usually disassembled, digested, and decomposed. Only rarely is anything ever fossilized, and even fewer things are very well-preserved. Because the conditions required for that process are so particular, the fossil record can only represent a tiny fraction of everything that has ever lived. Darwin provided many environmental dynamics explaining why no single quarry could ever provide a continuous record of biological events, and why it would be impossible to find all the fossilized ancestors of every lineage. But despite this, he predicted that future generations, -having the benefit of better understanding- would discover a substantial number of fossil species which he called “intermediate” or “transitional” between what we see alive today and their taxonomic ancestors at successive levels in paleontological history. In fact, in the century-and-a-half since then, we’ve found millions of evolutionary intermediaries in the fossil record, much more than Darwin said he could reasonably hope for. There are three different types of transitional forms and we have ample examples of each. But creationists still insist that we’ve never found a single one, because what they usually ask us to present are impossible parodies which evolution would neither produce nor permit."

"No matter what, creationists will not admit that anything we ever find can fulfill Darwin’s prediction of transitional intermediates. This is why creationists demand only monstrous absurdities or issue challenges they know still couldn’t be satisfied no matter how true evolution may be; because they know already that whatever they insist on seeing today we may show them tomorrow, and if that happens, they’ll have to make up new excuses for why it still doesn’t count. So they won’t request to see anything evolution actually requires, and they usually won’t define any criteria they would accept either, because they already know they won’t accept anything even if we show them everything they ever ask for."

"Many people think there are no transitional species because the only fossil forms they’re aware of at all are a handful of plastic pieces in a prehistoric play set. They’ve no idea how rich the fossil record is! We know of several hundred species just within dinosaurs, to say nothing of the thousands of examples of each of hundreds more taxa apart from that. Experts estimate that all the collective genera still roaming around now only amount to about 1% of all the species that have ever lived. Practically everything there ever was ain’t no more. Every species living today has definite relatives both extant and extinct, and evident in the fossil record. And in one sense, all of them, even the things still alive, count as transitional species."

"Demanding an “ape-man” is actually just as silly as asking to see a mammal-man, or a half-human, half-vertebrate. How about a half dachshund, half dog? It’s the same thing. One may as well insist on seeing a town half way between Los Angeles and California. Because the problem with bridging the gap between humans and apes is that there is no gap because humans are apes –definitely and definitively. The word, “ape” doesn’t refer to a species, but to a parent category of collective species, and we’re included. This is no arbitrary classification like the creationists use. It was first determined via meticulous physical analysis by Christian scientists a century before Darwin, and has been confirmed in recent years with new revelations in genetics. Furthermore, it is impossible to define all the characters exclusively indicative of every known member of the family of apes without describing our own genera as one among them. Consequently, we can and have proven that humans are apes in exactly the same way that lions are cats, and iguanas are lizards, and whales are mammals. So where is the proof that humans descend from apes? How about the fact that we’re still apes right now!"

"We don’t believe this because we want to! And why would we want to? We believe it because we can prove it really is true, and that applies to everyone whether you want to believe it or not. We’re not just saying you’ve descended from primates either; we’re saying you are a primate! Humans have been classified as primates since the 1700s when a Christian creationist scientist figured out what a primate was –and prompted other scientists to figure out why that applied to us. It wouldn’t be this way if different “kinds” of life had been magically-created unrelated to anything else; not unless God wanted to trick us into believing everything had evolved. Because the phylogenetic tree of life is plainly evident from the bottom up to any objective observer who dares compare the anatomy of different sets of collective life forms. But it can be just as objectively confirmed from the top down when re-examined genetically. This is why it is referred to as a “twin-nested hierarchy”. But there’s still more than that because the evident development of physiology and morphology can be confirmed biochemically as well as chronologically in geology and developmentally in embryology. Why should that be? And how do creationists explain why it is that every living thing fits into all of these daughter sets within parent groups, each being derived according to apparently inherited traits? They don’t even try to explain any of that, or anything else. They won’t because they can’t, because evolution is the only explanation that accounts for any of this, and it explains it all."

"Creationists insist that macroevolution has never been observed, and the excuse they use to deny that it has requires the addition of a bogus condition that simply does not apply. Creationists argue that evolution can only occur within “definite limits”, and then only to subtle variance within their “kind”. They say new diversity is limited to rare and unviable hybrids between those “kinds”, and they usually say that the emergence of new species is impossible. No “Darwinist” would ever say any of these things."

"Creationists may refuse to acknowledge geologic time scales, and cannot admit that any new organism might be unable to interbreed with the stock from whence it came because their sacred fables say they were “created each after their own kind”. But of course they can’t say what a “kind’ is either, because it’s impossible to identify any point in taxonomy where everything that ever lived isn’t evidently related to everything else. So they largely ignore phylogenetics altogether. Creationists have to deny macroevolution for the same reason they have to deny transitional species, not because these combined realities can only indicate an animal ancestry, but because either one alone proves that such is at least possible, and creationists are not permitted to admit even that."

"If it is possible to walk twenty feet, it’s possible to walk twenty miles. So creationists insist there must be some “definite boundary” blocking the evolution of new “kinds”. But they won’t say where or what that boundary is. Creationists habitually misdefine their terms –if they can be forced to use definitions at all, because they will not be accountable. They can’t be, because they’ve decided in advance never to change their minds even if they’re proven wrong. If they were to find out that macroevolution was ever actually seen and proven to have happened for certain, their cultish faith would still forbid them to admit it. Instead they’d have to redefine their terms, to “move the goalposts” to some higher taxonomic level –but not so high as to have to admit where humans belong in the families of apes."

"Macroevolution is properly defined as the emergence of new taxa at or above the species level. The only time creationists will use the proper definition is when they are as-yet unaware of the fact that speciation has already been directly-observed and documented dozens of times –both in the lab and in naturally-controlled conditions in the field. In fact, we’ve seen it so many times we’ve had to categorize recurrent types of macroevolution we’ve seen so often repeated. Once creationists find out about all this, their first reaction is to use the excuse that some newly evolved species of fruit fly or fish somehow still doesn’t count because it’s “still” a fly or it’s “still” a fish. Well of course it is! Evolution couldn’t permit them to be anything else. Creationists demand that the new species be so different from their parents that one can’t even tell they’re related. The irony there is that evolutionary theory never suggests that one “kind” of thing ever turned into another, fundamentally-different “kind” of anything, not unless you ignore all the intermediate stages –which of course creationists do."

"To comprehend evolutionary Theory, one must first understand that it’s only ever a matter of changing proportions –altering or enhancing existing features to build on what is already there. Developmental biology, genetics, and comparative morphology combine to confirm many of these taxonomic stages such that organs do not seem to have appeared abruptly or fully-formed as if out of nowhere, because there is an implied evolutionary origin evident in every case. Even the transition of fish-to-tetrapods, dinosaurs-to-birds, or apes-to-men are each are just a matter of incremental, superficial changes being slowly compiled atop successive tiers of fundamental similarities. These represent monophyletic clades which will forever encompass all the descendants of that clade. This is why birds are still dinosaurs, and humans are still apes, and both are still stegocephalian chordates."

"Throughout history, there have been many scientists who believed the universe was “created” in the same sense that Christian proponents of natural sciences still believe today. But those men who believed in God and made historic contributions to science still relied on necessarily natural methodology because that is the only way science can progress. In many cases, they found natural explanations for things previously believed to be miraculous, and they only succeeded when they did not allow religious convictions to subvert or inhibit their inquiry. None of them were able to vindicate the Bible stories, and their efforts to do so only ever indicated another origin. Thus these men wouldn’t have supported creationism as we know it today, and many of them wouldn’t have been creationists if they’d understood evolution."

"Owen believed in common archetypes rather than a common ancestor, and his conduct presents an archetype of the modern creation scientists, except that they submit to peer review rarely, (if ever) and none of them are experts in anything. They’ve never produced any research indicative of their position. They cannot substantiate any of their assertions, and they’ve never successfully refuted anyone else’s hypotheses either. But every argument of evidence they’ve ever made in favor of creation has been refuted immediately and repeatedly. All they’ve ever been able to do was criticize real science, and even then the absolute best arguments they’ve ever come up with were all disproved in a court of law with mountains of research standing against their every allegation. Yet creationists still use those same ridiculous rationalizations because they will never accept where their beliefs are in error! Their only notable strength is how anyone can be so consistently proven to be absolutely wrong about absolutely everything, 100% of the time, for such a long time, and still make-believe theirs is the absolute truth. More amazing still is how often they will actually lie in defense of their alleged truth. Every publication promoting creation over any avenue of actual science contains misquotes, misdefinitions, and misrepresented misinformation, while their every appeal to reason is based entirely on erroneous assumptions and logical fallacies. There is a madness to their method, but it is naught but propaganda."

"Creationists contend that they don’t believe in magic. But “speaking” anything into existence is an incantation, and the Bible is full of spells of one sort or another. Animating golems, or conjuring interdependent systems, and causing complex organisms to appear out of thin air -are each logically implausible and physically impossible according to everything we know about anything at all, yet this is exactly what religiously-motivated pseudoscientists actually promote! How do we test these ideas? How can we tell them apart from any of the thousands of fables men have concocted for the ghosts and gods of other religions? How can we tell whether any of this is even real, and not something someone just made up? Because despite anyone’s assertions of personal conviction, it is impossible to distinguish miracles from subjective impressions imagined out of nothing. In the realm of fantasy, it’s easy to demonstrate psionic talents, astral entities, and magical manifestations. Until they do that in reality too, then science has nothing but nature to work with."

"Fraudulent evangelical charlatans often say that creationism is scientific, but there’s utterly no verifiably accurate evidence behind any of their assertions, and no way to construct any hypotheses to explain any of their claims because no experiments could possibly support them, and faith prohibits believers from ever admitting when their notions would be falsified. Creationists are therefore unable to add to the sum of knowledge and instead only offer excuses trying to actually reduce what we already know. They’ve no way to recognize their own flaws and won’t correct them, so they can neither confirm nor improve their accuracy. But that’s all real science is or does. Consequently, since the dawn of rational thought, the advancement of science has been retarded by the minions of mysticism, and profound revelations have often been opposed or suppressed by the greater part of the dominant religion, because dogmatic faith is not based on reason and zealots will not be reasoned with."

"Science is a search for truth –whatever the truth may turn out to be, even if it’s evidently not what we wanted to believe it was. In science, it doesn’t matter what you believe; all that matters is why you believe it. This is why real science disallows faith, promising instead to remain objective, to follow wherever the evidence leads, and either correct or reject any and all errors along the way even if it challenges whatever we think we know now. But creationist organizations post written declarations of their unwavering obligation to uphold and defend their preconceived notions, declaring in advance their refusal to ever to let their minds be changed by any amount of evidence that is ever revealed. Anti-science evangelists display their statement of faith proudly on their own forums, as if admitting to a closed and dishonest mind wasn’t something to ashamed of or beg forgiveness for. They don’t want to do science. They want to un-do science! They try to segregate experimental science from historical science, ignoring the fact that both are based on empirical observations and both can be checked with testable hypotheses. Worse, they want to redefine science in general so that astrology, subjective convictions of faith, and excuses of magic can supplant the scientific method whenever necessary in defense of their beliefs. They’re only open to critical inquiry so long as that is not permitted to challenge the sacred scriptures nor vindicate any of the fields of study to which they’re already opposed. In short, everything science stands for, -or hopes to achieve- is threatened by the political agenda of these superstitious subversives."

"You can believe whatever you like. As long as you admit that it is a belief, you don’t have to defend it. But if you assert your belief as a statement of fact, then you do have to defend it! Stating anything as definitely true when there is insufficient evidence to back it –is dishonest. Making such positive proclamations without any evidence at all is a matter of faith. And promising in advance to forever defend an unsupportable a priori preference even against an avalanche of evidence against it -is apologetics, which is all creation “science” really is."

"It is no hoax that mammalian embryos temporarily have pharyngeal pouches, which are morphologically indistinguishable from the gill slits in modern fish embryos, and that the divergence of development from there matches what is indicated in the fossil record. This is fact, not fraud. And none of these facts should be true unless evolution were true also."

"The scientific process of peer-review seeks out and exposes fraud by design. But antievolutionist arguments are withheld from peer-review because they are driven entirely by frauds including misstatements, out-of-context quote-mining, and contrived or distorted falsehoods, and terms erroneously redefined into instigative reactionary nonsense unintelligible as anything other than propaganda. In short, if creationists knew how to expose a fraud, they wouldn’t be creationists anymore."

"Convicted fraud and pseudoscience charlatan, Mister Kent Hovind argues that what has already been directly-observed and shown to be certainly true is (in his opinion) impossible, and the only option he thinks is possible is that an imperceptible (and possibly imaginary) mystical being poofed everything out of nothing by magic. The irony is that what he proposes is physically impossible because it defies all natural laws, and it’s logically implausible since it has neither precedent nor parallel anywhere in reality to imply that it could still be true anyway. Where is there evidence anywhere that such a thing actually exists, or that anything even could have any of these abilities?"

"The evidence of evolution, and even the event of evolution itself, –the proof of it- are both directly observed, and testable, and demonstrably factual. But religious beliefs are none of the above and never have been; they’re assumed on faith. Whether or not these beliefs turn out to be correct, they are asserted as true without justification in the form of evidence."

"It is also important to remember that evolution works like any other aspect of real life, in that not everything progresses or progresses at the same speed. It's just like at work: some employees may suddenly excel, soaring through the corporate ranks while others may be in the same position doing the same old thing as long as they're there. Some even get demoted. Not everything moves in the same pace or in the same direction, and some don't seem to change much at all."

"Lizards don't look anything like dinosaurs. Why doesn't anyone understand this?... Ignore what you've seen in the cheesy old movies made by those who don't know anything; there's not even one dinosaur that looks anything like a lizard. It's so obvious it bothers me that no one can see this."

"Every feature that is known to exist in every bird universally accepted as such is also found on dinosaurs: four-chambered heart, fused caudal vertebrae, gastroliths, even the avian respiratory system have all been found on fossil theropods, especially dromaeosaurs and maniraptors. You can distinguish birds among dinosaurs, but it is no longer possible to distinguish birds from dinosaurs."

"Once upon a time, the founder of Protestant Christianity, said that doctors were fools, for treating diseases, as if they came from material causes. Then, Louis Pasteur disproved that, and came up with something, gonna love this, he called it "Germ Theory." Germs are still a theory! Atomic Theory is still a theory. Theory of gravity has never been proved."

"A theory, is a body of knowledge, that is supportive of, and explanative of facts. Scientific laws are included within a theory, facts are included within a theory, that's why you have the theory of evolution, the theory of gravity, the theory of relativity. There is no concept in creationism, which meets any of the qualifications of a scientific theory, none. You have no facts, you have no laws, you have no evidence, you have no explanative power. All you have, is whatever science can't explain, you pretend you can."

"You're an ape for the exact same reason that you are a mammal."

"I was told that faith is trust… I was told I would not step into an airplane unless I had faith that it would land safely. That doesn’t make sense because I know the plane exists… I know something about the safety ratings for commuting on an aircraft and I know that I can check my sources to find out they should be fairly reliable. But how could I be expected to trust things which can’t be verified and which are told to me by people which, frankly, can’t be trusted? I can’t trust the teacher, the preacher, or even the President, which when I was a boy was Richard Nixon. And maybe that was why I never recognized any authority as being unquestionable and that includes the people who wrote all the world’s religious tomes while claiming divine inspiration from a host of gods who cannot all exist at the same time."

"Each of my science books said, “This is why we think this; this is how we figured it out; and this is what we still don’t know.” That I can trust. And it inspires me to contribute. Conversely, religious books claim to already know everything we’ll ever need to know, even thought they never explained everything; and you’re forbidden to question them. Instead, you should believe them without suspicion and simply because they said so (even when they have already been proven wrong). This is why the word ‘confidence man’ describes a criminal swindler. Such people should not be trusted. When is it ever wise to believe someone without question?"

"While I don't like to encourage nationalism, I must admit that I feel... patriotic with regard to the ideals that the Founding Fathers had and on which this country was founded. I just wish that my fellow Americans knew more of our own history and of earlier European history to know what those ideals actually were."

"The atheists aren't the problem here. For example, atheists would not take sequestered school children and force them to recite the daily mantra that there is no god, because atheists aren't the ones imposing religious views onto other people's children, and thus denying their rights. It's not the atheists who impede medical research either; we're usually not the ones against free or affordable healthcare, and we're not the ones minimizing or criminalizing women healthcare either. We're not the ones proudly perpetuating prejudice, be it racism, sexism or homophobia (among others). We're not the ones prohibiting or punishing partnerships between consenting adults, and we were not the ones who argued that persecution against gays (for example) should be somehow excusable or not considered a hate crime if it's done in the spirit or inspired by religion. Atheists don't want religion to have exemptions under the law, and why should we? It's not our demographic that has the most divorces, that has the most chemical dependencies, domestic violence, criminal convictions or even abortions. The only thing we might have more of are diplomas."

"We [atheists] weren't the ones who came up with homeland security, conveniently ignoring inconvenient amendments in our own Bill of Rights. We aren't the ones determined to exploit fossil fuels to the exclusion of all better options, and we're not the ones wasting our resources like there's no tomorrow, because we're not the ones who actually believe there's no tomorrow. If you think these are the Last Days, then you're not going to prepare for the future, and if you elect such a person, then you are hiring them to lead you to your doom. Atheists are typically not the ones diverting millions of dollars into atrocious military offenses while simultaneously trying to defund beneficial public welfare programs like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education."

"If there is any group that can be typified by their frequent objection to and rejection of education, it is religion. From the Dark Ages to the Revivals, from the Taliban in Pakistan to American Christian creationists, religious extremism has historically always been an impediment to progress on many levels, and especially when that involves teaching actual factual information instead of baseless beliefs. What happens to the kids on the street when the government no longer requires or provides free schooling in the essential fundamentals? How bad could it be? Let's look at how bad it's already been; Christian dominionists seem to have this fantasy where they want to take us back to the good old days of the Industrial Revolution, where there will be no middle class and where poor illiterate children return to work in unrestricted factories, with no vaccinations and no hope for their future. That's not the America I know."

"I was born in the richest, most technologically advanced (and consequently the most powerful) country in the world. We were the leaders in science, so of course we had a better economy, and we had a higher standard of living than anyone else at that time. The rest of the globe sent their best and brightest to enroll in our schools because our students were among the most inventive, innovative and involved. Some of the greatest American scientists were the immigrants who stayed and enabled the United States to achieve more than anyone else had in the history of mankind. That's when our secular government still cared about better education. Sadly, that is not the country I still live in. America was number one, but saying that now reminds me of Aesop's fable where the hare is still resting on its laurels long after the tortoise has passed. In the fifty years since I was born, America's rating in science has fallen from number one to number thirty-seven. We have one of the lowest science scores of all countries in the developed world (or first world). Foreign scholars and foreign scientists don't stay here long after graduation (if they come at all), because what sort of environment do we offer intellectuals now? Our own scientists, our own graduate scholars are leaving as well, moving to Europe or Asia where they're more welcome, although an American going abroad now means that he will have to try to live down new stereotype instead of living up to the old one."

"The people who are overtly bigoted against gays now are often the same people who were openly bigoted against blacks years ago."

"A lot of folks are concerned about having yet another devoutly religious whackjob as president, but that's just a four year run, and we've survived that before. I'm more concerned with who sits on the Supreme Court, because that decision could cause continuing damage for decades, lasting much longer. At least one and perhaps three justices will be replaced within the next four years, and Romney has already said that he will put in more people like Scalia and Tomson: he wants right-wing religious conservative republicans."

"I would say that, whenever religion has rule over law, that madness will reign, with automatic violations of human rights, but maybe I'm being alarmist. What do they say? How can we know what sort of society they envision?.. We know that they are nearly all republicans, and that that party has been virtually assimilated by them, and we know they will speak more freely when they feel the safety of numbers. So let's look at the Republican Party platform of one of the red states, a very red state... Of course, they want to make pornography illegal (no surprises there), they also want to be able to filibuster the US senate again... Regarding the environment, they strongly support the immediate repeal and abolishment of the Endangered Species Act. Remember that these people don't believe in evolution, so they don't understand the importance of biodiversity and they don't care about the rights of animals either. They want to dominate and subdue the earth, just like their abominable doctrine demands, so they strongly oppose all efforts of environmental groups that stymie business interests, especially those of the oil and gas industry... Texas republicans not only want marriage to be restricted to one man and one woman (despite what the Bible says), but they insist it must be a natural man and a natural woman... So transgender people would be completely ostracized under the law should they get their way. There's no civil union options for gay couples either, because the platform also opposes the creation, recognition or benefits of partnerships outside marriage that are provided by some political subdivisions. As if that weren't enough, they also want to define the word "family" such that it excludes homosexual couples. They say they deplore sensitivity training (think about that for a moment), and they state very clearly that they want homosexuality condemned as unacceptable. They mean that very strongly too, so strongly in fact that they oppose any criminal or civil penalties against those who oppose homosexuality as a reaction of religious faith. In fact, they go so far as to urge the immediate repeal of the hate crimes law specifically where that relates to sexual orientation... If you're uncertain whether that includes acts of violence, there at least two members of the current State Board of Education who implied that it should, and we know of a few Tea Partiers who insist that homosexuals should be executed, murdered by the state. I am alarmed at how popular this abominable sentiment is... Under the heading "supporting motherhood", they strongly support women who "choose" to devote their lives to their families and raising their children, but they implicitly object to women choosing other options such as college, careers, or not having children at all. A woman's ambition beyond the confines of the kitchen and obeisance to her husband is decried by conservatives as a deplorable assault on the family which, of course, they blame on liberals. Regarding the right to life, they say that all innocent human life must be respected and safeguarded from fertilization to natural death. Notice a few subtle caveats here: the qualifier of protecting only innocent life is how Texas republicans justify having executed more prisoners than any other state in the union, nearly five times as many as the next deadliest state in fact. Says something about Christian forgiveness, doesn't it!"

"Our Republican Party platform is opposed to all methods of birth control, both preventative contraception and the morning after pill. Remember that in Texas they oppose any sex education other than abstinence until marriage. That's why our state has the highest rate of repeat teen pregnancies of the country. So they're creating a welfare dependent populace, but they also want to abolish all social welfare programs that these struggling kids will need. This will not only create unnecessarily stressful conditions for both parents and children, it will also ultimately eliminate the middle class. Our republicans want to do away with all government sponsored programs that deal with early childhood development, and they include pre-school and kindergarten in that list, but they don't stop there. They also want to abolish the Department of Education, because why would a religious organization want people to be educated? The real reason is because our secular government (which this country still is) will not permit state-funded schools to promote one religion over any other, and that is exactly what Texas republicans want to do."

"Do you know the penalty for blasphemy? It's death, just as it always is whenever religion is threatened, especially the Abrahamic religions. Violence is only the answer for those who don't understand the question, and religion is a misunderstanding of everything."

"Most people think of pterosaurs as "flying dinosaurs". When I was a boy, I remember the other kids called them "dinosaur-birds", but they were neither dinosaurs or birds. The first problem is that most people don't know any more about the fossil record than what they've seen in a few plastic pieces in a prehistoric playset. Not only do they typically think that all these things are dinosaurs, they might even think that these are all the fossil forms that are known. They have no idea how rich the fossil record is."

"Not everything that is big and dead is a dinosaur."

"Let's just ruin all the movies about pterosaurs: they could soar like airplanes, but they couldn't hover like hummingbirds. They couldn't carry things in their feet either, they couldn't perch on tree branches like birds, they didn't look like "bird-monsters", and they didn't look like "lizard-bats". They didn't have four-fingered wings like bats; their wings were based on an elongated pinky finger. The only thing bat-like about them was the way they walked; on all fours. So what are the possibilities for fluffy pterosaurs? We know they were a very diverse and almost certainly colorful group. They looked like a wide range of things, from fluttering bats to darting falcons. Some had powerful shell-crushing jaws and some had ridiculous crests, and some were quite huge. For decades, we were told that Pteranodon was the biggest animal that ever flew, then they discovered Ornithocheirus, then Quetzalcoatlus, then Hatzegopteryx (an apex predator)... These were capable killers of even human-sized prey, with a skull larger than that of even the biggest carnosaurs."

"In their evolution, we see that the earliest pterosaurs were small, and yet still unnecessarily heavy and clumsy, both in the air and on the ground, but 160 million years of refinement has honed their abilities to the limit of incidental engineering. Despite their enormity, they were unbelievably lightweight; even the biggest ones were estimated at less than 500 lbs. They had hollow pneumatic bones of large diameter but only millimeters thick, making a strut-supported tubular frame that's surprisingly strong and highly resistant to the stresses of aeronautics. They also had extraordinarily powerful wing muscles, and this made them capable of vaulting airborne in a single bolt. Once in the air, muscle strands and tendons in the membrane of the wing itself worked with a network of pycnofibres to give them all the data they needed for subtle adjustments to the shape of the wing. The portions of the brain which were dedicated to flight, balance and visual gaze stabilization in birds are all larger and more adapted in pterosaurs. In fact, scientists are now convinced that these animals had such a mastery of flight, that the larger ones could even cross oceans, going 80 mph at 15,000 feet for thousands of miles on a single launch."

"The Ten Commandments weren't historical. They're mythical, because they never existed and neither did Moses, neither does God; none of that is evidently real. Even rabbinical scholars now admit a consensus among archaeologists that the Exodus never happened, because the Hebrews were never enslaved in Egypt the way the Bible describes. Moses's childhood river arc was taken from the Saga of Sargon, and the parting of the Red Sea was adapted from the legend of an Egyptian pharaoh from an earlier millennium [Snefru and Djadjamankh]. Belief in the Ten Commandments never changed anything for the better either; most of the believers professing to promote them can't even recite them, and never knew what they meant."

"If that were true [that the principles of the Ten Commandments brought about universal human rights, women's suffrage, the abolition of slavery and parliamentary democracy], then all this progress would have come about thousands of years ago, and not just in the last century or so. But each of the advances... cited were made only recently, after the Enlightenment and in spite of the Commandments, because those Commandments are authoritarian, not democratic; they allow special privileges for one race over all others, they permit and endorse slavery, and they treat women as property. So, for these unique achievements to have occurred at all, the Commandments would have to be ignored or discarded first."

"There are eleven Commandments just in Exodus 20, and that list continues into the next three chapters, with many being ethnospecific and limited to the regional currency of sheep and shekels. It wasn't even relevant then and it has no parallel in the American legal system now, especially since we've freed the slaves, allowed women their own agency, and defied the Commandments by rejecting theocracy, permitting freedom of religion and prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, creed or national heritage."

"... back when nearly everyone in the Western World was ruled by religions touting these Commandments, it was a period of unparalleled tyranny and cruelty known as the Dark Ages. It was a time of thought police, when one could be killed simply for not believing what they were told. The first half [of the Ten Commandments] only serves to promote religion, with no benefit to humanity at all. Education, enlightenment and free inquiry are the key, not the forced conformity by those claiming authority from an imaginary being."

"Even after the part with the Ten Commandments, we still have God's self-appointed prophet ordering his army of barbaric thieves to pillage villages, killing every man, woman and child, but ironically some predominantly atheist countries in the modern world have finally achieved that sort of peaceful society [purported to be the product of a land governed under Mosaic law], with high education [and] very low crime, and the greatest threat to that comes from religious fundamentalists."

"If you were right [that the Ten Commandments are all that's necessary for an ideal society], then the world would have been less cruel thousands of years ago than it is today, and we wouldn't see all these improvements in our condition coming so late in history or accelerating in recent times. As our world becomes more secular, we would not see the consistent decline in inhuman atrocities that we have, nor the unprecedented rise in humanitarian compassion that continues today."

"Who is this God? The god of the Jews? Those who say they're God's chosen people? And what of these Commandments? The covenant between God and Israel? And why only Israel? Because neither their God or their fables were ever intended for the whole of mankind. It is the folklore of one particular tribe of superstitious primitives and is meaningless to us in the here and now, especially since your God never even existed. So these laws were given by men after all."

"Yes, it is absurd [to say that without God, murder is permissible], because even according to your sacred fables Moses murdered an Egyptian and then looked around to make sure no one saw him before trying to conceal the body, and the same goes for the myth of Cain and Abel, where Cain lied about killing his brother. Both of these characters obviously already knew that murder was wrong a long time before the story of the Ten Commandments, and this might be because Hammurabi had already established the code of law many centuries earlier than these myths found their way into the Bible, or it might be that, like most social animals, even superstitious savages understood that you shouldn't kill or maim other members of your own society (unless your religion commands it). One minute, God supposedly says "thou shalt not kill", and the next minute He orders His own people to kill every man and his brother, except of course for Moses's brother who really should have been the only one who was killed in that story. But somehow he was spared and promoted to priest instead; saved by nepotism. Then God told them all to kill all their neighbors, every man, woman and child, including the infants and the unborn. But the fact is that murder is still wrong, regardless of what God has to say about it, and there is still no justification when God allegedly commands His prophets to plunder communities and commit genocide."

"A just and fair judge would look at our actions and not our beliefs, thus it should be that good-hearted atheists could be rewarded over dark-hearted believers, but then no god worthy of worship would damn anyone to eternity either. This just one of many indications that it is not God making these judgements, but rather the people pretending to speak for Him. They're using the stick and the carrot to intimidate people into giving them credence and paying them tithes while reinforcing a shared delusion."

"We can tell murder is wrong because we have objective criteria by which we can determine for certain whether murder is wrong, and we can do that regardless of what mood the gods are in nowadays. There has to be an objectively verifiable reason why something is moral or immoral, or else no one could know whether it is, including God, since the Bible has Him changing His mind all the time. Without that criteria, you couldn't know what is moral or immoral either; you just have to trust whatever the people said who pretended to speak for God."

"... God's opinion is still an opinion, and the prophets of God are only expressing their opinions too; they're just claiming more authority than they actually have. Arguments from authority are worthless. You need to have a verifiable reason that can be determined objectively, regardless of what anyone has to say about it, including God."

"Having actually read all of the Commandments listed from Exodus 20 through Exodus 34 (and many of the other Commandments strewn about the Old Testament), it is obvious that anyone who uses them as a moral guide would be a criminal in every country on this planet. The Bible does not promote morality; it only commands obedience to an amoral, oppressive and unjustly enforced belief system."

"The story of the Ten Commandments is clearly based on the earlier story of the law code of Hammurabi, which was a better list and actually existed in real history centuries before the legends now attributed to Moses. Since then, people have come up with better documents like the Magna Carta and the U. S. Constitution. These are better, largely because they stand against what [the] Commandments represent; giving power to the people instead of indomitable despots."

"I know of people living in this country right now who think that white people came from Adam and Eve, and that there are all these other races that are separate creations and that aren't related at all. And I know from prior research that many different religious groups have believed this sort of thing for thousands of years, but the idea that any seemingly educated official would believe that during my lifetime is rather disturbing."

"Understand that sexual orientation is not a matter of choice, but your religion is. You're free to believe in any irrational idiocy that makes you happy, but your religion is an uninformed opinion, not an ethnicity, and should have no excuse for special exemptions from the law."

"... how many times... have they caught anti-gay advocates of "family values" cheating on their wives (often illegally) with prostitutes, on drugs, having gay sex or sharing a hotel room with a rent boy? It happens so often now that it's almost expected any time someone seems to protest too much."

"To the best of my understanding, bigotry, intolerance and hatred are not values, but then faith isn't a virtue either."

"... I think it's funny when any Christian organization pretends to be about "family values", because Jesus did not value families... So maybe it's not surprising that all these christian organizations with the word "family" in their name are really hate groups."

"I don't believe in marriage, myself. It's an arbitrary human concept with no reality beyond that. It isn't always necessarily romantic; it is often political. Even if you believe in God, and swear to love one another for better or worse, till death do you part, none of that is assured. In fact, evangelicals are statistically more likely to get divorced than people with no religion."

"It doesn't matter that [Christians] aren't paying attention to their religious doctrine, because marriage is not a sacred institution; it's a human invention. I'm married for the same reason other atheists like Penn Jillette are; it's partly for tax purposes, but also rights for partnership, possession, deathbed presence, inheritance and other benefits that civil unions just don't provide. But even if we made civil unions exactly identical to marriage, why can't we call it a marriage? "Because the Bible defines a marriage as one man and one woman". No, it doesn't! It is so irritating when everybody says that, because it's so wrong. First of all, the Bible doesn't define marriage at all. Secondly, if it did, that's not the description that it gives; the way the Bible describes marriage is creepy, criminal and cruel. According to the Bible, anyone you "cleave into" more than once becomes your bride if she happens to be living with you, and there's no limit on how many of them you can have, so it seems to me that the Bible defines marriage as one man and however many women that man can afford to keep in his house."

"Remember, [in the Bible] it's adultery only if the woman is already married. It doesn't matter if the man is married. If he is, she may just become another one of his wives, and a man can have sex with other women who aren't his wives, and that's not cheating either, as long as they live with him, because a man is also allowed to have concubines, and a concubine is a sort of sexual servant who serves no other purpose and has no claim to your estate. Your wife may not have a claim to your estate either, because when you die your wife may become your brother's sexual property. That's how the Bible defines marriage! The Bible does not prohibit multiple wives or incest either. In fact, both are promoted. However, when your father dies, your mother does not become your wife, and you can't inherit any of his other wives either, and the reason that the Bible gives for that is because that would be like looking up your father's skirt... So, a man can have multiple wives and a collection of personal harlots, but he can also have sex with his slaves, and that's not cheating either. You've heard of friends with benefits? You can call this your property rights. That's the only way that makes sense, because according to the Bible all women are property, and property doesn't have rights. Now, some people equate having sex with slaves to rape, because the slave doesn't have any choice. But, according to the Bible, women don't have any choice anyway, and rape can be a prelude to matrimony; if you're a Bronze Age Israelite and you see some young cutie walking unescorted, if you like her, you want her, you can have her, even if she doesn't want you. Now, if you rape a married woman, that's a death sentence for both of you (because the Bible is stupid like that). But if she's not promised to someone else, and you rape her and you get caught, you have to pay her father fifty shekels of silver and she's yours. He may not want her back after that, even his own child, because an unmarried woman who wasn't a virgin was considered damaged goods back then, so they had this rule that "if you pop it, you buy it." So your victim becomes your bride and you're stuck together forever, and can never get divorced (so be careful who you rape). There's actually a cheaper [and] easier way to get a bride; if a man takes a wife and decides he doesn't like her, if he can prove she wasn't a virgin (or if he can convince other people that was probably not a virgin), she she will be murdered on her father's doorstep because, according to the god of infinite mercy, that's the moral thing to do. But if she can prove that she was a virgin, then she must remain married forever to the man who hates her, because that's divine wisdom too. That unpleasant arrangement for both of you will also cost you a hundred shekels, whereas you can marry your rape victim for half the price. So, if you're a complete loser, and you can't get any woman who appeals to you by the normal way, just rape whoever you like and she's yours forever."

"The book of Proverbs repeatedly praises child abuse, saying that the bruises (or "blue stripes of the rod") are an indication of a well-trained child. Otherwise, God constantly has people killing children, and sometimes even eating them. Remember when Lot tried to satisfy a rape mob by offering them his own virgin daughters? Remember when Jephthah murdered his own child as a sacrifice to God? There's four books in the Old Testament where God demands that we sacrifice our firstborn sons, so the story of Abraham being ready to kill his own kid pales in comparison to what God demanded later on. How's that for family values! And don't think that all this Old Testament stuff didn't apply to Christians; Jesus said that He came to fulfill the law, not to change it, that not one jot or tiddle of those old Mosaic laws change under Him, and He said that anybody who didn't follow all of those old Mosaic laws would be called "least in Heaven". He even criticized the Pharisees for not murdering disobedient children the way God commanded."

"The Bible describes only the worst that a marriage can be, but never defines what a marriage should be."

"So, Kent Hovind gets out of prison and every atheist wants a piece of him. I understand that; I hate liars, I hate anyone who deceives even little old ladies and especially other people's children. So, of course I'd love to have the opportunity to get into it with Mister (not Doctor) Kent Hovind, as would every other atheist activist with a passion for science and a concern for truth. Understand though that this charlatan is every kind of fraud. He just wants to reestablish his racket. His schtick is to pretend to be more important than he is; we all know that his thesis was just as bogus as the PHD that he bought from a mail order catalog for about $100, he also claims to have taught high school science for about 15 years, hoping that folks will think that he has some verifiable connection to a high school somewhere (an actual school), but what I suspect is really the case is he may have preached to homeschooled kids at his house (which he used as a church sometimes). I can understand Atheist Podcast wanting to have this guy on to take him to task, but remember, he is a conman, a professional fraud. In his mind, he gains merit and financial supporters as a result of being "oppressed in the face of adversity", so go ahead and have him on, but only as a sideshow freak, someone to gawk at; show him the contempt he deserves. Don't treat him like an opponent, as if he had something to bring to the table."

"It's not that the U.S. isn't a great nation, but the biggest problem with being fed lies about how great we are is that people won't be prepared for how how evil this government already has been and therefore can be again. When I was a boy, I was proud that my country would never negotiate with terrorists. Would never torture prisoners. That it doesn't tolerate discrimination, and that it allows immigrants a chance to achieve the American dream... then after the turn of this century, we learn that it's not that way anymore. If you want to know how bad things can get, you only need to know how bad things have already been."

"Marching into the woods in the darkness I'm Robin Hood breaking your fortress Light it up start the fire, gonna strike you Step aside cause I’m on my way to Rome, yeah I'm made of stone I walk the road alone Fighting for my throne Woah oh"

"Hear the beat of the drums Woah oh You better run run Woah oh Hear the beat of the drums Woah oh Cause I'm a warrior, I'm a warrior Cause I'm a warrior"

"Will you remember my name or at the end of the night is it all a game Or will you hold on to my hand together forever we will stand Or the sun will rise and you’ve had your prize And you don’t even know the color of my eyes"

"Tonight I’m gonna make you mine Oh wait, that’s not supposed to be my line I’m waiting on you to make your move Boy I know that you think your smooth Show me what you got cause I got a lot Come on set your trap I want to get caught"

"You’re falling all over me I’m losing myself in your mystery I’m afraid of loving you, I’m afraid of losing me I’m over my head and I’m seeing red But I’m waiting right here for you in my bed"

"I’ll be the first unknown that everyone’s going to be sick of … People will say, “We have no idea what her name is, but she is everywhere!" … I did Salomé with Al Pacino, The Tree of Life with Terrence Malick, and all these films that were interesting and had great characters. But because they were so interesting, perhaps the directors had more control of them. They take their time, they’re not on a schedule."

"I don’t want to torture anything. … it’s about trying to live a life where I’m not contributing to the cruelty in the world. … While I am on this planet, I want everyone I meet to know that I am grateful they are here."

"We saw the choices. The audience will be given the opportunity. They can see Him and Her, or they can see Them. … Well, for the cinephiles and the people who really want to commit, I would definitely say, “See Him and Her.” It’s the full experience. … I’ve always thought Him and Her. But it’s funny, in Toronto, when Harvey Weinstein saw the film for the first time, he saw Her and Him, and he was determined. He was like, “That’s how it has to be seen!” So it depends."

"I was on the set of Tree of Life. He was with me, and he asked me [if I] would play Eleanor Rigby in his film. And I said, “Yes, but it’s so much the male perspective,” [whispers] like the majority of films that are made. I said, “I’d like to know more about the woman. I’d like to know her perspective as well.” So he went and he wrote Her. And it was very collaborative because every day as he’d write, I’d be working, and I’d come back and he’d ask me questions about sisters or whatnot and how women talk with each other, and I found that to be really exciting. … he was the full writer. I was his bounce board. Not story things, because that’s the main part of the film, but just things like, you know, cutting the hair. You know, because girls, we all tell each other, “Don’t cut your hair when you’re pregnant, don’t cut your hair when you have a breakup or when a tragedy happens.” It’s something that we like to do when we’re in an emotional place for some reason. Right? But that’s something that a man may not know, that’s inherently female. And so it was my idea, I wanted Eleanor to cut her hair off, because then it connects to then her disappearing herself as well."

"I can’t say ANYTHING. Everyone knows pretty much who I’m playing."

"A quirk of fate has put Chastain in a unique position. She is 30 now, and having worked solidly since leaving drama school with an impressive roster of A-list names, she is probably the most successful actress that no one has ever heard of. … This is about to change: over the next few months Chastain has so much coming out that she worries about being overexposed."

"Long before the #MeToo movement started, I was very upset when Jessica Chastain made statements against the film Last Tango in Paris. If you listen to her, that film should never have been made. To listen to her, Maria Schneider was raped. But Jessica Chastain wasn’t there, and it’s not true — I was on set. The scene was fiction."

"The soldier came knocking upon the queen's door, He said "I am not fighting for you any more.""

""I've watched your palace up here on the hill And I've wondered who's the woman for whom we all kill But I am leaving tomorrow and you can do what you will Only first I am asking you why."

"I have swallowed a secret burning thread."

"I won't march again on your battlefield."

"If you were to kill me now right here, I would still look you in the eye"

"And when they ask me, "What are you looking at?" I always answer, "Nothing much" (Not much)"

"I think they know that I'm looking at them I think they think I must be out of touch But I'm only In the outskirts And in the fringes On the edge And off the avenue And if you want me You can find me Left of center Wondering about you"

"I am sitting in the morning at the diner on the corner I am waiting at the counter for the man to pour the coffee and he fills it only halfway and before I even argue he is looking out the window at somebody coming in."

""It is always nice to see you" Says the man behind the counter To the woman who has come in She is shaking her umbrella And I look the other way As they are kissing their hellos And I'm pretending not to see them"

"I open up the paper, there's the story of an actor who had died while he was drinking, it was no one I had heard of."

"My name is Luka. I live on the second floor. I live upstairs from you. Yes, I think you've seen me before."

"If you hear something late at night, Some kind of trouble, some kind of fight, Just don't ask me what it was."

"They only hit until you cry, After that, you don't ask why."

"The light and sweet coffee color of her skin"

"Kids will grow like weeds on a fence She says they look for the light, they try to make sense They come up through the cracks like grass on the tracks She touches him goodbye"

"By day give thanks By night beware Half the world in sweetness The other in fear"

"When the darkness takes you With her hand across your face Don't give in too quickly Find the thing she's erased"

"Solitude stands by the window she turns her head as I walk in the room I can see by her eyes she's been waiting Standing in the slant of the late afternoon"

"And she turns to me with her hand extended Her palm is split with a flower, with a flame ...And she says, "I've come to set a twisted thing straight", And she says, "I've come to lighten this dark heart""

"If language were liquid It would be rushing in Instead here we are In a silence more eloquent Than any word could ever be These words are too solid They don't move fast enough To catch the blur in the brain That flies by and is gone."

"I'd like to meet you In a timeless, placeless place Somewhere out of context And beyond all consequences ...And we'll sit in the silence (That flies by and is gone) That comes rushing in And is gone"

"You come from far away With pictures in your eyes Of coffeeshops and morning streets In the blue and silent sunrise But night is the cathedral Where we recognized the sign We strangers know each other now As part of the whole design"

"You're the jester of this courtyard With a smile like a girl's Distracted by the women With the dimples and the curls By the pretty and the mischievous By the timid and the blessed By the blowing skirts of ladies Who promise to gather you to their breast"

"Oh Mom, the old man is telling me something His eyes are wide and his mouth is thin And I just can't hear what he's saying Oh Mom, I wonder when I'll be waking It's just that there's so much to do And I'm tired of sleeping"

"Those whole girls... Breathe with ease Need no mercy Move in light Run in grace"

"Travel, arrival Years of an inch and a step toward a source I'm coming to you I'll be there in time"

"A Senator of the U.S., a woman, is still a sort of political joke with our masculine leaders in party politics.. But the trail has been blazed! The road is apparently rough—maybe rocky—but the trail has been located. It is an established fact. While it is also a romantic adventure, it will ever remain an historical precedent—never to be erased."

"When the women of the country come in and sit with you, though there may be but very few in the next few years, I pledge you that you will get ability, you will get integrity of purpose, you will get exalted patriotism, and you will get unstinted usefulness." – Address to the Senate, November 21, 1922"

"When there is not enough religion in the pulpit to organize a crusade against sin; nor justice in the court house to promptly punish crime; nor manhood enough in the nation to put a sheltering arm about innocence and virtue----if it needs lynching to protect woman's dearest possession from the ravening human beasts----then I say lynch, a thousand times a week if necessary."

"Savage tribes used physical force to manage their women. The club and the lash were their only arguments. Moslem fanatics go a step further in saying women have no souls."

"This women's movement is a great movement of the sexes toward each other, with common ideals as to government, as well as common ideals in domestic life, where fully developed manhood must seek and find its real mate in the mother of his children, as well as the solace of his home."

"I do not want to see a negro man walk to the polls and vote on who should handle my tax money, while I myself cannot vote at all. Is that fair?"

"There were abuses, many of them. I do not pretend to defend these abuses. There were kind masters and cruel masters. There were violations of the moral law that made mulattoes as common as blackberries. In this one particular slavery doomed itself. When white men were willing to put their own offspring in the kitchen and corn field and allowed them to be sold into bondage as slaves and degraded as another man's slave, the retribution of wrath was hanging over this country and the South paid penance in four bloody years of war."

"There was never a more loyal woman in the South after we were forced by our political leaders to go to battle to defend our rights in ownership of African slaves, but they called it "States' Rights," and all I owned was invested in slaves and my people were loyal and I stood by them to the end. Like General Lee I could not fight against my kindred in a struggle that meant life or death to them. Nevertheless I am now too near the borderland of eternity to withhold my matured conscientious and honest opinion. If there had been no slaves there would have been no war. To fight for the perpetuation of domestic slavery was a mistake. The time had come in the United States to wipe out this evil. The South had to suffer, and even when our preachers were leading in prayer for victory, during the war, and black-robed mothers and wives were weeping for their dead ones, who perished on the field of battle, I had questions in my own mind as to what would be the end of it."

"Women mediate between men in the nerve centers of complex societies, seen but rarely heard, stimulating production over which they have no control, becoming consumers of products they inspire but do not produce, and finally becoming “consumed”- petted, admired and seduced- by the men who produce them.""

"This book recounts the story of the people in their struggle to maintain their way of life. Given this background of massacres, resistance, and protest, the courage they show in this current situation is remarkable. It should be an inspiration for those who maintain that progress can be made only when the rank and file of workers are the architects of the institutions in which they work and lie, just as it is a refutation of those who reject the primary role of workers in bringing about such a future""

"Just as the referential system of religion in the politics of indigenous peoples raises hackles with the sophisticated outside observer, so too does the self-referential language of motherhood and identification with the earth often used by women in these movements. In the postmodern, deconstructive mode now fashionable in anthropology, the very category of women is decried as essentialist.. . . We must go beyond deconstruction of the rhetoric to discover the incentives generating a common collective image among indigenous movements."

"The last few decades have witnessed a growing integration of the world system of production on the basis of a new relationship between less developed and highly industrialized countries. The effect is a geographical dispersion of the various production stages in the manufacturing process as the large corporations of industrialized "First World" countries are attracted by low labor costs, taxes, and relaxed production restrictions available in developing countries."

"The vanguard of industrial investment in the world capitalist system is in the lowest paid segment of those countries paying the lowest wages. Young women in developing countries are the labor force on this frontier just as women and children were in the industrialization of England and Europe in the nineteenth century. Escaping the patriarchal restrictions of domestic production, young women workers are segregated in the new industrial compounds where they are subject to the patriarchal control of managers."

"From the early years of the Industrial Revolution in England to the present in development countries, the household unit has resisted dependency on factory employment by clinging to a semisubsistence strategy."

"I’ve come to believe that you cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it."

"One of the difficulties when you’re coming out of oppression is that you get a concept of the messiah. You have to get to that point that we are the leaders we’ve been looking for. We are the children of Martin and Malcolm. I don’t know what the next American revolution is going to be like, but we might be able to imagine it, if your imagination were rich enough."

"We wanted to become part of the people who took responsibility for the country."

"I became so active in the black power movement that FBI records of that time say that I was probably Afro-Chinese."

"People thought of revolution chiefly in terms of taking state power. But we’ve had revolutions, and we’ve seen how the states which they have created have turned out to be like replicas of the states which they opposed. You have to bring those two words together and recognize that we are responsible for the evolution of the human species. It’s a question of two-sided transformation and not just the oppressed versus the oppressor. We have to change ourselves in order to change the world."

"Let me make a challenge to you, OK? With people of color becoming the new American majority in many parts of the country, how are we going to create a new vision for this country, a vision of a new kind of human being, which is what is demanded at this moment? So that’s your challenge."

"when you look out and all you see is vacant lots, when all you see is devastation, when all you see—do you look at it as a curse, or do you look at it as a possibility, as having potential? And we here in Detroit had to begin doing that for our own humanity."

"when you have been very active all your life, and suddenly you’re very restricted and don’t have much mobility, it’s tough. And it’s tough when you’ve been married for 40 years to be living alone."

"They need to know that a revolution is to advance their humanity and to advance the humanity of the human race. They need to know that a revolution is to create solutions and not to get angry at the people. They need to know that a revolution is not just protests, it’s not just anger, it’s not just a search for power. It’s a search for real problems for how to be a human being. And I think that’s what’s unique about the American revolution, and that’s what’s unique about this country, because even though there is a lot of poverty, there’s a lot of inequality, there’s a lot of physical hardships, I think the most profound hardship of the American people is that they want to change, they want to change themselves, they want to change this world, and they don’t know how to do it. And revolution is the way to do it, but not the old kind of revolution. So, I think, in that sense, the reason that people are responding so positively is that to see the film does meet a need, a very profound need. I mean, this country is in such deep trouble spiritually, in every human sense. It’s not just the finances. It’s not just the joblessness. It’s—I believe in a kind of American exceptionalism, that whereas in other countries you face the material hardships first and they become central, in the United States it’s something that’s a hunger that’s much deeper, that we have to find our souls."

"The question, which is actually from one of my teachers, Grace Lee Boggs, that she would always ask when we showed up to sit down and talk with her is, What time is it on the clock of the world? And I like this question. It always makes me kind of deconstruct time, when I’m like, oh, we’re in these looping patterns, actually. And we’re in a pattern that feels familiar in these ways and new in these other ways."

"Throughout this book, Martínez reminds readers again and again of why we should balance the wisdom of experience with the fire of youth and honor both perspectives. So many great leaders have boldly embodied this ethic, from the recently departed such as Yuri Kochiyama, Grace Lee Boggs, and Cedric Robinson, to those who carry on like Jamala Rogers, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, and Betita Martinez herself."

"Grace has made more contributions to the black struggle than most black people have."

"Grace’s legacy for us who are left here really is to consider that for each of us, we have our own responsibility to transform ourselves. As a transformative leader, it wasn’t that Grace wanted us to do as Grace did, but rather to explore ourselves to see what we could do to be better human beings, to stretch our own humanity, and to be involved in the social justice issues of our day."

"Grace Boggs is the inspiration, in many ways, for Freedom Dreams. You know, we go back to like 1992, and she started this debate with me about, you know, you need to read Dr. King, you need to pay attention to people’s needs beyond protest. Like, how do you build the society we’re trying to establish in time, in the present, as opposed to just continuing to fight for reform? And so, we had this ongoing debate, and she forced me to rethink some things. Even after Freedom Dreams came out, she had more critiques, of course. And so, I end the book with an epilogue that has a very substantial section on what is being built in Detroit right now as a result of the Boggs Center and the work that Grace and Jimmy Boggs did. And so, that’s a really important part of the story, saying that freedom dreamers are basically building that society of creating new human beings, new ways of being together that don’t fall into the same old trap of, you know, the Marxist seizing state power."

"When we think about Grace in the 20 century, she is very much an outsider. In the 21st century, she represents the uniting of people from different races and different backgrounds, in a way that is now defining America."

"Writing from bed is a time-honored disabled way of being an activist and a cultural worker. It's one the mainstream doesn't often acknowledge but whose lineage stretches from Frida Kahlo painting in bed to Grace Lee Boggs writing in her wheelchair at age 98. (preface)"

"there’s this new era of social justice movement about, “Yeah, we’re going to organize in the streets.” And let me tell you, I mean, I grew up hearing people like Grace Lee Boggs and all, everybody, that said, “Don’t wait for somebody to introduce things in the halls of Congress or wait ’til the White House wakes up. We transform our country by movement work outside of the halls of Congress and in the White House.” And so, believe in that, because that’s exactly what we’ve done."

"by 1966, '67, she's well known particularly in Detroit circles, but also nationally, as a black power figure."

"A massive rebirth is needed right now for much of the industrialized world-one that will justly transition us beyond the extractive dominance of fossil fuels and into a new way of being. Over the past few years I've found myself rereading the manifesto that Grace Lee Boggs and other women leaders wrote in 2005 that proclaimed, "Another world is necessary, another world is possible, another world has already started." In it they declare, "This universal crisis is not only a danger but a promise, an opportunity to advance ourselves and our societies to a new level, based on a new vision, new principles and values." With each new pipeline approved, with each new gas permit granted, world leaders show that they are not ready for this rebirth. But the Earth knows what's necessary and is continuing to send shock signals that we cannot keep on postponing this transition. How do we keep on rolling this rebirth along, even despite all that is politically, economically, environmentally against us?"

"I literally couldn't believe the images. I couldn't believe that men created such images, and that other men wanted to watch them."

"No anti-porn feminist I know has suggested that there is one image, or even a few, that could lead a non-rapist to rape; the argument, rather, is that taken together, pornographic images create a world that is at best inhospitable to women, and at worst dangerous to their physical and emotional well-being. In an unfair and inaccurate article that is emblematic of how anti-porn feminist work is misrepresented, Daniel Bernardi claims that Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon believed that “watching pornography leads men to rape women.” Neither Dworkin nor MacKinnon, pioneers in developing a radical feminist critique of pornography, saw porn in such simplistic terms. Rather, both argued that porn has a complicated and multilayered effect on male sexuality, and that rape, rather than simply being caused by porn, is a cultural practice that has been woven into the fabric of a male-dominated society. Pornography, they argued, is one important agent of such a society since it so perfectly encodes woman-hating ideology, but to see it as simplistically and unquestionably leading to rape is to ignore how porn operates within the wider context of a society that is brimming with sexist imagery and ideology. If, then, we replace the “Does porn cause rape?” question with more nuanced questions that ask how porn messages shape our reality and our culture, we avoid falling into the images-lead-to-rape discussion. What this reformulation does is highlight the ways that the stories in pornography, by virtue of their consistency and coherence, create a worldview that the user integrates into his reservoir of beliefs that form his ways of understanding, seeing, and interpreting what goes on around him."

"By the time they first encounter porn, most men have internalized the sexist ideology of our culture, and porn, rather than being an aberration, actually cements and consolidates their ideas about sexuality. And it does this in a way that gives them intense sexual pleasure. This framing of sexist ideology as sexy and hot gives porn a pass to deliver messages about women that in any other form would be seen as completely unacceptable. Imagine what would happen if suddenly we saw a slew of dramas and sitcoms on television where, say, blacks or Jews were repeatedly referred to in a racist or anti-Semitic way, where they got their hair pulled, faces slapped, and choked by white men pushing foreign objects into their mouths. My guess is that there would be an outcry and the images would not be defended on the grounds that they were just fantasy but rather would be seen for what they are: depictions of cruel acts that one group is perpetrating against another group. By wrapping the violence in a sexual cloak, porn renders it invisible, and those of us who protest the violence are consequently defined as anti-sex, not anti-violence."

"Women are brought up to depend on a man and to feel naked and frightened without one. We have been taught to believe that as females we cannot stand alone, that we are too fragile, too delicate, too needful of protection."

"There's something spectacularly freeing about acknowledging that one has both resources and limitations, and that both of these give shape to one's life."

"[Women] were not trained for freedom at all, but for its categorical opposite—dependency."

"Males are educated for independence from the day they are born."

"We have only one real shot at "liberation," and that is to emancipate ourselves from within. It is the thesis of this book that personal, psychological dependency—the deep wish to be taken care of by others—is the chief force holding women down today. I call this "The Cinderella Complex"—a network of largely repressed attitudes and fears that keeps women in a kind of half-light, retreating from the full use of their minds and creativity. Like Cinderella, women today are still waiting for something external to "transform their lives"."

"[The Cinderella Complex] used to hit girls of sixteen or seventeen, preventing them, often, from going to college, hastening them into early marriages. Now it tends to hit women after college—after they've been out in the world awhile. When the first thrill of freedom subsides and anxiety rises to take its place, they begin to be tugged by that old yearning for safety: the wish to be saved."

"Only after she begins to disengage from her belief in her own helplessness can she break out of the vicious cycle of dependency and its brutal effect in her life."

"Lack of confidence leads us into the dark waters of envy. We see men are functioning without hang-ups—and like girls who envy the unfettered freedom of older brothers, we find it easier to focus on how "lucky" the men are and how "unlucky" we are. Sequestered in an unfair situation, we don't have to do anything about achieving the competence and self-esteem we so admire in others."

"The woman who has sprung free has emotional mobility. She is able to move toward the things that are satisfying to her and away from those that are not. She is free, also, to succeed."

"If girls could do nothing else in this world, they were supposed to be able to keep their blood from showing."

"Female physical frailty is not a reality but a myth with an agenda."

"I didn’t feel comfortable with American children. I certainly knew more about sex and drugs by the time I was eleven than they would ever know. My father used to ask me when I was thirteen if I needed a diaphragm. I said, ‘No, Dad, really, I’m still a virgin.’ He said, ‘you let me know when you’re not.'"

"I like what’s happening to me now in every way. When you’re twenty, you handle it a lot differently than when you’re thirty—and I’m thirty-three. I was naïve enough to think it would be easy to get here. It wasn’t."

"I don't consider psychedelics hard drugs, [but] I also don't recommend that people take [them]. I think it's something that you either did in the sixties, or you just forget about it."

"Cass gained a lot of strength from her public. Once she was a star, she wasn't afraid of anybody, and certainly not me."

"I was raised to be very independent. I was raised to believe I could do anything I wanted with my life. My father said I was lucky to be born a woman because "women can do anything they want" with their lives. Of course, I didn't realize until later that my father was giving me a slightly unrealistic view, but I think that [it] gave me a lot of confidence."

"I've always had a reputation as the pretty girl. Pretty girls rarely get the good parts. We all have to do a film like The Burning Bed where we can really be degraded so that people think we can act."

"We toured in a Lear jet and that's the only way to fly, baby! Success is a bubble, though, and we knew the wonderful time we were having couldn't possibly last."

"People assume that there must have been tension between us, but the truth is I wanted to be just like Cass. Cass liberated me; she stopped John [Phillips] trying to have too much control over me. She taught me a lot about feminism, and she always encouraged me, although I was obviously inferior to her as a singer."

"I was so lucky to have been surrounded by really great actors. Everybody in that movie was a real actor: Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman, Richard Dreyfuss, Harry Dean Stanton. It was just a wonderful, wonderful experience for me and I had so much support and so much help and so much encouragement."

"I would not let her work until she was eighteen, and believe me, since the time she was being strolled down the street in her stroller, people were saying, “Can I use her in my commercial? Can I put her in my movie?” “No!” But I did let her take any class that she wanted to take. Singing, acting, dancing..."

"Neoliberalism is essentially a form of governing that sees democracy as an obstacle, at best, or as an illegitimate intervention into the rule of the market, at worst. For neoliberalism, rule by markets is understood as a form of governance that should be applied everywhere, not just to marketised goods, but to education, prisons, the organisation of state, and so on. So neoliberalism treats popular sovereignty, or decisions based on human agreement and deliberation, as inappropriate interference with the efficient market and the price mechanism."

"Terrorism conjoins with neoliberalism to heighten a sense of insecurity and even a sense that the nation state now fails to provide for the security of the people. That said, the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack remain very low in the order of possible dangers that a human being can face. A person is more likely to be killed by their own furniture than by a terrorist. So, we have fear and panic about improbable yet dramatic and unpredictable dangers, which is how terrorism works. It is supposed to make you frightened in a routine way by non-routine events, and it’s effective in that sense."

"One of the reasons — after 40 years of teaching — that I thought “it’s probably time to wrap it up” is that I began to get student evaluations that would say, “you know, she’s a really great lecturer and the materials were good, but there’s nothing else going on. There’s no PowerPoint, there are no videos…” and I realized they wanted a three-ring circus. That’s what they were used to. They were used to splitting attention and a lot going on, a lot of lights and music. [But the] explosion is meant to happen inside your mind — not outside."

"We must come to terms with the fact that the foods we've grown accustomed to—that have even helped to create the concept of our ethnic identity—may actually be feeding the machine of neocolonialism; that we remain enslaved to a system that thrives on our addictions and mental, physical, and emotional illnesses."

"Twenty years ago I thought: "What's the difference between eating a bloody steak and killing my dog, slitting him open and roasting him?" I've always loved animals but it was around the late 80s that I realised I had to go vegetarian. A lot of things converged in my life then – musically, emotionally – but mainly it was my love of animals and spending so much time touring that made me decide I had to change my diet. In the Runaways we used to eat a ton of junk food. So something had to give."

"I am, constitutionally, an actress and I think to be an actor is not only a different kind of discipline, but it’s completely introspective. So the solitude which is absolutely mandatory to write well is, I think, is hard for me. It’s training muscles I haven’t used very much. I love to write. I can write. But I’ve done nothing like this before and it will be a challenge."

"I think I’m more committed now. Some things are just serendipitous. My mother had the disease and I got involved with the organization, and then I met this splinter group out of the University of Minnesota Hospital, Dr. Karen Ashe and the team at the Grossman Center (for Memory Research and Care). I became sort of their spokesperson and then I got published. I published a first essay and a second essay and I’m up to my sixth essay. I speak all over the country and sometimes all over the world. It’s grown and blossomed into something that feels right. I’ve had a really good life and a wonderful career. I’ve been comfortable and I’ve been healthy. And I adored my mother. So this is my way to give back."

"When I arrived at Harvard in 1969, my fellow first-year graduate students and I were taken up to the roof of the Widener Library by a well-known professor of classics. He told us how many Episcopal churches could be seen from that vantage point. As a Jew (in fact a convert from Episcopalian Christianity), I knew that my husband and I would have been forbidden to marry in Harvard's church, which had just refused to accept a Jewish wedding. As a woman I could not eat in the main dining room of the faculty club, even as a member's guest. Only a few years before, a woman would not have been able to use the undergraduate library. In 1972 I became the first female to hold the Junior Fellowship that relieved certain graduate students from teaching so that they could get on with their research. At that time I received a letter of congratulation from a prestigious classicist saying that it would be difficult to know what to call a female fellow, since "fellowess" was an awkward term. Perhaps the Greek language could solve the problem: since the masculine for "fellow" in Greek was hetairos, I could be called a hetaira. Hetaira, however, as I knew, is the ancient Greek word not for "fellowess" but for "courtesan.""

"In India the perpetrators of violence are not Muslims (who are usually poor and downtrodden, but not involved in perpetrating violence, except in the special instance of Kashmir), but Hindus who sought their ideology in Fascist Europe and who model their stance on European anti-semitism of the 1930s. ... [Hindu political ideology was derived from] "European romantic nationalism and its darker aspirations to ethnic purity". .. The people who spoke Sanskrit almost certainly migrated into the subcontinent from outside, finding indigenous people there, probably the ancestors of the Dravidian peoples of South India. Hindus are no more indigenous than Muslims... What has been happening in India is a serious threat to the future of democracy in the world. The fact that it has yet to make it onto the radar screen of so many Americans, is evidence of the way in which terrorism and the war in Iraq have distracted Americans from events and issues of fundamental significance."

"One of the strengths of Cultivating Humanity is that it explicitly explores the conflict between authority and reason, even if the book does not entirely resolve this conflict. Nussbaum’s untrammeled confidence in both the universality of reason and the diversity of human life makes hers a challenging and curious book, one that strongly endorses multicultural study while distancing itself from nearly everything typically associated with it, including postmodernism, identity politics, and the critique of philosophical universalism. Here, in other words, we have an emphatic humanist who rebukes the ethnocentrism and willful ignorance of her fellow self-described humanists and the relativism and irrationalism of her postmodernist colleagues. Who knows? If her book is read as carefully and as sympathetically as it was written, it might just give humanism a good name again. But can it convince readers who don’t understand “reason” as she does? That’s another question entirely."

"I said that Nussbaum has only one card to play in this position, but then again, in Nussbaum’s deck of cards, reason always trumps, and all those holdouts who don’t like the rule of reason must ultimately be persuaded to reason differently — that is, similarly to us reasonable folk. Personally, I find this eminently reasonable. But I’m less sanguine about what reason can and can’t do when it’s confronted with political and religious opposition to gay and lesbian studies; fundamentalist Muslim clerics, evangelical Christian preachers, and even popes have so far seemed unmoved by Nussbaumian appeals to our common humanity and our shared capacity for reason. It seems prudent, then, at the very least, to entertain reasonable doubts about the reach of reason."

"Divorced from Alan Nussbaum in 1987, Nussbaum embarked on a romantic liaison with Amartya Sen, the Indian-born Harvard scholar who won the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics and later moved to Cambridge University in England. Working with United Nations development initiatives in impoverished areas of the globe, she and Sen came up with what they called the "capabilities approach," a way of measuring a nation's achievements apart from its economic output. Their idea was to look at factors such as ownership of property, access to health care and political systems, and sovereignty over one's body in matters such as reproductive rights. Nussbaum's romance with Sen was the second of three major relationships that demonstrate how tightly woven are her personal and professional worlds. Nussbaum's current partner, author and U. of C. law professor Cass Sunstein, to whom she recently became engaged, is, like Alan Nussbaum and Sen, an internationally known scholar. Nussbaum, it could be argued, rarely dates below the genius level."

"What began to bother me about Nussbaum's trajectory is that she is really not interested in the general issue of "religious violence" and the manner in which religious violence links up with religious sensibilities of one kind or another, whether perpetrated by the left or the right in India. What she is really interested in is mounting a political assault on what she identifies as the “Hindu Right,” and in this regard Nussbaum takes no prisoners... Alas, I fear, Martha Nussbaum has yet to resolve that “clash within” her own intellectual orientation."

"What makes her stylistic choices here so disappointing is not just that they are beneath commonly held standards of professional scholarship, but that they fall short of the standards of conduct that Nussbaum herself (via Gandhi) sets for India and America. In its own way, is not her treatment of these all-too-human subjects a kind of “violence,” a seeking to put them in their place? ...Nussbaum either cannot or does not wish to take seriously the question of Muslim extremism within India, or a broader regional backdrop to sectarian tension and violence..."

"Nussbaum advances her balkanization view of India through clever uses of ancient Indian history... Martha Nussbaum, who argues that India’s internal clash today is between the good guys, who are Westernized liberal Indians, versus the bad guys, who are branded as militant ‘Hindu thugs’.... But when it comes to India, she is aligned against Indian civilization and embraces radical Eurocentrism. ... She alleges that India has jumped on the bandwagon of fighting terrorism as a ploy to justify its own violence against religious minorities. Terror is a pretext to cover up India’s ‘values involved in ethnic cleansing’, which she wants to be ‘a definite deterrent to foreign investment’. After providing extensive gruesome details and highly sensationalized and exaggerated atrocity literature of Gujarat violence (including claims that have been exposed as fabrications), she cautions the world about Indians: ‘The current world atmosphere, especially the indiscriminate use of the terrorism card by the United States, has made it easier for them to use this ploy’. .. She accuses the Indian government of using al-Qaeda as ‘a scare tactic’, without providing any basis. She outright denies the existence of any India-based Islamic terror-network with Pakistani connections. India is not justified in enacting any special laws to control terror cells, she insists. She laments that the United States is not monitoring India as a threat to world democracy....Many of Nussbaum’s political stances are full of contradictions. For instance, in 2007 she argued against British unions that were boycotting Israeli academic institutions that were accused of political bias. But she took the opposite stand on Indian academic institutions and individuals, criticizing the world’s failure to not utter ‘a whisper about boycotting’ the Indians.... In this manner, she has been effective in shifting attention away from anti-India terrorism....Lacking her own direct scholarship on the complex issues concerning ancient Indian civilization, Nussbaum has parroted others who fit her politics."

"Nussbaum, if she were truly a well-wisher of India, would educate herself about Indian philosophy, religion and culture and read reports about Indian events by other than her Marxist/Socialist friends and colleagues. She should, as a rhetorician, be especially interested in the fourth-century logician Vatsyayana’s identification of the vices and virtues of speech. The vices originating from speech, according to him are mithya (falsehood), parusha (caustic talk), soochana (calumny) and asambaddha (absurd talk). The virtues of speech are satya (veracity), hitavaachana (talking with good intention), priyavaachana (gentle talk) and svaadhyaaya (recitation of scriptures). Prof. Nussbaum may want to appear on the “right side of history” but that should not be at the expense of truth."

"Most of the time walking is merely practical, the unconsidered locomotive means between two sites. To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking, physiologically like and philosophically unlike the way the mail carrier brings the mail and the office worker reaches the train."

"This history of walking is an amateur history, just as walking is an amateur act. To use a walking metaphor, it trespasses through everybody else's field—through anatomy, anthropology, architecture, gardening, geography, political and cultural history, literature, sexuality, religious studies—and doesn't stop in any of them on its long route."

"Walking has been one of the constellations in the starry sky of human culture, a constellation whose three stars are the body, the imagination, and the wide-open world, and though all three exist independently, it is the lines drawn between them—drawn by the act of walking for cultural purposes—that makes them a constellation. Constellations are not natural phenomena but cultural impositions; the lines drawn between stars are like paths worn by the imagination of those who have gone before. This constellation called walking has a history, the history trod out by all those poets and philosophers and insurrectionaries, by jaywalkers, streetwalkers, pilgrims, tourists, hikers, mountaineers, but whether it has a future depends on whether those connecting paths are traveled still."

"The whites who administered Native American subjugation claimed to be recruiting the Indians to join them in a truer, more coherent worldview—but whether it was about spirituality and the afterlife, the role of women, the nature of glaciers, the age of the world, or the theory of evolution, these white Victorians were in a world topsy-turvy with change, uncertainty, and controversy. Deference was paid to Christianity and honest agricultural toil, but more than a few questioned the former, and most, as the gold rushes, confidence men, and lionized millionaires proved, would gladly escape the latter. So the attempt to make Indians into Christian agriculturalists was akin to those contemporary efforts whereby charities send cast-off clothing to impoverished regions: the Indians were being handed a system that was worn out, and it is no surprise that they had trouble wearing this cultural certainty so full of holes."

"What distinguishes a technological world is that the terms of nature are obscured; one need not live quite in the present or the local."

"Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later, sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal, and change comes upon us like a change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to gamble. It's to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk. (p4)"

"...hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable. (p5)"

"Inside the word "emergency" is "emerge"; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters. (p12)"

"Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. (p17)"

"People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end. (p27)"

"Since the Seattle surprise, it's become standard practice to erect a miniature police state around any globalization summit, and these rights free zones seem to prefigure what corporate globalization promises. (p46)"

"I wonder sometimes what would happen if victory was imagined not just as the elimination of evil but the establishment of good (p61)"

"Writing is lonely, it’s an intimate talk with the dead, with the unborn, with the absent, with strangers, with the readers who may never come to be and who even if they read you will do so weeks, years, decades later. An essay, a book, is one statement in a long conversation you could call culture or history; you are answering something or questioning something that may have fallen silent long ago, and the response to your words may come long after you’re gone and never reach your ears, if anyone hears you in the first place. (p64)"

"A couple of years ago, a friend wrote to urge me to focus on the lyrical end of my writing rather than activism and I wrote back, “What is the purpose of resisting corporate globalization if not to protect the obscure, the ineffable, the unmarketable, the unmanageable, the local, the poetic, and the eccentric? So they need to be practiced, celebrated, and studied too, right now.” I could have added that they themselves become forms of resistance; the two are not necessarily separate practices. (p68)"

"A better world, yes; a perfect world, never. (p82)"

"The revolutionary days I have been outlining are days in which hope is no longer fixed on the future: it becomes an electrifying force in the present. (p108)"

"I believe in hope as an act of defiance, or rather as the foundation for an ongoing series of acts of defiance, those acts necessary to bring about some of what we hope for while we live by principle in the meantime. There is no alternative, except surrender. And surrender not only abandons the future, it abandons the soul. (p137)"

"Resistance is first of all a matter of principle and a way to live, to make yourself one small republic of unconquered spirit. You hope for results, but you don't depend on them. ("When We Lost" in 2016 edition)"

"...as Freire points out, struggle generates hope as it goes along. Waiting until everything looks feasible is too long to wait. ("When We Lost" in 2016 edition)"

"when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine act of insurrection. ("False Hope and Easy Despair" in 2016 edition)"

"Your opponents would love you to believe that it's hopeless, that you have no power, that there's no reason to act, that you can't win. Hope is a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't have to throw away."

"Most of us would say, if asked, that we live in a capitalist society, but vast amounts of how we live our everyday lives - our interactions with and commitments to family lives, friendships, avocations, membership in social, spiritual and political organizations-are in essence noncapitalist or even anticapitalist, full of things we do for free, out of love, and on principle."

"We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision. And yet, of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both. These are the forces that prefer the giant remain asleep."

"You row forward looking back, and telling this history is part of helping people navigate toward the future. We need a litany, a rosary, a sutra, a mantra, a war chant of our victories. The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we can carry into the night that is the future."

"The revolution that counts is the one that takes place in the imagination; many kinds of change issue forth thereafter, some gradual and subtle, some dramatic and conflict-ridden—which is to say that revolution doesn't necessarily look like revolution."

"Violence is the power of the state; imagination and non-violence the power of civil society."

"You may be told that the legal decisions lead the changes, that judges and lawmakers lead the culture in those theaters called courtrooms, but they only ratify change. They are almost never where change begins, only where it ends up, for most changes travel from the edges to the center."

"What lies ahead seems unlikely; when it becomes the past, it seems inevitable."

"The assumption that whatever we now believe is just common sense, or what we always knew, is a way to save face. It's also a way to forget the power of a story and of a storyteller, the power in the margins, and the potential for change."

"The word "lost" comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know. Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private space conspire to make it so."

"This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue."

"When I think of the artist Yves Klein, I think of those absolutists who preceded him by a generation or two, those who vanished, think of the boxer and Dadaist poet Arthur Cravan who in 1918 was supposed to leave Mexico to meet his new wife in Argentina but was never seen again; of Everett Ruess, the bohemian who might have become an artist or writer had he not disappeared into the canyons of Utah at the age of twenty in 1934, leaving behind a final signature carved into the rock: "Nemo" or "no one"; of the aviator Amelia Earhart who disappeared over the Pacific in 1937; of the pilot Antoine de Saint Exupéry who left behind several lapidary books before his plane too disappeared, in 1944, in the Mediterranean. They were all saddled with a desire to appear in the world and a desire to go as far as possible that was a will to disappear from it. In the ambition was a desire to make over the world as it should be; but in the disappearances was the desire to live as though it had been made over, to refashion oneself into a hero who disappeared not only into the sky, the sea, the wilderness, but into a conception of self, into legend, into the heights of possibility."

"… We talked while the full moon mounted in the sky, words filling up the narrow space between us, as much a buffer as a link. Hours passed and then suddenly at my foot there was a wriggle of the soil. A kangaroo mouse emerged, a creature that I have never otherwise seen except fleeing at a distance. I put my hand on the man's shoulder to call his attention to this surprise, and we fell silent and watched the strangely fearless mouse do its work for a long time, then resumed the conversation more slowly and more softly as the creature continued to refine its tunnel entrance and the mound of gravelly earth at its mouth, indifferent to our presence. Bats swooped down and snatched invisible meals from the air, and coyotes began to howl, more of them, closer and more persistently than I've ever heard before or since, a whole orchestra of drawn-out cries into the dawn."

"… It's hard to say whether it was pain or the past that was being extirpated or whether they were the same thing. The doctors who treated her were unlikely to have experienced such profound instability: disappearing mothers, the vast gap between the medieval Russian-Polish Pale and glittering amnesiac Los Angeles, the three or four languages she left behind and the English she never completely acquired, the annihilation of the world she came from and of the relatives she left behind. Post-traumatic stress disorder is an alternate diagnosis a therapist once proffered for her behavior, a condition that recognized all the kinds of war she survived and a world in which nothing was too far-fetched or terrible to be possible."

"For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go."

"She had to say, "That's her book" three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a nineteenth-century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn't read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless—for a moment, before he began holding forth again. (p3)"

"Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't. (p7)"

"Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being. (p9)"

"We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it's almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender. (p21)"

"There’s no good reason (and many bad reasons) colleges spend more time telling women how to survive predators than telling the other half of their students not to be predators. (p30)"

"Kindness and gentleness never had a gender, and neither did empathy. (p34)"

"Think of how much more time and energy we would have to focus on other things that matter if we weren’t so busy surviving. (p35)"

"Women’s liberation has often been portrayed as a movement intent on encroaching upon or taking power and privilege away from men, as though in some dismal zero-sum game, only one gender at a time could be free and powerful. (p35)"

"The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt. (p71)"

"The ways creative work gets done are always unpredictable, demanding room to roam, refusing schedules and systems. They cannot be reduced to replicable formulas. (p91)"

"The worst criticism seeks to have the last word and leave the rest of us in silence; the best opens up an exchange that need never end. (p94)"

"Like racism, misogyny can never be adequately addressed by its victims alone. (p153)"

"what is sometimes regarded as an inconsistency in the contemporary right-wing platform—the desire to regulate women’s reproductive activity in particular, and sexuality in general, while deregulating everything else—is only inconsistent if you regard women as people. If you regard women as an undifferentiated part of nature, their bodies are just another place a man has every right to go."

"Climate change is global-scale violence, against places and living species as well as against human beings. Once we call it by its true name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality."

"This is why I pair privilege with obliviousness; obliviousness is privilege’s form of deprivation."

"Language can erase, distort, point in the wrong direction, throw out decoys and distractions. It can bury the bodies or uncover them."

"(Which writers—novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets—working today do you admire most?) Jia Tolentino, Roxane Gay, Ocean Vuong, Louise Erdrich, Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, Elena Ferrante, Ariel Dorfman, Bill McKibben, Jamaica Kincaid, Maria Popova, Annie Dillard, Arundhati Roy, Leslie Marmon Silko, Alicia Garza, Fanny Howe, Nick Flynn, Lidia Yuknavitch, Greg Sarris, Elizabeth Kolbert, Jane Mayer, Jelani Cobb, Ronan Farrow, Valeria Luiselli, Eyal Press, Gustavo Esteva, Robert Hass, Mike Davis, Rob Macfarlane, Richard Holmes, Masha Gessen, Zeynep Tufekci, Rebecca Traister, Dahlia Lithwick, Soraya Chemaly, David Corn, Garance Burke, A. C. Thompson."

"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) To recognize a pattern and a meaning and an order in the world you didn't quite see before is exhilarating, and sometimes even exalting, and there is a moral beauty in the actions people perform out of generosity and courage that stirs and fortifies me—it's why I read and write about political activism and public life."

"I also read poetry—from Pablo Neruda to Warsan Shire—fairly regularly, and it keeps my sense of what words can do wide open and my sense of beauty awake."

"The books I write often feel like the books I wanted to read, but they didn't exist, so I brought them into being."

"I think of voting as a chess move, not a valentine."

"L.A. Kauffman: I am curious to hear what things are making you most hopeful right now, what things in the landscape you are really fixing on as signs of hope. Rebecca Solnit: Two things that always come up for me: one is that half the people under 18 in this country are not white. And you see how awesome, like, the Parkland students are, and that this rising generation kind of gets the connections between economics and race and gender. They are not nearly as homophobic as anyone who ever came before them, and a lot of them actually think very fluidly about their own gender and who they are attracted to. So, and that is coupled with the fact—and this is something I have written about, because it does not feel widely enough understood—the Republicans could not have won any of the last many national elections except through massive voter suppression."

"As Rebecca Solnit vividly documents in her 2009 book, A Paradise Built in Hell, it is precisely when humanitarian crises hit that these other, neglected values leap to the fore, whether it's the incredible displays of international generosity after a massive earthquake or tsunami, or the way New Yorkers gathered to spontaneously meet and comfort one another after the 9/11 attacks."

"(Whose writing today most inspires you?) Rebecca Solnit is a clarion voice of reason."