Both love and democracy depend on voice -- having a voice and also the resonance that makes it possible to speak and be heard.

For a man to be a man, did he have to be a soldier, or at least prepare himself for war? For a woman to be a woman, did she have to be a mother, or at least prepare herself to raise children? Soldiers and mothers were the sacrificial couple, honored by statues in the park, lauded for their willingness to give their lives to others.

Both love and democracy depend on voice -- having a voice and also the resonance that makes it possible to speak and be heard.

While men represent powerful activity as assertion and aggression, women in contrast portray acts of nurturance as acts of strength.

Women have traditionally deferred to the judgment of men although often while intimating a sensibility of their own which is at variance with that judgment.

The blind willingness to sacrifice people to truth, however, has always been the danger of an ethics abstracted from life.

Maybe love is like rain. Sometimes gentle, sometimes torrential, flooding, eroding, joyful, steady, filling the earth, collecting in underground springs. When it rains, when we love, life grows.