We're communal animals. If we're by ourselves, we can feel wrong and crazy and out of step with society. We really need those talking circles.

Severe opposition is a measure of success (because) one inevitable result of winning a majority change in consciousness is a backlash from those forces whose power depended on the old one.

It's not okay for a woman to be in control of her own body, her own reproductive system, much less of her life. There's opposition even to that. So passivity is rewarded as feminine.

Self-hatred leads to the need either to dominate or to be dominated.

Inside each of us is a unique person resulting from millennia of environment and heredity combined in a way that could never happen again and could never have happened before. We aren't blank slates, but we are also communal creatures who are born before our brains are fully developed, so we're very sensitive to our environment. The question is: How to find the support and the circumstances that allow you to express what's inside you?

Our children are the only people on whom we can safely take revenge for what was done to us.

I don't remember being thought of as good-looking until I became a feminist. It's more of a comment on people's expectations than of what a feminist would look like. They assumed that if you could get a man, you wouldn't want anything else - what else could you possibly want? So that feminists who were talking about such things as equal pay must be doing so because they were unable to get a husband to support them, and therefore they must be ugl - this was the sort of train of thought. So because I looked different from the stereotype, then people would comment.