I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That's the beginning of social protest.

I soon discovered that if you keep your mouth shut, people are apt to believe you know everything, and they begin to feel freer and freer to tell you anything, anxious to show that they know something, too.

It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society is to encourage excellence. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.

There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.

When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place in which I am like you and the place in which I am not like you, I'm not excluding you from the joining - I'm broadening the joining.

When you reach out and touch other human beings, it doesn't matter whether you call it therapy or teaching or poetry.