Authors From The United States

"I was once hired to develop a Windows-based chemistry library for a company that builds reactors that burn toxic metal waste into harmless substances (really). (1993/11)"

"I'm a nit, what can I say? (1994/12)"

"OK, I admit it. I'm like you."

"Like I said, you're damned either way. (1993/10)"

"...you'll screw everything up. (1994/10)"

"Stop beating your head, you might hurt yourself. (1995/8)"

"What are you doing, anyway? Writing code for IBM? (1996/1)"

"...why are you doing these things? Don't. (1993/12)"

"...[some code] looks disgusting, but that's life. (1993/6)"

"The implementation is brainless (various)"

"Don't do it! (1993/10)"

"A bug! A bug! Isn’t it just so satisfying to discover bugs in other people’s programs? Especially people from Microsoft. I don’t know why, it’s probably some kind of Freudian code-envy thing."

"It may seem kludgy, but hey - it works! (1994/3)"

"So? If you don't like it, write your own [program]. (1995/10)"

"Reusability, man. (1995/10)"

"Pretty simple. Except for one little problem: it doesn't work! (various)"

"But hey, I only work here. Besides, it works. (1995/6)"

"To be honest, there's something a little weird about this. (1995/4)"

"...perhaps this is a "feature", not a bug...."

"...my Trusty Friends in Redmond..."

"Freedom of expression is no longer a political nicety, but a precondition for economic competitiveness."

"Tomorrow's illiterate will not be the man who can't read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn."

"By instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education."

"Change is not merely necessary to life; it is life. By the same token, life is adaptation. There are, however, limits on adaptability. When we alter our life style, when we make and break relationships with things, places or people, when we move restlessly through the organizational geography of society, when we learn new information and ideas, we adapt; we live. Yet there are finite boundaries; we are not infinitely resilient. Each orientation response, each adaptive reaction exacts a price, wearing down the body's machinery bit by minute bit, until perceptible tissue damage results. Thus man remains in the end what he started as in the beginning: a biosystem with a limited capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the consequence is future shock."

"If industrialism, with its faster pace of life, has accelerated the family cycle, super-industrialism now threatens to smash it altogether."

"Change is the process by which the future invades our lives, and it is important to look at it closely, not merely from the grand perspectives of history, but also from the vantage point of the living, breathing individuals who experience it. The acceleration of change in our time is, itself, an elemental force. This accelerative thrust has personal and psychological, as well as sociological, consequences."

"…the sudden rise of a religious movement in the West that restricts the eating of beef and thereby saves billions of tons of grain and provides a nourishing diet for the world as a whole."

"If the new feminism did not appear on the scene in the 1930s or 40s, this was because the war economy had created new job opportunities for women. But at the end of World War II, returning veterans quickly reclaimed their "rightful places" in the economy, displacing female workers, and millions of women voluntarily took up domesticity and war-deferred motherhood. The young women of the 40s and 50s were living out the social phenomenon that Betty Friedan called the "feminine mystique" and Andrew Sinclair the "new Victorianism." Essentially it amounted to a cultural command to women, which they seemed to accept with enthusiasm, to return to their homes, have large families, lead the cultivated suburban life of status-seeking through domestic attainments, and find self-expression in a variety of avocations. This tendency was bolstered by Freudian psychology as adapted in America and vulgarized through the mass media…What Betty Friedan has described as the "feminine mystique" is essentially the symptom of a cultural lag, in which our societal and personal values are adapted to a family pattern that has long ceased to exist."

"A pioneering, early book, strong and influential, was Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique."

"Friedan's politics have always been confused. The experience that shaped her feminism--and inspired the eloquent indignation of The Feminine Mystique was the suburban wife's confinement to marginality and isolation. From that perspective the promise of feminism was escape from the sidelines. The rhetoric Friedan uses to describe the aims of "first stage" feminism is all about getting in-"in the mainstream, inside the party, the political process, the business world." Radical women's liberationists rudely insisted that, on the contrary, to oppose sexual inequality was to challenge men and the whole fabric of male-female relations, which by definition meant taking a stand outside the mainstream. Since the radicals had militant energy and an analysis of women's condition, both of which the liberals lacked, they immediately took center stage, capturing the public's and the media's imagination, pushing NOW and other liberal groups to take bolder positions. All this put Friedan in a terrible double bind. To associate herself with radicalism was to exchange the marginality of a housewife for the marginality of a rebel. But to ignore it was to risk being left behind, relegated to marginality within the movement itself. From the beginning, Friedan's response to this dilemma was to attack and misrepresent radical feminists while shamelessly co-opting their ideas."

"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."

"I wasn't aware of what was happening to women in my part of the world until I read The Female Eunuch and books on feminism by Friedan that transformed my personality overnight and brought an awareness of, "my God, what we have suffered as women!" So it wasn't something you just spontaneously erupt into knowing. It's an awareness that dawns through hearing people, reading and through discussing things with other women perhaps."

"When was the last time you heard Gloria Steinem or Betty Friedan talk about welfare rights?"

"Betty Friedan's antilesbian sentiments were so present in NOW that a group of lesbians, including Karla Jay and Rita Mae Brown, formed the Lavender Menace"

"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."

"After the rally I came back to the office and had a very upsetting conversation with Betty Friedan, who used to head the National Organization of Women. Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm and I have this major difference of opinion with Betty as to what the nature of a women's political movement should be. She seems to think we should support women for political office no matter what their views, and we don't. I feel our obligation is to build a real political movement of women for social change. I don't think we're at the level where we have to fight to get just any woman elected, especially if she turns out to be a Louise Hicks. But because she tends to regard herself as "the" leader of the women's movement, Betty is impossible sometimes. This may be why she's made it appear as if there are all kinds of differences between us. What distresses me most is that I know deep down that Betty understands politics in the same way I do. This is why I can't understand what she's up to. It doesn't add up. Now, don't get me wrong about Betty, please. All women owe her a great debt because she helped revive the whole women's movement in this country. She stimulated a revolt among the bored and frustrated middle class suburban housewives, and that led to the organization of groups like NOW. She's been part of the "consciousness-raising" among women that's given some foundation for the political movement we're now talking about. All I'm beginning to wonder is if she realizes that forming a political movement is a more complicated thing than giving lectures, writing books, having one-shot demonstrations and press conferences and appearing on the Dick Cavett Show. It takes a lot more than that-it takes organizing and a real knowledge of how the political machinery works."

"If women’s role in life is limited solely to housewife/mother, it clearly ends when she can no longer bear more children and the children she has borne leave home."

"What had really caused the women’s movement was the additional years of human life. At the turn of the century women’s life expectancy was forty-six; now it was nearly eighty. Our groping sense that we couldn’t live all those years in terms of motherhood alone was “the problem that had no name.” Realizing that it was not some freakish personal fault but our common problem as women had enabled us to take the first steps to change our lives."

"If I were a man, I would strenuously object to the assumption that women have any moral or spiritual superiority as a class. This is [...] female chauvinism."

"Friedan: I thought it was absolutely outrageous that the Silence of the Lambs won four Oscars. [...] I'm not saying that the movie shouldn't have been shows. I'm not denying the movie was an artistic triumph, but it was about the evisceration, the skinning alive of women. That is what I find offensive. Not the Playboy centerfold."

"Friedan: I think it's partly a reaction against feminism, partly envy of feminism, and partly partly a real need of men to evolve through the burden of the masculine mystique, the burden of machismo."

"Playboy: What's behind the current's men's movement?"

"Friedan: Men had to be supermen: stoic, responsible meal tickets. Dominance is a burden. Most men who are honest will admit that."

"Playboy: What was it?"

"Friedan: There was a masculine mystique, too."

"Friedan: A celebration of women's bodies is all right with me so long as there is no denial of the personhood of women. I suppose sometimes women are sex objects -- and men are too, by the way. It's the definition of women just as sex objects that bothers me. Women can celebrate themselves as sex objects, they can celebrate their own sexuality and can enjoy the sexuality of men as far as I'm concerted. Let's have men centerfolds. [..] Playboy's centerfold is fine. It's holding onto your own anachronism and it is not pornographic, though many of my sisters would disagree. It's harmless. [...] Playboy strikes me as an odd mixture of sex -- sometimes juvenile --- and forward intellectual thoughts."

""Do you object to the celebration of sexuality in our pictorials?"

"A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of man’s advance in the professions, or by refusing to compete with man at all."

"A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex but neither should she 'adjust' to prejudice and discrimination."

"When women take their education and their abilities seriously and put them to use, ultimately they have to compete with men. It is better for a woman to compete impersonally in society, as men do, than to compete for dominance in her own home with her husband, compete with her neighbors for empty status, and so smother her son that he cannot compete at all."