Quotes by Commentators

Co-opted convictions will always betray you.

The United States as we know it was founded on the principle of inalienable rights, this idea that some rights are so sacrosanct not even a government can take them away. Of course, this country’s founding fathers were only thinking of wealthy white men when they codified this principle, but still, it’s a nice idea, that there are some freedoms that cannot be taken away.What this debate shows us is that even in this day and age, the rights of women are not inalienable. Our rights can be and are, with alarming regularity, stripped away.

In many ways, likability is a very elaborate lie, a performance, a code of conduct dictating the proper way to be. Characters who don't follow this code become unlikable. Critics who criticize a character's unlikability cannot necessarily be faulted. They are merely expressing a wider cultural malaise with all things unpleasant, all things that dare to breach the norm of social acceptability.

Trump’s America is not America: not today’s or tomorrow’s, but yesterday’s.Trump’s America is brutal, perverse, regressive, insular and afraid. There is no hope in it; there is no light in it. It is a vast expanse of darkness and desolation.And that is a vision of America that most of the people in this country cannot and will not abide.

This is where we should start focusing this conversation: how men (as readers, critics, and editors) can start to bear the responsibility for becoming better, broader readers.

Since when did the American Dream become the American Guarantee?

We have to examine the extent to which we export poverty to other societies. When we decide that we will import products from China that are produced by people earning less than a dollar an hour, and grant their country most-favored-nation status (political contributions notwithstanding), we are deciding to make American workers who must earn the minimum wage compete with them. I am not suggesting that we close the doors to China or to Mexico, but I am suggesting that we look very carefully at the web of international relationships that we are creating. At the very minimum, we should understand that we have two choices in our country: we can raise world living standards by exporting those standards, or we can lower living standards- not only the world’s but also our own- by deciding that it is acceptable for the products of exploited labor to enter this country.

I'm tired of feeling like I should be grateful when popular culture deigns to acknowledge the experiences of people who are not white, middle class or wealthy, and heterosexual.

There is no collective slavery revenge fantasy among black people, but I am certain, if there were one, it would not be about white people, not at all.

I often tell my students that fiction is about desire in one way or another. The older I get, the more I understand that life is generally the pursuit of desires. We want and want and oh how we want. We hunger.

I also don’t think there’s any shame in saying that when I was raped, I became a victim, and to this day, while I am also many other things, I am still a victim.

He never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity

We routinely and rightly condemn the terrorism that kills civilians in the name of God but we cannot claim the high moral ground if we dismiss the suffering and death of the many thousands of civilians who die in our wars as ‘collateral damage’. Ancient religious mythologies helped people to face up to the dilemma of state violence, but our current nationalist ideologies seem by contrast to promote a retreat into denial or hardening of our hearts. Nothing shows this more clearly than a remark of Madeleine Albright when she was still Bill Clinton’s ambassador to the United Nations. Later she retracted it, but among people around the world it has never been forgotten. In 1996, in CBS’s 60 Minutes, Lesley Stahl asked her whether the cost of international sanctions against Iraq was justified: 'We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean that’s more children than died in Hiroshima … Is the price worth it?’ 'I think this is a very hard choice,’ Albright replied 'but the price, we think the price is worth it.

I was too smart and that made people uncomfortable--most folks where we've lived our whole lives don't trust too much intelligence in a woman. There is also the problem of my eyes--they don't hide anything. If I don't care for a person, my eyes make it plain. I don't care for most. Folks are generally comfortable with the small lies they tell each other. They don't know what to do with someone like me, who mostly doesn't bother with small lies.

I knew I was in love with The Hunger Games when I did not want to get off the treadmill

Mythology was never designed to describe historically verifiable events that actually happened. It was an attempt to express their inner significance or to draw attention to realities that were too elusive to be discussed in a logically coherent way.

... just one more reminder that the rules are always different for girls, no matter who they are and no matter what they do.

I hear many young women say they can't find well-known feminists with whom they identify. That can be disheartening, but I say, let us (try to) become the feminists we would like to see moving through the world.

People like bipartisanship not because they like the substance of what bipartisanship produces, but because it reduces the cognitive stress that partisan disagreement creates. If two sides are bitterly arguing over some major piece of public policy, this forces us to choose sides, and for those with weak mastery of the issue or tenuous connections to a specific worldview, it is easy to be stalked by the worry that you’re choosing the wrong side: After all, there are a ton of people screaming in righteous indignation that the side you’re on is about to destroy the country.

It's not called being gay, it's called being fabulous!

Nostalgia is powerful. It is natural, human to long for the past, particularly when we can remember our histories as better than they were.

Many comedians are very proud of themselves for saying the things others are supposedly afraid to say. They are at the forefront of this culture of entitlement where we get to do anything, think anything, and say anything.

I had been fortified by trauma, the way a bone, once broken, grows back stronger than it had been.

We could talk about the retraction of re-productive rights in North Carolina and Texas and Ohio, or we could conjure up a lot of statistics about domestic and sexual violence or women living in poverty. If the patriarchy is dead, the numbers have not gotten the memo.

You don't have the right to hold somebody accountable for standards you refuse to apply to yourself.

A citizen at his home in Rockford, Illinois, or Boulder, Colorado, could read a newspaper, listen to a radio, or watch the round-the-clock coverage on television, but he had no way of connecting with those who shared his views. Nor was there a quick, readily available tool for an ordinary citizen to gather information on his own. In 1960, communication was a one-way street, and information was fundamentally inaccessible. The whole idea of summoning up data or reaching thousands of individuals with the touch of a finger was a science-fiction fantasy.

We are now dealing with a bizarre new morality where a woman cannot simply say, in one way or another, "I'm on the pill because I like dick.

In graduate school, early on, I once overheard a classmate talking in her office as I walked by. She didn't know I was there. She was gossiping about me to a group of our classmates & said I was the affirmative-action student...Rationally, I know it was absurd, but hearing how she & maybe others saw me hurt real bad...I stopped joking about being a slacker. I tripled the number of projects I was involved with. I was excellent most of the time. I fell short some of the time. I made sure I got good grades. I made sure my comprehensive exams were solid. I wrote conference proposals & had them accepted. I published. I designed an overly ambitious research project for my dissertation that kind of made me want to die. No matter what I did, I heard that girl, that girl who had accomplished a fraction of a fraction of what I had, telling a group of our peers I was the one who did not deserve to be in our program.

I get angry when women disavow feminism and shun the feminist label but say they support all the advances born of feminism because I see a disconnect that does not need to be there.