"We use religion like a trolley-car--we ride on it only while it is going our way."

“It makes you more open, it gives you perspective, having a child”

“Science can explain the universe without the need for a Creator.”

“Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.”

“The natural human reaction is to greet hatred with hatred, revenge by revenge. That's the natural genetic reaction.”

“At sixty I look back on a life of deep disappointments, of withered hopes, of unlooked for suffering, of severe discipline.”

Source : Letter to Harriot Hunt (1853), as quoted in "The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Woman's [sic] Rights and Abolition" by Gerda Lerner, Editorial Oxford University Press, (p. 241), 1998.

“I could not tell Himmler everything because he was too false and two-faced.”

Source : Letter to Leon Goldensohn. Quoted in "The Nuremberg Interviews" - by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately, 2004, March 13, 1946.

“One woman violated is already too many but when I learned that it was one in three, the first thought in my head was "Why aren't more people talking about this?"”

“You once said to me that I talk like a man in a book. I not only talk, but think and feel like one. I have spent my life in books; literature has deeply dyed my brain its own colour. This literary colouring is a protective one--like the brown of the rabbit or the checks of the quail--making it impossible for me to tell where literature ends and I begin.”