What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?

But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.

Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time, and the arena, and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle where we are standing.

For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

The more I use my strength in the service of my vision the less I am afraid.

Institutionalized rejection of differences is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate.