My father was the Jewish half of the family, yet it was my mother who taught me to have pride in that tradition.

At my graduation, I thought we had to marry what we wished to become. Now you are becoming the men you once would have wished to marry.

The problem is that America is still so racist - I guess it's hard to find another word for it ­ - that they still, the press in general and many people, perceive only white women as feminists. They think black women are black.

All biographers, no matter how sympathetic, end up using their subjects as mirrors to figure themselves out. I don't want to be anyone's mirror.

Behave like everything you do matters.

The first problem for all of us, men and woman, is not to learn, but to unlearn. We are filled with the popular wisdom of several centuries just past, and we are terrified to give it up. Patriotism means obedience, age means wisdom, woman means submission, black means inferior: these are preconceptions imbedded so deeply in our thinking that we honestly may not know that they are there.

We have to learn to stand up for our interests. To seek purity is self-defeating and a stereotype in itself: women have to be pure, women are not concerned about money.