“This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.” 

“We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach. ” 

“If you find yourself drawn to an event against all logic, go. The universe is telling you something.” 

“Dying seems less sad than having lived too little.” 

“Having someone who looks like us but thinks like them is worse than having no one at all.” 

“Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.” 

“Remember: "For want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost, for want of a horseshoe, the horse was lost, for want of a horse, the battle was lost, for want of a battle, the war was lost." This parable should be the mantra of everyone who thinks her or his vote doesn't count.” 

“Self-esteem isn't everything; it's just that there's nothing without it.” 

“Each others' lives are our best textbooks.” 

“The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us” 

“If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them. If you hope people will change how they live, you have to know how they live. If you want people to see you, you have to sit down with them eye-to-eye.” 

“No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home, or in the office.” 

“Swiftboating enters the English language as a verb that means attacking strength instead of weakness. In feminist and other social justice contexts, this has long been called trashing, attacking leaders for daring to write, speak, or lead at all. Taking away the good is even more lethal than pointing out the bad. p.189” 

“A lot of my generation are living out the un-lived lives of our mothers.”

“We might have known sooner that the most reliable predictor of whether a country is violent within itself—or will use military violence against another country—is not poverty, natural resources, religion, or even degree of democracy; it’s violence against females. It normalizes all other violence.” 

“I began to see that for some, religion was just a form of politics you couldn’t criticize.” 

“Happy or Unhappy, families are all mysterious. ” 

“Don't think about making women fit the world -- think about making the world fit women." ” 

“Altogether, if I'd been looking at nothing but the media all these years, I would be a much more discouraged person-especially given the notion that only conflict is news, and that objectivity means being evenhandedly negative.” 

“Always ask the turtle.” 

“no one ever got radicalized by being grateful” 

“No wonder studies show that women's intellectual self-esteem tends to go down as years of education go up. We have been studying our own absence.” 

“I wonder: If you think of someone you love, do you become a little more like them? I would like to think so.” 

“Her searches after knowledge were arbitrary and without context. It was as if she were shining a small flashlight of curiosity into the dark room of the world.” 

“The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories—in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.” 

“Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.” 

“It’s said that the biggest determinant of our lives is whether we see the world as welcoming or hostile. Each becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“When the past dies, there is mourning, but when the future dies our imaginations are compelled to carry it on.” 

“We'll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.” 

“Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts.” 

“Instead of either/or, I discovered a whole world of and.” 

“The root of oppression is the loss of memory.” 

“Only food and water are more important than music and privacy,” 

“On the road, I learned that the media are not reality; reality is reality.” 

“In retrospect, perhaps the biggest reason my mother was cared for but not helped for twenty years was the simplest: Her functioning was not that necessary to the world.”

“Always look at what people do, not who they are.” 

“I can go on the road - because I can come home. I come home - because I'm free to leave. Each way of being is more valued in the presence of the other.” 

“I'm also now immune to politicians who say, "I've traveled the length and breadth of this great land, and I know..." I've traveled more than any of them, and I don't know.” 

“We learn most where we know the least.” 

“I've noticed that great political leaders are energized by conflict. I'm energized by listening to people's stories and trying to figure out shared solutions. That's the work of an organizer.” 

“What we’re told about this country is way too limited by generalities, sound bites, and even the supposedly enlightened idea that there are two sides to every question. In fact, many questions have three or seven or a dozen sides.” 

“We are all trained to be female impersonators.” 

“The driver, an old Irish woman, the only such cabbie I’ve ever seen, turned to us at a traffic light and said the immortal words, “Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament!” 

“I worshipped dead men for their strength, forgetting I was strong.” 

“Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square.” 

“We are so different, yet so much the same.” 

“Perhaps the most revolutionary act for a woman will be a self-willed journey—and to be welcomed when she comes home.” 

“Since learning causes our brains to grow new synapses, I like to believe that the road is sharpening my mind and lengthening my life with surprise.” 

“Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” 

“It's important for someone who could play the game - and win - to say: 'the game isn't worth shit.”