What Happened

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

All I wanted to do was get inside, change into comfy clothes, and maybe not answer the phone ever again.

The implication was that there must be something else going on, some dark ambition and craving for power. Nobody psychoanalyzed Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, or Bernie Sanders about why they ran. It was just accepted as normal. But for me, it was regarded as inevitable—people assumed I’d run no matter what—yet somehow abnormal, demanding a profound explanation.

My paraphrasing gave Eliot’s elegant English verse a Midwestern makeover: “There’s only the trying,”

I’m convinced that the answer for Democrats going forward is not to abandon data but to obtain better data, use it more effectively, question every assumption, and keep adapting. And we need to listen carefully to what people are telling you and try to assess that too.

I appreciate their talents and like how they make me look. But I’ve never gotten used to how much effort it takes just to be a woman in the public eye. I once calculated how many hours I spent having my hair and makeup done during the campaign. It came to about six hundred hours, or twenty-five days!

Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.

I came along at just the right moment, like a surfer catching the perfect wave. Everything I am, everything I’ve done, so much of what I stand for flows from that happy accident of fate.

I know that for a lot of people, including a lot of women, the movement for women’s equality exists largely in the past. They’re wrong about that. It’s still happening, still as urgent and vital as ever. And it was and is the story of my life—mine and millions of other women’s. We share it. We wrote it together. We’re still writing it. And even though this sounds like bragging and bragging isn’t something women are supposed to do, I haven’t just been a participant in this revolution. I’ve helped lead it.

best candidate whose experience as a woman in a male-dominated culture made her sharper, tougher, and more competent.

Sexism is all the big and little ways that society draws a box around women and says, “You stay in there.”

Misogyny is something darker. It’s rage. Disgust. Hatred. It’s what happens when a woman turns down a guy at a bar and he switches from charming to scary.

Sexism in particular can be so pervasive, we stop seeing it.

“the most obvious realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.”

I suspect that for many of us—more than we might think—it feels somehow off to picture a woman President sitting in the Oval Office or the Situation Room. It’s discordant to tune into a political rally and hear a woman’s voice booming (“screaming,” “screeching”) forth.

Men get to shout back to their heart’s content but not women. Okay, I told this expert, I’m game to try. But out of curiosity, can you give me an example of a woman in public life who has pulled this off successfully—who has met the energy of a crowd while keeping her voice soft and low? He could not.

that women are seen favorably when they advocate for others, but unfavorably when they advocate for themselves.

something fanatical about unruly women still lurks in our national subconscious.

Some things are a lot better. But many are still bad. And they are connected—the bad is the backlash to the good. Women’s advancement has set into motion vast changes that inspire intense feelings of all kinds. Some of us are exhilarated. Others feel a whole lot of rage.

that the decades of work I had done on women and families served me well in all those places, because it meant that I understood the intricacies of people’s lives. I knew how governments could help or hurt families. I knew how to marshal resources and support to the people who needed them most. It turned out that my work on so-called women’s and children’s issues prepared me well for nearly everything else I’ve ever done.

I’d simply urge you to accept that it matters to many of your fellow Americans, even if it doesn’t to you.

Yes yes this 🙌

Those weren’t magic words that stopped her wailing, but they helped, if for no other reason than that they reminded me I was completely new at this and should be gentle with myself.

I couldn’t wait to become a mother, but I didn’t want to lose everything else about myself in the becoming. I was counting on my husband not just to respect that but also to join me in guarding against it.

I don’t believe our marriage is anyone’s business. Public people should be allowed to have private lives, too.

But on those days, I asked myself the questions that mattered most to me: Do I still love him? And can I still be in this marriage without becoming unrecognizable to myself—twisted by anger, resentment, or remoteness? The answers were always yes. So I kept going.

The most important people in her life told her she was nothing. How did she know that wasn’t true?

Friendships between women provide solace and understanding in a world that can be really hard on us.

“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

I think about that line every time I see him on TV now. When he’s yucking it up in the Oval Office with the Russian foreign minister and divulging classified information. When he’s giving the cold shoulder to the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and other European allies. When he’s lying through his teeth about Russia or anything else. “No puppet. No puppet. You’re the puppet.” This man is President of the United States. And no one is happier than Vladimir Putin.

In the twenty-first century, wars will increasingly be fought in cyberspace. Yet our President is too proud, too weak, or too shortsighted to face this threat head-on. No foreign power in modern history has attacked us with so few consequences, and that puts us all at risk.

There’s an old saying that “Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.”

We have to NOT fall into this trap again.

I castigated Republican obstruction in Congress and offered lots of solutions to make the economy fairer and politics cleaner, but I never escaped being pigeonholed as the candidate of continuity rather than change. Certainly, if voters wanted to “shake things up” or “burn it all down,” they were more likely to choose Donald Trump over me. They weren’t in any mood to remember that great old Texas saying from Sam Rayburn, the former Speaker of the House: “Any jackass can kick down a barn. It takes a good carpenter to build one.”

And while I’m sure a lot of Trump supporters had fair and legitimate reasons for their choice, it is an uncomfortable and unavoidable fact that everyone who voted for Donald Trump—all 62,984,825 of them—made the decision to elect a man who bragged about sexual assault, attacked a federal judge for being Mexican and grieving Gold Star parents who were Muslim, and has a long and well-documented history of racial discrimination in his businesses.

“Every period of racial progress in this country is followed by a period of retrenchment. That’s what the 2016 election was about.” It’s like in physics—every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Stan thinks this happened because I “went silent on the economy and change.” But that’s baloney.

But if the media didnt cover it, it was perceived as silence.

He described a nation of volunteers and problem solvers who believed that their own self-interest was advanced by helping one another.

revolts tend to start not in places where conditions are worst, but in places where expectations are most unmet.

Why is the burden of opening our hearts only on half the country?