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There had been an outbreak of assaults on women at night. One [cabinet] minister suggested a curfew: women should stay home after dark. I said, “But it’s the men who are attacking the women. If there’s to be a curfew, let the men stay home, not the women.”

Golda Meir, former prime minister of Israel

I grew up hearing over and over, to the point of tedium, that “hard work” was the secret of success: “Work hard and you’ll get ahead” or “It’s hard work that got us where we are.” No one ever said that you could work hard — harder even than you ever thought possible — and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt.

Barbara Ehrenreich

To love another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection, it is a magnificent task . . . tremendous and foolish and human.

Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

Diseases have no eyes. They pick with a dizzy finger anyone, just anyone.

Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street

There is no human failure greater than to launch a profoundly important endeavor and then leave it half done. This is what the West has done with its colonial system. It shook all the societies in the world loose from their old moorings. But it seems indifferent whether or not they reach safe harbor in the end.

Barbara Ward

Show me a man or woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call “society.” Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare.

Stephen King, The Stand

My uncles . . . are farmers in Minooka, Illinois. I grew up with them and their pickup trucks and mustaches, and to me that was masculinity: big, hairy, sweaty guys who could pick up a bus.

Nick Offerman

Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears.

Audre Lorde

An animal’s eyes have the power to speak a great language.

Martin Buber

Every heart is the other heart. Every soul is the other soul. Every face is the other face. The individual is the one illusion.

Marguerite Young, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling