... patriarchy creates megapatterns that affect us all--even as we forge different individual choices within them--just as do themegapatterns of nationalism or racism.

Having someone who looks like us but thinks like them is worse than having no one at all.

I think that part of everybody's success is due to their looks, but it just works in different ways. If you're whatever society calls attractive, then people say that you got ahead because of your looks-especially if you're a woman. If you're whatever society says is not attractive, then they say you got ahead because you're compensating, you couldn't get a man or whatever. So everybody pays the same penalty for the fact that women are assessed for their outsides rather than for what's in our heads and our hearts.

Law and justice are not always the same.

Why are solutions not just as newsworthy as problems? The notion that hostility is necessary all the time to create interest and news is not going to help us [humanity] come to agreements and solve the huge problems we have.

the less powerful group usually knows the powerful one much better than vice versa - blacks have had to understand whites in order to survive, women have had to know men - yet the powerful group can afford to regard the less powerful one as a mystery.

The road itself is informative, because it forces you to respond spontaneously and to encounter the unexpected. It forces you to reassess what you felt about people or issues or places, and it forces you to live in the present.