When I look at a person, I see a person - not a rank, not a class, not a title.
When they kept you out it was because you were black; when they let you in, it is because you are black. That's progress?
To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.
Fear is a question. What are you afraid of and why? Our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.
The same men who are blind and deaf to feminism are acutely sensitive to what threatens their dominance and privilege.
If you ask me what I believe in today, I believe in feminism. I believe that all human beings are equal. I believe that no one has the right to authority over anyone else. Feminism has to do with everything in the world, a vision of how the world can be. I have great doubts about Utopias, but I just keep on thinking there is a better way to live than the way we live now.
My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I don’t even need to shrug. I simply don’t care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply don’t matter.
The presence of another caring person doubles the amount of pain a person can endure.
The intention is to make people laugh, to make people happy. It's unselfish, it's in the service of others, and as a comedian you are making yourself vulnerable in order to make others happy. And it has a transformative power.
One does not simply tell an archangel they have devoted their life to a folly.
Faire language grates not the tongue.