Millions of people have to restore liberty and have to understand the danger and personal risk they face in a police state.

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.

Obstacles, of course, are developmentally necessary: they teach kids strategy, patience, critical thinking, resilience and resourcefulness.

When women are pessimistic about their political strength and feel hopeless about changing the conditions of their lives, it is almost as if they do not believe that democracy means the country belongs to them. But it's true.

'The End of America' details the 10 steps that would-be dictators always take in seeking to close an open society; it argued that the Bush administration had been advancing each one.

Most urgently, women's identity must be premised upon our 'beauty' so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of self-esteem exposed to the air.

I did not imagine that pregnant women were 'naturally' any more sensitive or exalted than people in any other condition; only it seemed as if - perhaps because we are in such a twilight state, a melting down and reconstituting of the self - there was more opportunity to hear strains from what must be the other side, the moral music of the sphere.