Molly Ivins

The greatest moral leader of my lifetime was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose private life does not bear close examination.

We need to reform the political system, or we'll lose the democracy. I don't think it's that hard. It doesn't take rocket science. We've done it before successfully at the presidential level and tried it several places at the state level.

Here's the deal on Texas. It's big. So big, there's about five distinct and different places here, separated from one another geologically, topographically, botanically, ethnically, culturally, and climatically.

You can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to.

I've always had trouble with male authority figures because my father was such a martinet.

Don't get me started about the media double standard.

Even after four years in office, George W. Bush's record on women doesn't leap out at you. It's composed almost entirely of little things, small enough to fly well under the media's radar screen, so few of us have any sense of their cumulative impact.

Many a time freedom has been rolled back - and always for the same sorry reason: fear.

I worked through cancer twice. I probably worked through it too much the last time. This time, I found myself saying, 'Well, I don't feel well. I think I'll take the day off.' I think I did that even a little bit more than I needed to.

One thing I have learned from Johnny Faulk, Texas, and life, is that since you don't always win, you got to learn to enjoy just fightin' the good fight.

New York is just as provincial as anyone else.

If you grew up white before the civil rights movement anywhere in the South, all grown-ups lied. They'd tell you stuff like, 'Don't drink out of the colored fountain, dear, it's dirty.' In the white part of town, the white fountain was always covered with chewing gum and the marks of grubby kids' paws, and the colored fountain was always clean.

To mistake Midland for the volk heartland is the West Texas equivalent of assuming that Greenwich, Connecticut, is Levittown.

I left the 'Trib' in 1970 with the feeling that I would never have a career in establishment media of any kind.

Guns do kill. Unlike cars, that is all they do.

Public campaign financing isn't perfect and can doubtlessly be improved upon as we go.

And the funny thing is, I've always been an optimist - it's practically a congenital disorder with me.

Conservatives, in general, are anti-immigrant for the same reasons they have always been anti-immigrant - a proud tradition in our nation of immigrants going back to the days of the Founders, when Ben Franklin thought we were going to be overrun by Germans. But Business likes illegal workers.

I've thought for years that newspapers should all be owned by nonprofits.

There was really quite a remarkable level of sexism on newspapers when I started.