You can compel fear. You can even make someone feel they're in love if they're isolated and dependent for long enough. But laughter is free.

Monotheism makes me grouchy. I don't trust any religion that makes God look like one of the ruling class. I guess I'm a pagan or an animist.

I'd like to be played as a child by Natalie Wood. I'd have some romantic scenes as Audrey Hepburn and have gritty black-and-white scenes as Patricia Neal.

It's an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don't try to make it posthumous.

Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.

Pop culture shapes our ideas of what is normal and what our dreams can be and what our roles are. Politics, of course, decides how the power and the money in the country is distributed. Both are equally important, and each affects the other.

The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day; a movement is only people moving.

Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.

God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there's no turning back.

A gender-equal society would be one where the word 'gender' does not exist: where everyone can be themselves.

Obviously, there is much similarity among the challenges of transgender people and all women - from health care to harassment to discrimination in the workplace.

Mama grizzlies mate later than other bears. They have two cubs instead of four. They wait four years - about twice as long as other bears - between having cubs. And after they're pregnant, if winter is hard or their health is not good or the food supply is uncertain, they re-absorb the embryo into their body.

Women tend to need the healthcare system more because we bear children. Insurance companies - not all of them, but many of them - 'gender-rate.' Women may pay 40% more for their health insurance than men do.

What I've learned is that unless it's an emergency, like a fire or brain surgery, hierarchy is not necessary and may be damaging. If you have a hierarchy, you're repeating the strengths and weaknesses of one person without allowing for the accumulative strength of a group.

If technology and medicine are used by women to have children or not to have children or to have healthier children - that's one thing. But if it's used to say, 'You're not a real woman unless you have a child; therefore, take all these dangerous hormones and have one at 54,' then it's another story.

Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.

All women, and men of color - we were owned like tables and chairs. We spent a hundred years getting a legal identity as human beings. That's a big thing.

I've yet to be on a campus where most women weren't worrying about some aspect of combining marriage, children, and a career. I've yet to find one where many men were worrying about the same thing.

I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.

A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.

I was never against marriage per se. Before feminism, I didn't think you had any choice. In fact, for a long time I always assumed I would get married. I just didn't see any marriages I wanted to emulate, so I kept putting it off.

It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate.

Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.

Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.

The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.

The deepest change begins with men raising children as much as women do and women being equal actors in the world outside the home. There are many ways of supporting that, from something as simple as paid sick leave and flexible work hours to attributing an economic value to all caregiving and making that amount tax deductible.

What has the women's movement learned from Geraldine Ferraro's candidacy for vice president? Never get married.

I want to help correct the inaccurate image of immigration in the media. There is an idea that women's issues are over here and immigration is over there. Three quarters of undocumented workers are women and children.

Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.

The first resistance to social change is to say it's not necessary.

Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.

If you ask men about their body image, they will tell you they look better than they do. And if you ask a woman, she'll tell you she looks worse.

Anger is energising. The opposite of anger is depression, which is anger turned inward.

Because I have work to care about, it is possible that I may be less difficult to get along with than other women when the double chins start to form.

We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

For much of the female half of the world, food is the first signal of our inferiority. It lets us know that our own families may consider female bodies to be less deserving, less needy, less valuable.

The family meal is really the nursery of democracy. It's where we learn to share; it's where we learn to argue without offending. It's just too critical to let go, as we've been so blithely doing.

Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it's exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather: all pervasive and virtually inescapable.

When you realize the real pleasure in food comes in the first couple bites, and it diminishes thereafter, that's a kind of reminder to focus on the experience, enjoy those first bites, and as you get into the 20th bite, you're talking calories and not pleasure.

You can make real food in 20, 30 minutes, but we've convinced ourselves that it is a rocket science. It's a shame. It's the media and the food industry: they've fed our panic around time.

As a society, we devalued farming as an occupation and encouraged the best students to leave the farm for 'better' jobs in the city. We emptied America's rural counties in order to supply workers to urban factories.

Those of us who care about food and where it comes from will miss both Obama and Michelle. Even though Obama failed to do many things he indicated he would do around food, Michelle Obama has done a lot to shine a light on the link between diet and health, which is really important.

High-quality food is better for your health.

Simply by starting to cook again, you declare your independence from the culture of fast food. As soon as you cook, you start thinking about ingredients. You start thinking about plants and animals and not the microwave. And you will find that your diet, just by that one simple act, that is greatly improved.

The things journalists should pay attention to are the issues the political leadership agrees on, rather than to their supposed antagonisms.

We know there is a deep reservoir of food wisdom out there, or else humans would not have survived to the extent we have. Much of this food wisdom is worth preserving and reviving and heeding.

A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.

The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.

Agriculture changes the landscape more than anything else we do. It alters the composition of species. We don't realize it when we sit down to eat, but that is our most profound engagement with the rest of nature.