“American housewives have not had their brains shot away, nor are they schizophrenic in the clinical sense. But if … the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but the need to grow and to realize one’s full potential, their comfortable, empty, purposeless days are indeed cause for a nameless terror.”

“You can have it all, just not all at the same time.”

“It is better for a woman to compete impersonally in society, as men do, than to compete for dominance in her own home with her husband, compete with her neighbors for empty status, and so smother her son that he cannot compete at all.”

“We need to see men and women as equal partners, but it's hard to think of movies that do that. When I talk to people, they think of movies of forty-five years ago! Hepburn and Tracy!”

“Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.”

“Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.”

“Neither woman nor man lives by work or love alone.... The human self defines itself and grows through love and work: All psychology before and after Freud boils down to that.”

“It is easier to live life through someone else than to become complete yourself.”

“When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity she finally began to enjoy being a woman.”

“We couldn't possibly know where it would lead but we knew it had to be done.”

“We couldn't possibly know where it would lead but we knew it had to be done.”