I don't like debates anyway. I have never debated anyone, I think they're a very masculine form - like an intellectual prizefight. They let you know who the better debater is but they don't really tell you about the issue. It's all heat, but no light.

Labeling makes the invisible visible, but it's limiting. Categories are the enemy of connecting. Link, don't rank.

In retrospect, perhaps the biggest reason my mother was cared for but not helped for twenty years was the simplest: Her functioning was not that necessary to the world.

Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.

... 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.

[On gender-rating by insurance companies:] They say the reason they get to charge more is we have children. I would say having children is a socially useful act. Being female is not a preexisting condition.

If the men in the room would only think how they would feel graduating with a 'spinster of arts' degree they would see how important this is.