Betty Rollin Quotes

#1. The nice thing about being on stage is it's not that I know what to do, but I have a very clear feeling that anything I do is OK. All I'm up there to do is express how I feel. Any way I choose to do that is fine.

Adam Duritz

#2. In Angola, I visited 'HeroRats' that have been trained to sniff out land mines (and, in some countries, diagnose tuberculosis). In a day, they can clear 20 times as much of a minefield as a human, and they work for bananas!

Nicholas Kristof

#3. I understand being the villain is what people like. People play to that. They want to know about the villain.

Dwyane Wade

#4. The notion that the maternal wish and the activity of mothering are instinctive or biologically predestined is baloney.

Betty Rollin

#5. To be afraid is in a way to be hopeful, because to be afraid means that you haven't given up. You know it doesn't help, but you keep thrashing. The monster has you pinned to the wall, but you're not ready to say, 'Oh, hell, eat me.

Betty Rollin

#6. I wasn't your average kid. I was signing autographs in Japan at 12.

Shaun White

#7. I don't believe gun owners have rights.

Sarah Brady

#8. [On her mastectomy:] Pity is delicious. I was crazy about the pity I got. It was the best kind, too. I did not get, nor did I want, the drooling, mewing kind. I preferred something more restrained but deep-felt. Quality pity.

Betty Rollin

#9. Scratch most feminists and underneath there is a woman who longs to be a sex object, the difference is that is not all she longs to be.

Betty Rollin

#10. Disease may score a direct hit on only one member of a family, but shrapnel tears the flesh of the others.

Betty Rollin

#11. History is what people want to remember.

Jane Stevenson

#12. In my mother's ferocious striving to give me 'everything,' she had never considered that giving me 'everything' would make me (1) different (from her), and (2) guilty (about what I got). Different and Guilty are not the stuff on which comradeship is built.

Betty Rollin

#13. Love of learning is a pleasant and universal bond since it deals with what one is and not what one has.

Freya Stark

#14. Art is not fashionable. That's why fashion and art are two different things. Fashion can never be art because fashion deals with whim, what is temporary, what changes, what is transient, what is now and not now. Art has to deal with issues that are timeless, that never change.

Duane Michals

#15. Unlike a disappointing marriage, disappointing motherhood cannot be terminated by divorce.

Betty Rollin

#16. [On her mastectomy:] Fact is, I'm the same car I always was, except now I have a dent in my fender.

Betty Rollin

#17. All music is important if it comes from the heart.

Carlos Santana

#18. Biological possibility and desire are not the same as biological need. Women have childbearing equipment. For them to choose not to use the equipment is no more blocking what is instinctive than it is for a man who, muscles or no, chooses not to be a weightlifter.

Betty Rollin