Quotes from Gail Collins

Downplaying their faults is pretty much the point of campaigns. But we do count on them living with the constant terror of public rejection.

Bin Laden wasn't all that central to the terrorist network any more, but taking him down created a kind of national catharsis. It's been a really, really long time since we had something to celebrate that didn't involve a sports team. I'd rather it had been a non-death-related occasion, but we'll take what we can get.

You hear younger women say, 'I don't believe I'm a feminist. I believe women should have equal right and I believe in fighting for the rights of other women, but I'm certainly not a feminist. No, no, not that!' It's just a word. If you called it 'Fred' would it be better?

I did some research once on the way people in the past imagined the year 2000. They tended to picture the things they already had getting more sophisticated - flying cars, self-cleaning windows. And the folks in the early 1900s had a wildly optimistic estimate of the future of pneumatic tubes.

Billy Jean King could not get credit when her husband was in law school and she was winning the Wimbledon, because he had to sign the cards. You know, you had these cases in the '70s of women who were mayors who couldn't get credit unless their husbands signed for them.

You know what Americans are really sensitive to? Issues of fairness. I think this is a modern phenomenon, born of the civil rights movement. Once you convince Americans that something is basically unfair, you've got a winning cause.

For a border state, I would argue that Texas is less lunatic on the subject of immigration issues than other places around it, like Arizona. They're much more comfortable with their long-term identity as a place with a very large Hispanic population.

The idea that 'if you don't like how things are going, you can just leave' is so ingrained in Texas, the secession movement is no surprise.

Texas has no income tax, which is a big draw for corporate executives who do business there. But it's hardly tax-free. The property taxes are high for a Southern state. The sales taxes are high. One study found that the bottom 20 percent of the Texas population pays 12 percent of its income in state and local taxes.

My only thought about Margaret Thatcher is the same one I had about Ronald Reagan. I hated a lot of what they did, but once in a while a country just needs a change.

The history of American women is all about leaving home - crossing oceans and continents, or getting jobs and living on their own.

The history of American women is about the fight for freedom, but it's less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women's role that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders.

If you can't say anything nice about somebody, step away from the voice enhancement equipment.

It took our entire history to actually change the rules of proper female behavior. But those rules were temporarily abandoned whenever the country needed women to do something they weren't supposed to do.

Ella Baker]'s second defining characteristic was her dislike of top-down leadership... 'She felt leaders were not appointed but the rose up. Someone will rise. Someone will emerge'. It was an attitude Baker shared with some of the older women in the movement.

The term "tomboy," one nineteenth-century author recalled, looking back at the pre–Civil War era, "was applied to all little girls who showed the least tendency toward thinking and acting for themselves.

The theory that women should only be asked to do work that was safe and relatively mundane was ignored whenever something risky or difficult actually needed to be done.

The history of American women is about the fight for freedom, but it's less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women's role that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders.

Most émigrés arrived at Ellis Island in New York, invariably confused and exhausted from an unpleasant and dangerous voyage. Health inspectors checked every immigrant, and while the inspections were not particularly rigid, people were routinely refused entry. Often it was a child, leaving the mother with a sort of Sophie's choice—whether to go back to Europe with the rejected son or daughter or stay with her husband and other children.

How did I make a living? I haven't. I have eked out an existence. - Ella Baker

Ann Fowler was sentenced to twenty lashes in 1637 for defaming a county justice, Adam Thorowgood, with the somewhat undeferential suggestion that Captain Thorowgood could "Kiss my arse.

Admirers of Jefferson might best be advised to skip everything he ever wrote about women and restrict their attention to the Declaration of Independence.)

No matter what the ladies' contribution, the Revolution was not fought to prove that all women were created equal.

Rape was a capital crime, and the defense reminded the men in the jury that if Bedlow was found guilty, the lives of all male citizens would be put "in the hands of a woman, to be disposed of almost at her will and pleasure.