I never got a Oscar. I never had an acting lesson. Life was my only tr — Barbara Stanwyck

"Im a tough old broad from Brooklyn. Dont try to make me into something Im not. If you want someone to tiptoe down the Barkley staircase in crinoline and politely ask where the cattle went, get another girl."

"People talk about my career, but career is too pompous a word. It was a job, and I have always felt very privileged to be paid for what I love doing."

"I could understand if they picked Katharine Hepburn, but of course she wouldnt do it. But when they asked me, I thought at first it was a mistake. I thought they got me mixed up with Bette Davis. Attention embarrasses me. I dont like to be on display. I was always an extrovert in my work, but when it comes time to be myself Ill take a powder every time."

"My only problem is finding a way to play my fortieth fallen female in a different way from my thirty-ninth."

"Be the change that you wish to see in the world."

"we are engaged in a grim experiment never before attempted. We are subjecting whole populations to exposure to chemicals which animal experiments have proved to be extremely poisonous and in many cases cumulative in their effect. These exposures now begin at or before birth and-unless we change our methods-will continue through the lifetime of those now living. No one knows what the result will be, because we have no previous experience to guide us."

"pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease: your victim (death and life safely beyond) plays with the bigness of his littleness"

"I believe that the unity of man as opposed to other living things derives from the fact that man is the conscious life of himself. Man is conscious of himself, of his future, which is death, of his smallness, of his impotence; he is aware of others as others; man is in nature, subject to its laws even if he transcends it with his thought."

"“We need brains, is the bottom line,” Ivy said. “We’re not hunter-gatherers anymore. We’re all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn’t bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It’s our ability to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need to breed nerds.”"

"I have been clinically depressed for most of my life. I once used drugs to fix it. Then I stopped. I stopped because I decided they were making me stupid, and Id rather be miserable than stupid. I am what I am."