What is the natural reaction when told you have a hopeless mental illness? That diagnosis does you in; that, and the humiliation of being there. I mean, the indignity you're subjected to. My God.

This is how psychiatry has functioned-as a kind of property arm of the government, who can put you away if your husband doesn't like you.

In those days, when you got boxed, that was it. A lot of old people were there because somebody wanted the farm. It was about property. People are treated like property.

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

Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different.

Everybody believes in psychiatry; it's supposed to be for our own good. Let psychiatry prove that anybody has an illness, and I'd concede, but there is no physical proof.

The involuntary character of psychiatric treatment is at odds with the spirit and ethics of medicine itself.

I saw hell. The hospital had divided and conquered pretty successfully.

However muted its present appearance may be, sexual dominion obtains nevertheless as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power.

We're more sexually repressed than men, having been given a much more strict puritanical code of behavior than men ever have.

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.

Many women do not recognize themselves as discriminated against; no better proof could be found of the totality of their conditioning.

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

What is the natural reaction when told you have a hopeless mental illness? That diagnosis does you in; that, and the humiliation of being there. I mean, the indignity you're subjected to. My God.

Psychiatry causes so much death.

This country is becoming increasingly authoritarian. It's based on capital punishment.

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

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

We are naive 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.

It was horrifying. You wouldn't believe how people are treated there. You could see that these people had withdrawn so far that they just lived in their own minds. They did terrible things to themselves.

It would appear that love is dead. Or very likely in a bad way.

The concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit, since love is the only circumstance in which the female is (ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity.

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

Men and women were declared equal one morning and everybody could divorce each other by postcard.

Mother had committed me for life. This is where I felt betrayed the most.

Isn't privacy about keeping taboos in their place?

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

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

What is our freedom fight about? Is it about the liberation of children or just having sex with them?

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

I was supposed to be women's lib, and now I'd exceeded it and gone over into international politics.

I'm slammed with an identity that can no longer say a word; mute with responsibility.

What is the future of the woman's movement? How in the hell do I know? I don't run it.

Politics is repetition. It is not change. Change is something beyond what we call politics. Change is the essence politics is supposed to be the means to bring into being.

The great mass of women throughout history have been confined to the cultural level of animal life in providing the male with sexual outlet and exercising the animal functions of reproduction and care of the young.

I can remember the frustration of not being able to talk. I knew what I wanted to say, but I could not get the words out, so I would just scream.

What I try to do for my readers is to pass on some of the things that I found out about being thirteen after doing it for forty years.

In this watering-place I acted an heroic character, badly studied; and being a novice on such a stage, I forgot my part before a pair of lovely blue eyes.

Young people discovering their sexuality must know they walk with a strong tradition and that they are not alone. They have a right to information without being pressured.

Being a publicist is like management in a lot of ways - you're their friend, you're their mother, you're their confidante.

I mean, all alternative comedy is are comedians that have being doing it for so long, for so long, that they were relaxed enough to start becoming personal on stage.

I became hooked on the idea of being able to shoot an image and process it myself, and end up with a product.

Being a cover artist is not like being a real artist. That's just copying what someone else did.

It is too maddening. I've got to fly off, right now, to some devilish navy yard, three hours in a seasick steamer, and after being heartily sick, I'll have to speak three times, and then I'll be sick coming home. Still, who would not be sick for England?

I don't like being recognised, I have no interest in being famous at all, I just do what I do. If I could be like Captain Kirk and beam myself up and then beam myself down, I would!

I'm glad I'm not Brezhnev. Being the Russian leader in the Kremlin. You never know if someone's tape recording what you say.

Being a musician is what I do, but it's not what I am.

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.

We've had it very clear to the Bosnians that our obligation to equip and train their forces is completely conditional on the foreign forces being gone.