Al Lerner Quotes

Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.

Although it's not useful to drown in despair, it's also not useful to keep a 'positive attitude' when this means concealing or denying real emotions.

Coughing in the theater is not a respiratory ailment. It is a criticism.

The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt.

We will be in tune with our bodies only if we truly love and honor them. We can't be in good communication with the enemy.

Women's history is the primary tool for women's emancipation.

I'm getting married in the morning! / Ding dong! the bells are gonna chime. / Pull out the stopper! Let's have a whopper! / But get me to the church on time!.

Those of us who are locked into ineffective expressions of anger suffer as deeply as those of us who dare not get angry at all.

It's not a pretty face, I grant you. But underneath its flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character.

If you provide good alternatives for public transport, you won't have traffic problems.

We cannot make another person change his or her steps to an old dance, but if we change our own steps, the dance no longer can continue in the same predictable pattern.

Only through our connectedness to others can we really know and enhance the self. And only through working on the self can we begin to enhance our connectedness to others.

No one will ever believe that both your hard drive and mine crashed within a week of each other.

If we only listened with the same passion that we feel about being heard.

The world doesn't fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life.

When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.

The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences, and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone.

Women's history is women's right-an essential, indispensable heritage from which we can draw pride, comfort, courage, and long range vision.

Anger is a tool for change when it challenges us to become more of an expert on the self and less of an expert on others.

An intimate relationship is one in which neither party silences, sacrifices, or betrays the self and each party expresses strength and vulnerability, weakness and competence in a balanced way.

If you want creativity, take a zero off your budget. If you want sustainability, take off two zeros.

Whole-hearted listening is the greatest spiritual gift you can give to the other person.

America is a passionate idea or it is nothing. America is a human brotherhood or it is chaos.

In long-term relationships ... we are called upon to navigate that delicate balance between separateness and connectedness ... we confront the challenge of sustaining both--without losing either.

If you want a recipe for relationship failure, just wait for the other person to change first.

Black people cannot and will not become integrated into American society on any terms but those of self-determination and autonomy.

When I started working on women's history about thirty years ago, the field did not exist. People didn't think that women had a history worth knowing.

Either men will learn to live like brothers, or they will die like beasts.

A politician wouldn't dream of being allowed to call a columnist the things a columnist is allowed to call a politician

Differences don’t just threaten and divide us. They also inform, enrich, and enliven us.

When you are seventeen you aren't really serious.

The miracle is that your children will love you with all your imperfections if you can do the same for them.

You write a hit the same way you write a flop.

The secret to the city is integration. Every area of the city should combine work, leisure and culture. Separate these functions and parts of the city die.

A President is best judged by the enemies he makes when he has really hit his stride.

I am neither an optimist nor pessimist, but a possibilist.

A lot of people assume that the expensive ideas are the most effective ones, but that is simply not true.

Love alone is never a good enough reason to marry.

I was only eight when Sputnik was launched, and at that age the boundary between science and fiction is pretty blurry. Whichever way the process ran, I've been a fan of science and SF ever since.

You may call for peace as loudly as you wish, but where there is no brotherhood there can in the end be no peace.

The best thing about lying in bed late is that you learn to distinguish between first things and trivia, for whatever presses on you has to prove its importance before it makes you move.

Anger is a signal, and one worth listening to.

Anxiety is extremely contagious, but so is calm.

When I was in graduate school in consumer science and math, all of the big companies had labs, all doing blue sky research.

We need to hear the sound of our voice for what we think and need.

The amount of time that a young girl spends wearing pink will be inversely proportional to her future income.

When the narrator feels like an octopus, when he says his limbs are starting to multiply, he means he has inklings of orders of perception beyond his individual body.

The winter is forbidden till December, And exits March the second on the dot. By order summer lingers through September In Camelot.

What counted was not the facts but the fears.

Silence can pose a greater threat than the difficult truth.