a white person who claims to have no impediment of vision in this country is not, I think, telling the whole truth. And when it comes to race relations, not telling the whole truth about the fog one inhabits slows down the work of groping forward.

There is always the risk in advocating for democracy that the first people to wake up might not be your team, but that is a risk worth taking. I would rather have citizens I don't agree with organized and active than an oligarchy of people that I agree with.

To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren't is to learn inequality in little ways all day long.

Women's orgasms will quadruple in intensity if she's in a beautiful, dimly lit room versus a brightly lit, uncomfortable room.

To ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality.

We should be telling girls what they already know but rarely see affirmed: that the lives they lead inside their own self-contained bodies; the skills they attain through their own concentration and rigor, and the unique phase in their lives during which they may explore boys and eroticism at their own pace - these are magical. And they constitute the entrance point to a life cycle of a sexuality that should be held sacred.

When I was a baby feminist, leading feminist thinkers were insisting that if women ran the world, there would be no sadism or war.