"A take back the night march goes right to our emotional core. We women are especially supposed to be afraid of the night The night promises harm to women. For a woman to walk on the street at night is not only to risk abuse, but also—according to the values of male domination—to ask for it. The woman who transgresses the boundaries of night is an outlaw who breaks an elementary rule of civilized behavior: a decent woman does not go out—certainly not alone, certainly not only with other women—at night. A woman out in the night, not on a leash, is thought to be a slut or an uppity bitch who does not know her place."

“Do women need sovereignty—not only over their own bodies as currently understood in the United States ...; but control of a boundary further away from their bodies, a defended boundary? Do women need land and an army ...; or a feminist government in exile ...? Or is it simpler: the bed belongs to the woman; the house belongs to the woman; any land belongs to the woman; if a male intimate is violent he is removed from the place where she has the superior and inviolate claim, arrested, denied parole, and prosecuted. .... Could women "set a high price on our blood"? Could women set any price on our blood? Could women manage self-defense if not retaliation? Would self-defense be enough? Could women execute men who raped or beat or tortured women? .... .... Could the acts of women in behalf of women … have a code of honor woman-to-woman that weakens the male-dominant demands of nationalism or race-pride or ethnic pride? Could women commit treason to the men of their own group: put women first, even the putative enemy women? Do women have enough militancy and self-respect to see themselves as the central makers of legal codes, ethics, honor codes, and culture?”

“Can intercourse exist without the woman herself turning herself into a thing, which she must do because men cannot fuck equals and men must fuck: because one price of dominance is that one impotent in the face of equality?”

“Men renounce whatever they have in common with women so as to experience no commonality with women; and whatis left according to men, is one piece of flesh a few inches long, the penis.”

“Her own experiences—as a rape victim, a prostitute and a battered wife—only added to the trenchancy of her views, but she reacted with fury to suggestions that such traumas had made it difficult for her to be objective. "I've never heard Solzhenitsyn asked if he can be objective about the gulag," she snarled. "As if not paying attention to rape and wife battery were some kind of objectivity.”

“I want to see this men's movement make a commitment to ending rape because that is the only meaningful commitment to equality. It is astonishing that in all our worlds of feminism and antisexism we never talk seriously about ending rape. Ending it. Stopping it. No more. No more rape. In the back of our minds, are we holding on to its inevitability as the last preserve of the biological? Do we think that it is always going to exist no matter what we do? All of our political actions are lies if we don't make a commitment to ending the practice of rape. This commitment has to be political. It has to be serious. It has to be systematic. It has to be public. It can't be self-indulgent.”

“I know a hell of a lot about intercourse. I wish I knew less.”