Great Throughts Treasury

"For the reader who has put away comic books, but isn't yet ready for editorials in the Daily News."

"For women... bras, panties, bathing suits, and other stereotypical gear are visual reminders of a commercial, idealized feminine image that our real and diverse female bodies can't possibly fit. Without these visual references, each individual woman's body demands to be accepted on its own terms. We stop being comparatives. We begin to be unique."

"Fortunately, all of us can unlearn."

"From pacifist to terrorist, each person condemns violence -- and then adds one cherished case in which it may be justified."

"God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there's no turning back."

"Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described - and will be, after our deaths - by each of the family members who believe they know us."

"Happy or Unhappy, families are all mysterious."

"Given the expectations of society at large, men are generally correct in their assumption that it is important for a woman to have a man. What they do not understand is how pathetically little difference it makes what man."

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

"Hope is a very unruly emotion."

"However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four. However far it may expand, the progression inevitably rests on unequal power and airtight roles within the family."

"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."

"I always try to say my age because I figure it's a form of coming out."

"Human beings are communal creatures. If we're by ourselves we come to feel crazy and alone."

"I am not now, and never have been, a girlfriend of Henry Kissinger"

"I can't mate in captivity"

"I do not like to write - I like to have written."

"I didn’t hear words that were accurate, much less prideful. For example, I never once heard the word clitoris. It would be years before I learned that females possessed the only organ in the human body with no function than to feel pleasure. (If such an organ were unique to the male body, can you imagine how much we would hear about it—and what it would be used to justify?)"

"I did not see any way that I could possibly give birth to someone else and also give birth to myself. Far from feeling guilty, it was the first time that I had taken responsibility for my own life."

"I don't breed well in captivity."

"I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career."

"I'd like to be played as a child by Natalie Wood. I'd have some romantic scenes as Audrey Hepburn and have gritty black-and-white scenes as Patricia Neal."

"I have met brave women who are exploring the outer edge of human possibility, with no history to guide them, and the courage to make themselves vulnerable that I find moving beyond words."

"I will no longer be referred to as Miss Steinem of Ms. Magazine."

"If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?"

"If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of their menstrual cycle when their female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that in those few days women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?"

"If children are treated badly enough for long enough, they come to believe they are bad people."

"If women have young children, they are one man away from welfare."

"If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament."

"It will not be the year of the woman until we have half of the House and half of the Senate and a president once in a while."

"In my own mind, I am still a fat brunette from Toledo, and I always will be."

"Imagining anything is the first step toward creating it."

"If you say, I'm for equal pay, that's a reform. But if you say. I'm a feminist, that's a transformation of society."

"In order to make a choice, you need the power to see there is one."

"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."

"Inside each of us is a unique person resulting from millennia of environment and heredity combined in a way that could never happen again and could never have happened before."

"Instead of defining power as domination, it is being redefined as self-determination. Instead of outstripping others, the goal is completing oneself."

"It still would be years before I understood the seriousness of my change of view. Much later, I recognized it in Revolution, the essay of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who describes the moment when a man on the edge of a crowd looks back defiantly at a policeman — and when that policeman senses a sudden refusal to accept his defining gaze — as the imperceptible moment in which rebellion is born. All books about all revolutions begin with a chapter that describes the decay of tottering authority or the misery and sufferings of the people, Kapuscinski writes. They should begin with a psychological chapter — one that shows how a harassed, terrified man suddenly breaks his terror, stops being afraid. This unusual process — sometimes accomplished in an instant, like a shock — demands to be illustrated. Man gets rid of fear and feel free. Without that, there would be no revolution."

"It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate."

"It's important to understand what joy there is — we're meant to use all five senses — we're meant to be active and contribute to the world."

"It's clear that most children suffer too much mother and too little father."

"It's terribly important that we always assume that men have, or should have, or could have, the same concerns about their kids that women do."

"I've come to realize that the ancient cultures — the original cultures, which account for 95% of human time on Earth — were gender-balanced and balanced with nature."

"It's important not to stigmatize the word Republican, because the great tragedy is an extremist group has taken over one of our great parties."

"It's an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don't try to make it posthumous."

"It's important for all of us to be authentic with each other."

"It's a truism that we can't love others until we love ourselves — but truisms are also true."

"It's clear that most American children suffer too much mother and too little father."

"It's more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate."

"I've learned only one thing: No matter how hard it is to do it, it's harder not to do it."