... we've allowed a youth-centered culture to leave us so estranged from our future selves that, when asked about the years beyondfifty, sixty, or seventy--all part of the average human life span providing we can escape hunger, violence, and other epidemics--many people can see only a blank screen, or one on which they project fear of disease and democracy.

No one can give us power. If we aren’t part of the process of taking it, we won’t be strong enough to use it.

Power in this country is often like hemophilia; it passes through women and then men get it.

We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach.

A lot of the people who are supposed to be enforcing the crime, enforcing the law, are also criminals. They've suppressed something in their childhood and they don't want to think they themselves were sexually abused as children or they are abusing their own children and they're sitting on a bench and they either can't admit it, won't admit it, depending on how deeply buried it is.

I think we acquire habits of mind when we're little, and I lived in the future because I was always imagining being a grown-up, when I could get out.

My father was the Jewish half of the family, yet it was my mother who taught me to have pride in that tradition.