"Football is a beautiful game because it belongs to us all."

"We are upsetting the atmosphere upon which all life depends. In the late 80s when I began to take climate change seriously, we referred to global warming as a “slow-motion catastrophe” one we expected to kick in perhaps generations later. Instead, the signs of change have accelerated alarmingly."

"Progress has never been a bargain… you have to pay for it. Sometimes I think there’s a man who sits behind a counter and says, ‘You can have a telephone but you lose privacy and the charm of distance. Madame, you may have the vote but at a price. You lose the right to retreat behind your powder puff and your petticoat. Mister, you may conquer the air but the birds will lose their wonder and the clouds will smell of gasoline.’"

"Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death leaving only that which is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you will have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

"Women suffer hideous abuse including prostitution, disappear and die at the hands of men every year in every major city in Canada. Aboriginal women remain especially vulnerable. Women live without adequate incomes, social services or advocacy. The criminal law is applied in a discriminatory fashion that sustains male violence. The statistics are not even disputed any more. But that hierarchical status quo maintains hundreds if not thousands of women in prostituted squalor."

"The book confirms the mind-numbing bigotry and ignorance of individuals with the criminal justice system but more importantly, the common ideology underpinning our institutions and their functionaries: women are not trusted as victims or witnesses, are deemed unreliable, exaggerating their plight and in themselves dangerous, unworthy of the protection of law."

"You could quite seriously look at climate change as a response of the system intended to get rid of an irritating species: us humans,” … “Or at least cut them back to size."

"It seemed to me that the trading in men would continue for as long as some people were free to take others as their property."

"It doesn’t matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books."