I learned always to trust my own deep sense of what I should do, and not just obediently trust the judgment of others - even others better than I am.

People who attack others need rationalizations for doing so. We undermine those rationalizations.

All prisons that have existed in our society to date put people away as no human being should ever be put away.

We believe, in fact, that the one act of respect has little force unless matched by the other - in balance with it... The acting out of that dual respect I would name as precisely the source of our power.

This is the heart of my argument: We can put more pressure on the antagonist for whom we show human concern.

People may find it more comfortable to listen to us if we equivocate, but in the long run only words that discomfort them are going to change our situation.

We learn best to listen to our own voices if we are listening at the same time to other women-whose stories, for all our differences, turn out, if we listen well, to be our stories also.