After we shot Basic Instinct, I got called in to see it. Not on my own — Sharon Stone

"Who is the most unfortunate actress in Hollywood? There are many contenders for the role. Reading, however, about Sharon Stone, you just think: woah — never has someone been so sucked in, chewed up and spat out by a bunch of grasping, evil men. She recently explained how she lost custody of her son because of that famous scene in Basic Instinct. The judge asked Roan, then very young: "Do you know your mother makes sex movies?" She was admitted to hospital with a prolapsed heart valve after he was taken from her: "It literally broke my heart," she said. ... I don’t pretend that Stone is perfect — any woman over the age of 16 knows where the instruction "Take your knickers off" can lead. But how Hollywood treats women is repulsive — it will take anything that is beautiful, funny and talented and turn it into a broken, tarnished mess. It will beg you to play up and play sexy and take your clothes off, and then punish you just for following orders. Did the judge enjoy his viewing of Basic Instinct? I bet he did."

"My father has always been supportive of my individuality."

"An individual who isnt worth the ink it would take to write about him."

"Its traumatizing for me to come to Washington during a Republican administration because I dont have any Republican clothes."

"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."

"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."

"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"

"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"