A sexual revolution begins with the emancipation of women, who are the chief victims of patriarchy, and also with the ending of homosexual oppression.

For it is precisely because certain groups have no representation in a number of recognized political structures that their position tends to be so stable, their oppression so continuous.

Perhaps nothing is so depressing an index of the inhumanity of the male-supremacist mentality as the fact that the more genial human traits are assigned to the underclass: affection, response to sympathy, kindness, cheerfulness.

The whole bloody system is sick: the very notion of leadership, a balloon with a face painted upon it, elected and inflated by media's diabolic need to reduce ideas to personalities.

Prostitution is really the only crime in the penal law where two people are doing a thing mutually agreed upon and yet only one, the female partner, is subject to arrest.

The image of the woman as we know it is an image created by men and fashioned to suit their needs.

I don't believe in monogamy, possessing people, the rightness or inevitability of jealousy.

With the first act of cruelty committed in the name of revolution, with the first murder, with the first purge and execution, we have lost the revolution.

Aren't women prudes if they don't and prostitutes if they do?

They weren't crazy. They were tired of being locked up. Even I could see that.

We are women. We are a subject people who have inherited an alien culture.

You won't do any more housework? Then you go to the bin.

As women, we're probably more protective of children. Also, we've been minors all of our history.

We are naïve and moralistic women. We are human beings. Who find politics a blight upon the human condition. And do not know how one copes with it except through politics.

They are more beautiful than anything in the world, kinetic sculptures, perfect form in motion.

Let us stop being afraid. Of our own thoughts, our own minds. Of madness, our own or others'. Stop being afraid of the mind itself, its astonishing functions and fandangos, its complications and simplifications, the wonderful operation of its machinery -- more wonderful because it is not machinery at all or predictable.

My sister said, You're making it hard for all us housewives in Nebraska.

You may well ask how I expect to assert my privacy by resorting to the outrageous publicity of being one's actual self on paper. There's a possibility of it working if one chooses the terms, to wit: outshouting image-gimmick America through a quietly desperate search for self.

Psychiatry causes so much death.

Perhaps patriarchy's greatest psychological weapon is simply its universality and longevity. ... Patriarchy has a still more tenacious or powerful hold through its successful habit of passing itself off as nature.