The hardest times for me were not when people challenged what I said, but when I felt my voice was not heard.

While an ethic of justice proceeds from the premise of equality—that everyone should be treated the same—an ethic of care rests on the premise of nonviolence—that no one should be hurt.

While men represent powerful activity as assertion and aggression, women in contrast portray acts of nurturance as acts of strength.

In the different voice of women lies the truth of an ethic of care, the tie between relationship and responsibility, and the origins of aggression in the failure of connection.

Maybe love is like rain. Sometimes gentle, sometimes torrential, flooding, eroding, joyful, steady, filling the earth, collecting in underground springs. When it rains, when we love, life grows.

I find the question of whether gender differences are biologically determined or socially constructed to be deeply disturbing.

Both love and democracy depend on voice -- having a voice and also the resonance that makes it possible to speak and be heard.

I've found that if I say what I'm really thinking and feeling, people are more likely to say what they really think and feel. The conversation becomes a real conversation.

Theory can blind observation.

Pleasure is a sensation. It is written into our bodies; it is our experience of delight, of joy. ... Pleasure will become a marker, a compass pointing to emotional true north.

The blind willingness to sacrifice people to truth, however, has always been the danger of an ethics abstracted from life.

You're a free man, act like it.

If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.

Retributive justice is one that says clobber him or clobber her because they clobbered me. So it emphasizes punishment.

I'm very interested in how idealistic young people can get caught up in all sorts of systems of extreme belief, you know, whether it's cults or whether it's suicide bombers.

The average person is gregarious; there is something in the spirit of the crowd that adds to the enjoyment of entertainment.

You can't pay a landlord in dogma.

I don't actually listen to much music since I need quiet to work.

The basis of persistence is the Power of Will.

The great advantage of telling the truth is that one is so much more likely to sound convincing

I am an American; free born and free bred, where I acknowledge no man as my superior, except for his own worth, or as my inferior, except for his own demerit.