A biography for Norah Vincenthasn’t been written yet.
“The reporting of the news is supposed to be objective, a dispassionate recitation of the facts. But of course it never is and never has been. What's more, it never will or could be.”
“Being free doesn't mean you get to do whatever you want; that's license. It also doesn't mean that you don't have to pay up when whatever you've insisted is your right to do turns sour in the doing.”
“Feminism is not monolithic and never will be if it remains true to its founding principle that a woman has a mind of her own and the right to express it freely.”
“This may be one of the real tragedies of free market capitalism gone awry. The quality of our intellectual life is declining in the throes of profit and loss, and the proof is in the process.”
“If Oprah's Book Club is gone, good riddance.”
“That was the crux. You. Only you could work on you. Nobody could force you, and if you weren't ready, then you weren't ready, and no amount of open-armed encouragement was going to change that.”
“Plagiarism is one of those petty larcenies many of us were more or less guilty of in high school or college or both.”
“The fact that you carried an embryo to term does not make you a mother any more than it makes you an obstetrician.”
“It was emotionally exhausting to be an impostor, and also an impostor of the opposite sex. That's what most transsexuals feel before they make the transition. When I started, I'd thought that gender had to do with costumes and haircuts.”
“Fetal humanity is the philosophical hinge on which the abortion debate turns.”
“Race is not the stumbling block to progress it once was, in large part because the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race.”
“Picking fights with or propositioning strangers, betraying friends, lying to family, stealing, cheating and engaging in road rage were things I did with alacrity on Prozac but contemplate now with shame.”
“Students can publish their views in college newspapers. They can print pamphlets and hand them out at student unions or even on campus walkways. They need not deface college property.”
“Conservatives do not oppose affirmative action because they are crypto-racists.”
“There should be no ideas that cannot be expressed.”
“The womb is one of the defining features of the female animal. The defining feature of abortion, meanwhile, is a denial or negation of the womb, because its sole purpose is to stop the womb from fulfilling its normal function. Thus abortion is the ultimate negation of the female animal and therefore the ultimate misogynistic act.”
“You've got to lie skillfully to get elected, because you've got to convince a whole zoo of self-involved ciphers that you've got every one of their self-serving, solipsistic interests at heart.”
“The twin causes Bin Laden invokes are Islam and Arab self-determination, and armies rise to serve him. No need to convert or dogmatize. Believers are ready-made.”
“When you've renounced all the conveniences whose ungreen prerequisites you so abhor, then you can bemoan the plague of greenhouse gases.”
“The next time someone tells you that Shakespeare is irrelevant, tell him that the Bard wrote his greatest play about George W. Bush 350 years before our incumbent president was even born. Oh yeah, you're thinking. Which one? 'Much Ado About Nothing?' 'The Comedy of Errors?' Nah. Actually, it's 'Hamlet.'”