“People accuse me of being a single-issue writer, a single-issue thinker, and a single-issue voter, but it isn't true. What I've chosen, in a world where there's never enough time and energy, is to focus on the one political issue which most clearly and unmistakably demonstrates what any politician — or political philosophy — is made of, right down to the creamy liquid center.
Make no mistake: all politicians — even those ostensibly on the side of guns and gun ownership — hate the issue and anyone, like me, who insists on bringing it up. They hate it because it's an X-ray machine. It's a Vulcan mind-meld. It's the ultimate test to which any politician — or political philosophy — can be put.
If a politician isn't perfectly comfortable with the idea of his average constituent, any man, woman, or responsible child, walking into a hardware store and paying cash — for any rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything”

Source: Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971), p. xxiv

"Politics and the English Language" (1946)
Source: Why I Write
Context: All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

On abortion, pg. 184.
The Woman I Am: A Memoir (2006)

Address on religious factions (1981)
Context: The specter of single-issue religious groups is growing over our land. … One of the great strengths of our political system always has been our tendency to keep religious issues in the background. By maintaining the separation of church and state, the United States has avoided the intolerance which has so divided the rest of the world with religious wars.

Source: Gowda upset over seeing his sleeping photo http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bangalore/Gowda-upset-over-seeing-his-sleeping-photo/articleshow/97258.cms, The Times of India, 27 July 2003

Wellesley Commencement Address (1994)

Interview with the Economist (September 10, 2019)

"Abe Lincoln in McDonald’s" p. 140 (originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1989)
Short fiction, Bible Stories for Adults (1996)

Ecology, during the last ten years, has acquired a new meaning. It is still the name for a branch of professional biology, but the term now increasingly serves as the label under which a broad, politically organized general public analyzes and influences technical decisions.
Silence is a Commons (1982)