[1] Lilienthal was enrolled at the private Katherine Delmar Burke School in San Francisco, but was soon expelled for passing a note containing a vulgar word in class.

[2][6] Lilienthal founded the Ploughshares Fund in her living room in 1981, at the height of the Cold War, to advocate against nuclear weapons.

[1][2] In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle on the Fund's fifteenth anniversary, Lilienthal said, "The possibility of a nuclear war was the very worst problem in the world.

I mean really nothing," but in its first year was "able to give away about $100,000 to individuals and small organizations to study the problems of nuclear weaponry and to get ordinary citizens informed about the issues and the danger.

"[2] By the time of Lilienthal's death in 2006, the Ploughshares Fund had given nearly $50 million to the cause of nuclear disarmament,[1] mostly toward startup research, and had become (according to The Washington Post) "the largest grant-making foundation in the United States focusing exclusively on peace and security issues.

[1][2] The Ploughshares Fund also made a $3,000 grant "to send scientists from the Natural Resources Defense Council to Moscow for what resulted in a breakthrough agreement allowing the installation of seismic monitoring equipment, which proved that a nuclear testing ban could be verified" and a $5,000 grant to Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Theodore Postol for him "to finish a technical paper that exposed the Pentagon's exaggerated claims of the effectiveness of Patriot missiles during the Persian Gulf War.

"[2] Lilienthal died on October 24, 2006, at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, at the age of 87, from a bone infection that led to pneumonia.

[1][2] In an interview with The Washington Post upon her death, George Perkovich, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said: "Sally was an absolutely vital figure in supporting researchers, policy activists and scientists in the U.S. and overseas who were trying to change government policies while [governments] were inflating the powers of nuclear weapons.