“I could leave—because I could return. I could return—because I knew adventure lay just beyond an open door. Instead of either/or, I discovered a whole world of and.” 

“You didn’t leave your party. Your party left you. Forget about party labels. Just vote on the issues and for candidates who support equality.” 

“we have to behave as if everything we do matters. Because it might.” 

“My father did not have to trade dying alone for the joys of the road. My mother did not have to give up a journey of her own to have a home. Neither do I. Neither do you.” 

“In truth, we don't know which of our acts in the present will shape the future. But we have to behave as if everything we do matters. Because it might.” 

“The worship of power is an old religion.”

“Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.”

“An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.”

“why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.”

“I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.”

“Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.”

“The Platonic idealist is the man by nature so wedded to perfection that he sees in everything not the reality but the faultless ideal which the reality misses and suggests.”

“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.”

“That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.”

“The earth has its music for those who will listen.”

“When someone asks me if I believe in God and I say no—I believe in people—I” 

“Laughter is an orgasm of the mind.” 

“I’m not sure we can understand another country if we don’t understand our own.” 

“The first step toward speaking for others is speaking for ourselves.” 

“Taking away the good is even more lethal than pointing out the bad.” 

“There is no such thing as a perfect leader. We have to learn to lead ourselves.” 

“I was the only “girl writer,” probably because the power to make people laugh is also a power, so women have been kept out of comedy. Polls show that what women fear most from men is violence, and what men fear most from women is ridicule. Later, when Tina Fey was head writer and star of Saturday Night Live, she could still say, “Only in comedy does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity.” 

“punished people sometimes pass punishment downward, especially to members of their own devalued group.” 

“if you don’t stand up for yourselves, how can you stand up for anybody else?” 

“Forget about party labels. Just vote on the issues and for candidates who support equality.” 

“The simple right to reproductive freedom - to sexuality as an expression that is separable from reproduction - is basic to restoring women's power, the balance between women and men, and a balance between humans and nature.” 

“Home is a symbol of the self. Caring for a home is caring for one’s self.” 

“I recommend trying this kind of grassroots organizing for a week or a year, a month or a lifetime—working for whatever change you want to see in the world. Then one day you will be talking to a stranger who has no idea you played any part in the victory she or he is celebrating.” 

“The problem for all women is we're identified by how we look, instead of by our heads and hearts.” 

“If you do anything people care about, people will take care of you.” 

“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. This balance between making camp and following the seasons is both very ancient and very new. We all need both.” 

“she is still better known than most living movie stars, most world leaders, and most television personalities. The surprise is that she rarely has been taken seriously enough to ask why that is so.” 

“When the past dies, we mourn for the dead. When the future dies, we mourn for ourselves.” 

“If I could, I would leave an open space for your story on every page.” 

“The man who is not permitted to own is owned.”

“A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one’s life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.”

“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

“All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible”

“A habitual indulgence in the inarticulate is a sure sign of the philosopher who has not learned to think, the poet who has not learned to write, the painter who has not learned to paint, and the impression that has not learned to express itself--all of which are compatible with an immensity of genius in the inexpressible soul.”

“Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.”

“One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.”

“Consciousness is a born hermit.”

“The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.”

“The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals, but mad.”

“Laughter is the only free emotion-the only one that can't be compelled.p.181” 

“For sad if obvious reasons, women (especially white women who are seduced by access to the powerful) are the only discriminated-against group whose members seem to think that, if they don’t take themselves seriously, someone else will.” 

“The purpose of ass-kicking is not that your ass gets kicked at the right time or for the right reason,” she often explained. “It’s to keep your ass sensitive.” 

“After all, hope is a form of planning. If our hopes weren’t already real within us, we couldn’t even hope them.” 

“Statistically speaking, home is an even more dangerous place for women than the road.” 

“All movements need a few people who can’t be fired.”