Non-crazy gun advocates – the ones who aren’t stockpiling in preparation for a zombie invasion – don’t like the idea of expanding background checks because they think it’ll be a lot more paperwork. And it probably would make it more difficult to sell guns at, say, a flea market. Gail Collins Read Quote
The Tea Party people say they’re angry about socialism, but maybe they’re really angry about capitalism. If there’s a sense of being looked down upon, it’s that sense of failure that’s built into a system that assures everyone they can make it to the top, but then reserves the top for only a tiny fraction of the strivers. Gail Collins Read Quote
Well, it’d certainly be fascinating if we discovered that gays were better at being married than heterosexuals are. Talk about irony. Gail Collins Read Quote
As long as we decline to allow sick, uninsured people to just lie down and die on the side of the road, everybody has to have insurance for the health care system to work sanely. Gail Collins Read Quote
My only thought about Margaret Thatcher is the same one I had about Ronald Reagan. I hated a lot of what they did, but once in a while a country just needs a change. Gail Collins Read Quote
Billy Jean King could not get credit when her husband was in law school and she was winning the Wimbledon, because he had to sign the cards. You know, you had these cases in the ’70s of women who were mayors who couldn’t get credit unless their husbands signed for them. Gail Collins Read Quote
Certainly Nancy Reagan had an extraordinary effect on her husband. I’m truly not sure that, say, Laura Bush had that much effect on the Bush administration. She certainly, you know, seems to be a nice person who I think the public likes. But I can’t really put my finger on any huge impact she’s had. Gail Collins Read Quote
The middle of ‘America’s Women’ is about the Civil War, and how women, black and white, confronted slavery and abolition. As in every other period of crisis, the rules of sexual decorum were suspended due to emergency. Gail Collins Read Quote
The history of American women is about the fight for freedom, but it’s less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women’s role that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders. Gail Collins Read Quote
Some of our national heroines were defined by the fact that they never nested – they were peripatetic crusaders like Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Sojourner Truth, Dorothy Dix. Gail Collins Read Quote