‎ When a person is born we rejoice, and when they're married we jubilate, but when they die we try to pretend nothing has happened.

I had no reason to doubt that brains were suitable for a woman.

I suddenly realized that through no act of my own I had become biologically related to a new human being.

Humanity . . . lies in man's capacity to question the known and imagine the unknown.

If they learn easily, they are penalized for being bored when they have nothing to do; if they excel in some outstanding way, they are penalized as being conspicuously better than the peer group. The culture tries to make the child with a gift into a one-sided person, to penalize him at every turn, to cause him trouble in making friends and to create conditions conducive to the development of a neurosis. Neither teachers, the parents of other children, nor the child peers will tolerate a Wunderkind.

I discovered when I had a child of my own that I had become a biased observer of small children. Instead of looking at them with affectionate but nonpartisan eyes, I saw each of them as older or younger, bigger or smaller, more or less graceful, intelligent, or skilled than my own child.

We know of no culture that has said, articulately, that there is no difference between men and women except in the way they contribute to the creation of the next generation.