"The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day."

"Pushing himself off the bed in a violent thrust, his lats widen like wings down his sides, where his waistcoat is open halfway to his waist to accommodate muscular builds, he indicates the gilded cage with outstretched arms. Showing off his supreme musculature, he says, “We have forever Phoebe."

"What others will think?” has killed the most dreams,Living the mainstream has never been the mainstream,Free people know how to live without remorse,They know ships aren’t meant to stay at shores."

"It is high time to compel man by the might of right to give woman her political, legal and social rights. She will find her own sphere in accordance with her capacities, powers and tastes; and yet she will be woman still."

"If government is to respect people's autonomy, or to treat them with dignity, it should not deprive them of freedom. It should treat them as adults, rather than children or infants."

"Now and then women should do for themselves what men have already done—occasionally what men have not done—thereby establishing themselves as persons, and perhaps encouraging other women toward greater independence of thought and action."

"The nineteenth century, especially the second half of it, was a time of restatement in Ireland. After the famine, after the failed rebellions of the Forties and Sixties, the cultural and political desires for self-determination began to shape each other in a series of riffs on independence and identity."

"All men are by nature free; you have therefore an undoubted liberty to depart whenever you please, but will have many and great difficulties to encounter in passing the frontiers."

"California is a bellwether state. California was the first state in the United States to overturn the laws against interracial marriage. It took 19 years for the rest of the country to come around to that point of view."