We teach what we need to learn.

The cleanup costs of polluting a river, injecting pesticides into the ground water, or putting noxious gases into the air have not been figured into the cost of the manufacturing or agribusiness that put them there in the first place. Historically, the economic incentive has been to pollute.

Most women's magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers.

If we have reproductive freedom, that is the ability to decide for ourselves when and whether to have children and what happens to our bodies, sexism can be reversed. It's the understanding that it's not inevitable. I think that is crucial.

Given the expectations of society at large, men are generally correct in their assumption that it is important for a woman to have a man. What they do not understand is how pathetically little difference it makes what man.

You have no choice but to live in the present, if you're really being open to events and people as they come along.

I think my role is as a writer, especially, and then also as a speaker, an organizer, and an entre- preneur of social change. My role isn't to make choices for people-each individual or group needs to do that on their own. But as a writer and a speaker, you can describe possibilities that perhaps haven't been visible before, and aren't in other public dialogues or in the rest of the media. So I suppose I think of myself mainly as an organizer and as someone who describes possibilities.