Quotes About Progress

Marriage equality is a threat: to inequality. It's a book to everyone who values and benefits from equality. It's for all of us.

We need to stop telling the story about the woman who stayed home, passive and dependent, waiting for her man. She wasn't sitting around waiting. She was busy. She still is.

Feminism, as writer Marie Sheer remarked in 1986, "is the radical notion that women are people," a notion not universally accepted but spreading nonetheless.

Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible. Perfectionists can find fault with anything, and no one has higher standards in this regard than leftists.

Time always wins; our victories are only delays; but delays are sweet, and a delay can last a whole lifetime.

Recently, a lot of Americans have swapped the awkward phrase 'same-sex marriage' for the term 'marriage equality'. This phrase is ordinarily implied to mean that same-sex couples will have the rights different-sexed couples do. But it could also mean that marriage is between equals. That's not what traditional marriage was. Throughout much of history in the west, the laws defining marriage made the husband essentially an owner and the wife a possession. Or the man a boss and the woman a slave.

A lot of people respond to almost any achievement, positive development, or outright victory with yes but. Naysaying becomes a habit.

The process of transformation consists mostly of decay.

You may be told that the legal decisions lead the changes, that judges and lawmakers lead the culture in those theaters called courtrooms, but they only ratify change. They are almost never where change begins, only where it ends up, for most changes travel from the edges to the center.

Were revolutions ever really that we thought them to be?

You are making something, a life, a self, and it is an intensely creative task as well as one at which it is more than possible to fail, a little, a lot, miserably, fatally.

He ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.

A woman goes walking down a thousand-mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that she still has nine hundred ninety-nine miles to go and will never get anywhere.

We are, as a culture, moving to a future with more people and more voices and more possibilities. Some people are being left behind, not because the future is intolerant of them but because they are intolerant of this future.

What lies ahead seems unlikely; when it becomes the past, it seems inevitable.

A comprehensive utopia may be out of reach, but the effort to realise it shapes the world for the better all the same. The belief may not be true, but it is useful. Belief makes the world.

Modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.

Young feminists are a thrilling phenomenon: smart, bold, funny defenders of rights and claimers of space—and changers of the conversation.

Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension.

Many events plant seeds, imperceptible at the time, that bear fruit long afterward.

Hope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door at some point, some way out of the problems of the present moment even before that way is found or followed.

A better world, yes; a perfect world, never.

I wonder sometimes what would happen if victory was imagined not just as the elimination of evil but the establishment of good...

We inhabit, in ordinary daylight, a future that was unimaginably dark a few decades ago, when people found the end of the world easier to envision than the impending changes in everyday roles, thoughts, practices that not even the wildest science fiction anticipated. Perhaps we should not have adjusted to it so easily. It would be better if we were astonished every day.