"I can go on the road - because I can come home. I come home - because I'm free to leave. Each way of being is more valued in the presence of the other. This balance between making camp and following the seasons is both very ancient and very new. We all need both."

"I hate to generalize, but in general, both men and women suffer from ageism. Men much less because men gain power as they get older. Women lose power as they get older. Men are seen as gaining experience and being distinguished. Sons look forward to replacing their fathers."

"I think we each come out of the womb with some unique way of looking at the world and if we don't express it, we loose faith in ourselves."

"The uncomfortable truth seems to be that the amount of talk by women has been measured less against the amount of men's talk than against the expectation of female silence."

"If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?"

"Citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own conscience can transform countries, it is the basis of any real democracy."

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

"All women, and men of color - we were owned like tables and chairs. We spent a hundred years getting a legal identity as human beings. That's a big thing."

"A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual."

"Without leaps of the imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning."

"Unless we include a job as part of every citizen's right to autonomy and personal fulfillment, women will continue to be vulnerable to someone else's idea of what need is."

"Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one."

"Because I have work to care about, it is possible that I may be less difficult to get along with than other women when the double chins start to form."

"I didn't hear words that were accurate, much less prideful. For example, I never once heard the word clitoris. It would be years before I learned that females possessed the only organ in the human body with no function than to feel pleasure. (If such an organ were unique to the male body, can you imagine how much we would hear about it-and what it would be used to justify?)"

"I also noticed that humor was even more of a survival tactic here than in most women's groups. As one asked: What did Columbus call primitive? Answer: Equal women."

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

"We are becoming the men we wanted to marry."

"The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day; a movement is only people moving."

"Rich People plan for three generationsPoor people plan for Saturday night."

"If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?"

"Father Egan continues to write about everything from the injustice of current wars to the past and future of Catholic mysticism.In the Catholic Reporter, he publishes an article titled "Celibacy, a Vague Old Cross on Priestly Backs", and explains that it started "only in 1139 when the church no longer wanted to be financially responsible for the children of priests."

"Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described - and will be, after our deaths - by each of the family members who believe they know us."

"What has the women's movement learned from Geraldine Ferraro's candidacy for vice president? Never get married."

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

"Or perhaps it's "activist," but on environmental and economic problems, without understanding that pressuring women to have too many children is the biggest cause of environmental distress, and economic courses should start with reproduction, not just production."

"Despite all their faults, campaigns are based on the fact that every vote counts, and therefore every person counts. As freestanding societies, they are more open than academia, more idealistic than corporations, more unifying than religions, and more accessible than government itself."

"A journey - whether it's to the corner grocery or through life - is supposed to have a beginning, middle, and end, right? Well, the road is not like that at all. It's the very illogic and the juxtaposed differences of the road - combined with our search for meaning - that make travel so addictive."

"This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism."

"A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men."

"The problem for all women is we're identified by how we look instead of by our heads and our hearts."

"Never having seen women play chess, they assumed this game wasn't for them and without even a female teacher as role model, they dropped out."

"Hope is a very unruly emotion."

"I took a part-time editing job to pay the rent. It was work I could do at home, but when suddenly I was expected to spend two days a week in the office, I quit, bought an ice cream cone, and walked the sunny streets of Manhattan."

"Mrs. Greene made me understand the parallels between race and caste--- and how women's bodies were used to perpetuate both. Different prisons. Same key."

"A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space."

"We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs."

"In short, we would discover, as we should already, that logic is in the eye of the logician. (For instance, here's an idea for theorists and logicians: if women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long? I leave further improvisation up to you.)"

"I'd like to be played as a child by Natalie Wood. I'd have some romantic scenes as Audrey Hepburn and have gritty black-and-white scenes as Patricia Neal."

"Pornography is about dominance. Erotica is about mutuality."

"As Robin Morgan wrote so wisely, "Hate generalizes, love specifies". Thats what makes going on the road so important. It definitely specifies."

"Logic is in the eye of the logician."

"After all, hope is a form of planning."

"Monotheism makes me grouchy. I don't trust any religion that makes God look like one of the ruling class. I guess I'm a pagan or an animist."

"Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men."

"A gender-equal society would be one where the word 'gender' does not exist: where everyone can be themselves."

"The first resistance to social change is to say it's not necessary."

"In Indian Country, he says, "we have a different sense of time. I'm learning and you're learning-and more will."

"No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin-because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names, and promise rebirth into everlasting life."

"What I've learned is that unless it's an emergency, like a fire or brain surgery, hierarchy is not necessary and may be damaging. If you have a hierarchy, you're repeating the strengths and weaknesses of one person without allowing for the accumulative strength of a group."

"Altogether, I can't imagine technology replacing bookstores completely, any more than movies about a country replace going there."