If you do not learn to hate you will never be lonely enough to love easily nor will you always be brave, although it does not grow any easier. Do not pretend to convenient beliefs, even when they are righteous; you will never be able to defend your city while shouting.

Oppression is as American as apple pie.

We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.

Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures.

I have come to believe that caring for myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

Women are powerful and dangerous.