I always thought that "humanist" was a good word long before I understood that anyone thought it was a bad word.

The androcentric, patriarchal cultures, whatever you want to call it, are quite new. So, every economic statement should start with reproduction, not production. Every statement for human rights ought to include reproduction as a basic human right, like freedom of speech.

One of our biggest problems in terms of effectiveness is that we have hopes, but our opposition has interests. We measure everything against our hopes, including politicians that we are voting for or choosing amongst. We don't measure up to our hopes ourselves.

For much of the female half of the world, food is the first signal of our inferiority. It lets us know that our own families may consider female bodies to be less deserving, less needy, less valuable.

The art of being helpful is behaving as if everything we do matters - because we never know which things might.

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.

Probably those three things affect the most people: reproductive freedom, freedom from violence, and democratic families. But there may well be someone sitting at this table who has a great idea to do something else that wouldn't come under those umbrellas and that would really be great, and make all kinds of change.