• In 1976: We women are doing pretty well. We're almost back to where we were in the twenties.
• I had no reason to doubt that brains were suitable for a woman. And as I had my father's kind of mind -- which was also his mother's -- I learned that the mind is not sex-typed.
• Differences in sex as they are known today ... are based on the bringing up of the mother. She is always pushing the female towards similarity and the male towards differences.
• There is no evidence that suggests women are naturally better at caring for children ... with the fact of child-bearing out of the center of attention, there is even more reason for treating girls first as human beings, then as women.
• It has been a woman's task throughout history to go on believing in life when there was almost no hope.
• Because of their age-long training in human relations -- for that is what feminine intuition really is -- women have a special contribution to make to any group enterprise.
• Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.
• The male form of a female liberationist is a male liberationist -- a man who realizes the unfairness of having to work all his life to support a wife and children so that someday his widow may live in comfort, a man who points out that commuting to a job he doesn't like is just as oppressive as his wife's imprisonment in a suburb, a man who rejects his exclusion, by society and most women, from participation in childbirth and the most engrossing, delightful care of young children -- a man, in fact, who wants to relate himself to people and the world around him as a person.
• Women want mediocre men, and men are working to become as mediocre as possible.
• Mothers are a biological necessity; fathers are a social invention.
• Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.
• Man's role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary.
• I think extreme heterosexuality is a perversion.
• No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.
• One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night.
• Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've put it in an impossible situation.
• We have got to face the fact that marriage is a terminable institution.
• Of all the peoples whom I have studied, from city dwellers to cliff dwellers, I always find that at least 50 percent would prefer to have at least one jungle between themselves and their mothers-in-law.
• Any woman can find a husband unless she is deaf, dumb or blind ... [S]he cannot always marry the ideal man of her choice.
• And when our baby stirs and struggles to be born it compels humility: what we began is now its own.
• The pains of childbirth were altogether different from the enveloping effects of other kinds of pain. These were pains one could follow with one’s mind.
• You just have to learn not to care about the dust mites under the beds.
• Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children.
• The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.
• Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders.
• As long as any adult thinks that he, like the parents and teachers of old, can become introspective, invoking his own youth to understand the youth before him, he is lost.
• If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.
• Old age is like flying through a storm. Once you're aboard, there's nothing you can do.
• All of us who grew up before the war are immigrants in time, immigrants from an earlier world, living in an age essentially different from anything we knew before. The young are at home here. Their eyes have always seen satellites in the sky. They have never known a world in which war did not mean annihilation.
