The family is the basic cell of government: it is where we are trained to believe that we are human beings or that we are chattel, it is where we are trained to see the sex and race divisions and become callous to injustice even if it is done to ourselves, to accept as biological a full system of authoritarian government.
It's a fundamental human right to decide to have children or not to have children.
We all have good instincts unless they're beaten out of us or shamed out of us in childhood.
Everyone is unique and each experience is different.
When you attempt something new, there's always fear. A couple of helpful slogans to me are "follow the fear" or "fear is a sign of growth."
We'll only really know we've succeeded when a mediocre woman does as well as a mediocre man. You shouldn't have to be extraordinary. That's the point!
Most books are bought by women.
Women and men are equal human beings.
We have to imagine change before we can begin to move toward it.
When the gender role starts to descend, boys get into the masculine box.
If we're isolated, we come to feel powerless when we're not.
It feels as if childhood sexual abuse or domestic abuse of women in the home has increased but actually if you ask women of 60 or 70 years old, the incidence is about the same. We just didn't know it.
One of the things I understood from early on was that art was a symbol of systemic inequity.
I believe that art has incredible power.
We have to know before we can act.
It used to be said that this country was a child-centered one. Nothing could be further from the truth. Children have been our lowest priority, both in economic and emotional spending.
Whatever the gender of the participants, all pornography including male-male gay pornography is an imitation of the male-female, conqueror-victim paradigm, and almost all of it actually portrays or implies enslaved women and master.
If you follow the voice inside you, it does give you guidance.
the less powerful group usually knows the powerful one much better than vice versa - blacks have had to understand whites in order to survive, women have had to know men - yet the powerful group can afford to regard the less powerful one as a mystery.
If you're going to have a male dominant system, to maintain the system, you have to teach men to dominate.
The surest way to be alone is to get married.
There is bias and sexism everywhere, just like there are problems of racism and homophobia stemming from the whole notion that we're arranged in a hierarchy, that we're ranked rather than linked.
It's hard to measure success when we're dealing with between 500 and 5,000 years of patriarchy depending on which continent we sit, so I would say feminism has been successful and we have a huge distance to go, huge.
I think my role is as a writer, especially, and then also as a speaker, an organizer, and an entre- preneur of social change. My role isn't to make choices for people-each individual or group needs to do that on their own. But as a writer and a speaker, you can describe possibilities that perhaps haven't been visible before, and aren't in other public dialogues or in the rest of the media. So I suppose I think of myself mainly as an organizer and as someone who describes possibilities.
If women could sleep their way to the top, there'd be a lot more women at the top.
