Living simply makes loving simple.

Like many liberal men in the age of feminism, he believed women should have equal access to jobs and be given equal pay, but when it came to matters of home and heart he still believed caregiving was the female role. Like many men, he wanted a woman to be 'just like his mama' so that he did not have to do the work of growing up.

We have to constantly critique imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture because it is normalized by mass media and rendered unproblematic.

We must live by the fundamental, dialectical principle that progress comes only from struggling to resolve contradictions.

From the onset, reformist white women with class privilege were well aware that the power and freedom they wanted was the freedom they perceived men of their class enjoying.

I thought about how we need to make children feel that there are times in their lives when they need to be alone and quiet and to be able to accept their aloneness.

The ethic of liberal individualism has so deeply permeated the psyches of blacks... of all classes that we have little support for a political ethic of communalism that promotes the sharing of resources.

My idea of a delicious time is to read a book that is wonderful. But the ruling passion of my life is being a seeker after truth and the divine.

I think Black people need to take self-esteem seriously.

Young girls often feel strong, courageous, highly creative, and powerful until they begin to receive undermining sexist messages that encourage them to conform to conventional notions of femininity. To conform they have to give up power.

The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created.

One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library.

The message received from the mass media is that knowledge makes love less compelling; that it is ignorance that gives love its erotic and transgressive edge.

When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.

Honesty and openness is always the foundation of insightful dialogue.

As many black women and other women of color saw white women from privileged classes benefiting economically more than any other group from reformist feminist gains in the workforce, it simply reaffirmed that feminism was a white woman thing.

Consider the possibility that to love blackness is dangerous in a white supremacist culture- so threatening, so serious a breach in the fabric of the social order, that death is the punishment.

Some people act as though art that is for a mass audience is not good art, and I think this has been a very negative thing. I know that I have wanted very much to write books that are accessible to the widest audience possible.

Once you do away with the idea of people as fixed, static entities, then you see that people can change, and there is hope.

Any society based on domination supports and condones violence.