Somewhere between poetry and journalism lies the magical land of quotes. They may be fact or fantasy, personal or political, from academia or the street, but they are smart enough to be memorable and short enough to remember.
You might say they are the poetry of everyday life.
A quote can turn a tweet into a haiku because it evokes a story. Indeed, if you poured water on a quote, it would become a story. “Tell me a fact and I’ll forget,” as a Native American quote goes, “but tell me a story and I’ll always remember.”
If a quote evokes more than one story, it’s likely to last a very long time.
Take the first half of the title of this book: “The truth will set you free.” That was said by Jesus in the Bible, and the truth was the Word of God. Academics used the same quote to say that knowledge would set you free. Then during the war in Vietnam, young men wrote that quote on protest signs, hoping that the truth of the war would set them free from the draft.
It was then that I added, “But first it will piss you off.” That’s because I was pretty sure we were not only in the wrong war, we were also on the wrong side.
If this sounds far out even now, let me tell you a story of my own.
I lived in India for a couple of years after college, and I learned that Ho Chi Minh, our enemy-to-be in Vietnam, was a much-admired anticolonial hero whose model for getting the French out of his country was the American Revolution. He also risked his life to rescue our pilots downed in the jungle during World War II, and he impressed them by reciting our entire Declaration of Independence by heart.
With the hope of making a human connection to a man who was supposed to be our enemy, I researched, wrote, and published an essay about Ho Chi Minh. I have to say this had no public impact at all. I also learned that some veterans who knew and liked Ho Chi Minh during the war had gone to Washington to plead the case. They had no impact either.
I felt pissed off and powerless, as if I were living in an alternate universe. On my bulletin board, I put this quote of my own: “Alienation is when your country is at war, and you want the other side to win.”
Soon more truths of the war began to come out of hiding. Our government had been concealing death statistics in order to downplay our casualties, exaggerate Ho Chi Minh’s casualties, and make the war seem under control. Before the end came, thousands of Americans would lose their lives on the battlefield, and more from Agent Orange and Vietnam-related damage to their spirits and bodies, plus millions of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians in both north and south.
Eventually, the sheer number of Americans marching and opposing the war forced President Lyndon Johnson to resign and President Richard Nixon to preside over our retreat. Vietnam became the first war this country ever lost.
But movements don’t only create change in the outside world, they transform people in them. Many women had organized against Vietnam—and for civil rights, against nuclear testing, and more—so they learned they could have a public impact. Yet they also learned that even in those idealistic movements, women were not treated as equals by many of the men.
This pissed a lot of women off. I began to see feminist slogans, including the title of this book, which I thought no one had noticed, on T-shirts and buttons, bulletin boards, campus banners, and even sidewalks as graffiti.
There also turned out to be a parallel to this title in programs for and by alcoholics: “The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.” Is this related? I have no idea.
It’s always honorable to credit the source of a quote, which also helps to explain its meaning, but claiming ownership of a quote is often beside the point. We all contribute to the collective unconscious from which quotes come.
Even all these decades after this quote emerged in the peace and feminist movements, I see the hybrid title of this book on posters and painted on the side of a truck, in demonstrations, online, in needlepoint, and even as a tattoo. In tragedies, we might now also say, the truth will set you free—but first it will make you mourn. Alice Walker always reminds me of that.
As I write this, for instance, I’ve just returned from speaking in the grand old Castro Theatre in San Francisco, together with artist and activist Favianna Rodriguez. Though I don’t remember either of us repeating this quote during our talk, a young hijab-wearing woman in the audience came up afterward to say that it was her favorite, and that she had translated it into Persian and Kurdish for her feminist blog in Iran. Why? Because it applied to women’s lives there.
Who would have guessed? She was a reminder that quotes go global.
Even before the World Wide Web, quotes were contagious. Almost fifty years ago, Simone de Beauvoir and other women in France wrote “I have had an abortion” on a petition, demanded the repeal of antiabortion laws, and gathered hundreds of signatures. In the first issue of Ms. magazine, we followed their example with a petition signed by hundreds of women in the United States. It was this shared and personal quote that made all the difference.
More than a decade ago in this country, Tarana Burke, herself a survivor of sexual assault, was working to help young girls survive abuse, and coined “Me too” as a way of sharing the personal experience of sexual assault. Women picked this quote up by the millions to share their experiences on social media.
Then women in Hollywood came forward with stories of their own sexual harassment by men who could make or break their careers. They declared, “Time’s up!” This wave of truth-telling began reverberating around the country, from women farm workers and restaurant workers to students, gymnasts, and more.
“Me too” and “Time’s up!” have also spread around the world as contagious movements, from India’s glamorous Bollywood to students and workers in Seoul, London, and Nairobi. Such shared quotes are the most powerful and contagious path to change because each one contains a personal story.
In a way, passing on a quote is like putting a note in a bottle and sending it out to sea. You may never know who will find your words—or who said or wrote the words you may find—but each quote is an entry in the diary of humankind. Without such honest words, that diary would be incomplete.
We are again in a time of crisis and dissent, just as we were when the hybrid title of this book was inspired by Vietnam protest signs. As I write this, even more Americans are opposed to this occupant of the White House, and the marches and demonstrations are even more widespread. They go beyond ending the draft or an unjust war. Now they challenge how our leaders are elected, who is allowed into this country and who is cast out, what are facts and what are not, and whether every citizen’s vote counts.
That last point may be the key to all the others. Donald Trump, who is the occupant of the White House at this moment, lost the 2016 election by nearly eleven million votes, three million for Hillary Clinton and eight million for other candidates—a far bigger popular vote loss than any president in history. He succeeded only because of the Electoral College, a system of weighted voting that the southern slave-owning states wrote into the Constitution at this country’s founding. Only five times in U.S. history have the electoral and popular verdicts been different, but there has always been the possibility of straying far from one person, one vote. Because of the Electoral College, the voting power of a citizen in Wyoming, the least populated state, is 3.6 times that of a citizen in the largest state, California.
I don’t like to cite a problem without suggesting a solution, so even though this is not a quote, let me say that, since the 1940s, public opinion polls have shown that an overwhelming majority of Americans want to eliminate the Electoral College and to be assured of one citizen, one vote. There just hasn’t been enough energy or urgency to undertake the long process of passing a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Electoral College, but now there is another way to equalize voting power. State legislatures are voting to give all their states’ electoral votes to the candidate who wins the national majority vote. Once this number of states passes the tipping point and represents more than half of all electoral votes, the Electoral College will become obsolete. This initiative is known as the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
Has the truth of Trump’s unpopular election pissed off enough state representatives to set us free from the Electoral College? Has it pissed off enough voters to force them to do it? As I’m writing this, the answer is blowing in the wind.
But sometimes the lessons of defeat can be even more important than a passing victory. We are learning a lot due to the disaster of an unelected president in the White House, from the depth of remaining racism to the unearned economic influence of the wealthy few.
And we’re learning how to fight without repeating the tactics of our adversaries. For instance, if there were a Nobel Prize for the right quote at the right time, it would go to Michelle Obama for saying to the whole country, “When they go low, we go high.” We don’t win by imitating what we’re against.
We’re also learning that the most dangerous time often comes after a victory. For instance, a peace movement ended the Vietnam War by popular demand, and the civil rights, feminist, gay, lesbian, transgender, and environmental movements have now changed the majority consciousness of this nation. But these majority changes have left about a third of the country feeling deprived of the hierarchies they grew up with: white over black, men over women, people over nature, monotheism over spirituality, heterosexual over all other forms of love—and the list goes on.
When I’m traveling, I’m often confronted by a middle-aged white man who says something like “A black woman took my job.” My answer is always “Who said it was your job?” The problem is his sense of entitlement.
Yet we have too often celebrated progress and not understood the dangers of an earlier majority becoming a minority. There are plenty of examples.
For instance, the crime of lynching became commonplace not during slavery but after emancipation, when white racists feared the new voting and economic power of black Americans. The Civil War had eliminated slavery but hadn’t challenged the power of racism.
Another example: Not until after World War II did the U.S. government make propaganda films that glorified white women in suburban kitchens. That’s because once the war was over, women who had been working in war factories, or were otherwise independent, were supposed to go home, leave their jobs to men, and, as housewives, become full-time consumers whose endless buying and suburban lifestyle would replace the economic engine of the war.
Similarly, even when abortions were illegal, women who had them were not threatened with the death penalty. But Texas, Ohio, and perhaps by now other states are responding to decades of women having the power to decide the fate of their own bodies by proposing legislation that has included the death penalty for women who have abortions and loss of license or prison for the doctors. That was too extreme to pass, but so-called heartbeat bills criminalize abortion for both woman and physician long before a fetus could possibly survive outside a woman’s body. These bills are succeeding even though they put women’s bodies and the practice of medicine under government control.
This backlash is also fueled by the imminent change of this country’s majority from white people to people of color. Indeed, the first generation that is majority babies of color has already been born. This is a great thing for our country in a post-colonial and striving to become post-racist age, but it is also energizing a racist and anti-immigrant reaction. For instance, the depth of white racism and antifeminism can be seen in “replacement theory,” a white nationalist effort to persuade, reward, or otherwise force white women to have more white children. This is also a motivation of the antiabortion movement.
Altogether, there is a backlash against the social justice movements that have changed majority consciousness from the 1960s forward. Public opinion polls now show that most Americans no longer approve of laws based on race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and other group judgments. We are more likely to see each other as unique individuals as well as universally human. To cite a quote from this book, more of us understand that “we are linked, not ranked.”
That is a cause for celebration—and also caution.
Just as the family is the source of everything from violence to democracy, it is also the source of a lesson here. For a woman in a violent household, the most dangerous time is just before or just after she escapes. This is when she is most likely to be injured or killed. Why? Because she is escaping control. She is about to be free.
The majority in this country are escaping control of old hierarchies of race and gender and more. This means two things:
First, we need to be aware of the danger and look after each other.
Second, just as we would never tell a woman to go back to a violent household, we too will not go back to the past.
We may be about to be free.
There are also quotes that no longer have relevance. I think it’s called growing up. For instance, I used to say, “The examined life is not worth living.” It was obviously a reversal of what Socrates said when he was on trial for his life: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
My version was a smartass way of saying that I could live an activist life forever, without admitting how my unchosen childhood patterns were still magnets in my supposedly chosen adult life.
Until you de-magnetize whatever early patterns you inherited, you are probably making choices that aren’t really yours. Socrates knew what he was talking about.
I also had a deep and not totally unfounded fear of becoming a bag lady. After all, I was freelancing and had never saved a penny in my life. I dealt with this fear by saying, “If I become a bag lady, I’ll just organize the other bag ladies—it’s a life like any other.”
I doubt this unrealism was shared by real bag ladies. They probably would have liked a room of their own, and preferred the street only because it was less dangerous than overcrowded shelters.
But once I passed fifty and actually began to save money for the first time ever, this romance with becoming a bag lady gradually disappeared. I unpacked the boxes that had been a feature of my apartment when it was just a stop on the road. I created a home.
One more quote I have abandoned over the years: “Men should think twice before making widowhood women’s only path to power.” Once, women’s main path to power was widowhood. Even Senator Margaret Chase Smith, who became a hero by facing down Senator Joe McCarthy, inherited her office from her husband. Thankfully, in this new era, women are powerful on their own, independent of who they are attached to.
I hope you find encouragement and company in this lifetime collection of quotes from my speeches, articles, and books, plus some from my friends. I’ve chosen the ones that I hope will be the most useful in arguments, the most comforting in bad times, and the most inspirational when needed, as well as the most likely to lead to laughter.
At the end of the book, I’ve left space so that you can write down your own quotes or those you find and want to save.
For me, coming up with a good quote is like being in an editorial meeting where everyone is searching for ideas, words are flying through the air, and then finding a sudden aha! That’s high praise because my idea of heaven is an editorial meeting.
On these pages, I’ve tried to pretend we were in such a meeting together.
A quote is the essence of a story. We all need stories to convey ideas, justice, anger, humanity, hope, laughter, learning, and whatever makes us understand or feel understood.
We all need words that tell our own story. I hope you find some here.
