Quote of the Day

The other scary beauty of life, which I probably should have expected to discover in all of this, was how heightened circumstances, such as overlapping tragedy and success, sharpen your vision and shorten your patience for baloney and hogwash.

-- Tig Notaro, I'm Just a Person, p. 236

Quote of the Day

A [Blue Mountain Clinic] staff member tells me that one of the female picketers has come in when the men were not around, had an abortion, and gone back to picket the next day.  This sounds surrealistic to me -- but not to the staff member.  She explains that women in such anti-abortion groups are more likely to be deprived of birth control and so to need an abortion.  They then feel guilty -- and picket even more.  This restriction on birth control may also explain why studies have long shown that Catholic women in general are more likely to have an abortion than are their Protestant counterparts.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 190

Quote of the Day

I cannot express how important it is to believe that taking one tiny -- and possibly very uncomfortable -- step at a time can ultimately add up to a great distance.

-- Tig Notaro, I'm Just a Person, p. 236

Quote of the Day

Progress, real progress, makes me cry harder than anything -- when the world itself grows.

-- Kate McKinnon

Quote of the Day

Thanks to Mrs. Greene -- and many others brave enough to stand up for themselves and other women -- I began to understand that females were an out-group, too.  That realization solved such mysteries as why the face of Congress was male but the face of welfare was female; why homemakers were called women who "don't work," though they worked longer, harder, and for less pay than any other class of worker; why women did 70 percent of the productive labor in the world, paid and unpaid, yet owned only 1 percent of the property; why masculinity meant leading and femininity meant following in the odd dance of daily life.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 45

Quote of the Day

The scary beauty of life is that cancer can be around the corner just as a Grammy nomination can be.

-- Tig Notaro, I'm Just a Person, p. 235

Quote of the Day

When has a true milestone sailed by without people's hateful attention?

-- Kate McKinnon

Quote of the Day

If Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer and others had been heard fifty years ago -- if women had been half the speakers in 1963 -- we might have heard that the civil rights movement was partly a protest against the ritualistic rape and terrorizing of black women by white men ... We might have known sooner that the most reliable predictor of whether a country is violent within itself -- or will use military violence against another country -- is not poverty, natural resources, religion, or even degree of democracy; it's violence against females.  It normalizes all other violence.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 43

Quote of the Day

I've always tried to be aware of an opportunity to change something I might later regret.

-- Tig Notaro, I'm Just a Person, p. 233

Quote of the Day

You white women, Mrs. Greene said kindly, as if reading my mind, if you don't stand up for yourselves, how can you stand up for anybody else?

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 42

Quote of the Day

Whenever I'm told to go after "low-hanging fruit," I think of drawing a cartoon with two characters standing over a tombstone.

"He picked the low-hanging fruit," one says.

"Yeah," says the other.  "But he never climbed the tree."

-- Austin Kleon, "Low-hanging fruit"

Quote of the Day

Having spent most of that year in and out of the hospital, fearful that I was close to my deathbed, I naturally came across people who were close to dying themselves.  Who cares that it's cliche, this was their one common regret: They wished they had worked less and spent more time with their loved ones.  I pride myself on living with no regrets, and I certainly don't want any in my final moments.

-- Tig Notaro, I'm Just a Person, p. 233

Quote of the Day

Home is a symbol of the self.  Caring for a home is caring for one's self.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 249

Quote of the Day

Why can so many of us only express our true feelings onto a blank slate: a diary page, the sky, an unconscious loved one, a tombstone?

-- Tig Notaro, I'm Just a Person, p. 185-186

Quote of the Day

Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 245

Quote of the Day

Every day is the day.

-- Tig Notaro, I'm Just a Person, p. 155

Quote of the Day

Spiders should be the totem of writers.  Both go into a space alone and spin out of their own bodies a reality that has never existed before.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 237-238

Quote of the Day

Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.

-- Mary Oliver, "Franz Marc's Blue Horses"

Quote of the Day

I discovered that Native languages, Cherokee and others -- like Bengali and other ancient languages -- didn't have gendered pronouns like he and she.  A human being was a human being.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 223

Quote of the Day

Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.

-- Mary Oliver, "Franz Marc's Blue Horses"

Quote of the Day

When new people guide us, we see a new country.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 211

Quote of the Day

Because of her own experience as a young lawyer and a working mom, Clinton knows that we don't need equal pay and family leave because they are women's issues.  We need equal pay and family leave because they are family issues.
 
-- Patti Solis Doyle, "If Hillary Clinton were a man"

Quote of the Day

The Catholic Church not only didn't oppose abortion but actually regulated it until the mid-nineteenth century.  It was made a mortal sin mostly for population reasons.  Napoleon III wanted more soldiers, and Pope Pius IX wanted all the teaching positions in the French schools -- plus the doctrine of papal infallibility -- so they traded.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 204

Quote of the Day

While Trump still needs to be taught about women's struggle for equality over the past 50 years, Clinton's trying to move the country past it.

-- Patti Solis Doyle, "If Hillary Clinton were a man"

Quote of the Day

The first step toward speaking for others is speaking for ourselves.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 209

Quote of the Day

Only in comedy does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity.

-- Tina Fey

Quote of the Day

It's easy to tell people how things are done; real teachers show people how things are done.

-- Pat Summitt with Sally Jenkins, Sum It Up, p. 340

Quote of the Day

[Donald] Trump thinks [Hillary] Clinton succeeded as a token ... Let's (examine) the facts.  After graduating with honors from Wellesley and Yale Law, Clinton worked as an investigator on the Watergate Committee, taught law at The University of Arkansas, served as the chairwoman of the Legal Services Corp. (a $300 million per year enterprise, at the time), made partner at one of the country's oldest and most respected law firms, served on the boards of three public companies, and, for many years, was the principal breadwinner for her family.  Throw in her experience as a best-selling author, first lady, U.S. senator, secretary of state, co-chair of a global foundation, and you get the idea.  Along the way, she found time to volunteer at the Yale Child Study Center (researching early childhood development) and New Haven Hospital (helping victims of child abuse).  She handled pro bono child welfare cases throughout her legal career.  She founded Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families and helped lead its national partner, The Children's Defense Fund.  She led a school reform effort for teacher testing and higher standards for curriculum and class size ... She was the first female partner at her law firm, the first female head of the Legal Services Corp., one of the first female professors at her law school, and the first female board member for at least one of those big companies.  Trump -- heir to a real estate fortune and recipient of a $1 million loan from his father to "get started" -- has nothing on Clinton, daughter of a small-business owner.

-- Patti Solis Doyle, "If Hillary Clinton were a man"