Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.
Whenever one person stands up and says, “Wait a minute, this is wrong,” it helps other people do the same.
The story of women’s struggle for equality belongs to no single feminist nor to any one organization but to the collective efforts of all who care about human rights.
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
Human beings are communal beings and we can’t exist or prosper by ourselves. We need each other’s support.
People start to talk about post-racist, post-feminist. What does that mean? We’re clearly not post either. Would you say post-democracy? Clearly we haven’t reached true democracy yet.
You’re always the person you were when you were born,” she says impatiently. “You just keep finding new ways to express it.
I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. Later I would discover this was endemic among female human beings. Anger is supposed to be “unfeminine” so we suppress it -until it overflows. I could see that not speaking up made my mother feel worse. This was my first hint of the truism that depression is anger turned inward; thus women are twice as likely to be depressed. My mother paid a high price for caring so much, yet being able to do so little about it. In this way, she led me toward am activist place where she herself could never go.
Laughter is a rescue. p.204.
Sometimes I think the only real division into two is between people who divide everything into two and those who don’t.
As Robin Morgan wrote so wisely, “Hate generalizes, love specifies”. Thats what makes going on the road so important. It definitely specifies.
When humans are ranked instead of linked, everyone loses.
Decisions are best made by the people affected by them.
Also, one of the simplest paths to deep change is for the less powerful to speak as much as they listen, and for the more powerful to listen as much as they speak.
Long before all these divisions were opened between home and the road, betweens a woman’s place and a man’s world, humans followed the crops, the seasons, traveling with their families, our companions, animals, our tents. We built campfires and moved from place to place. This way of traveling is still in our cellular memory. Living things have evolved as travelers, Even migrating birds know that nature doesn’t demand a choice between nesting and flight.
If you find yourself drawn to an event against all logic, go. The universe is telling you something.
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.
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.
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.
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.