Quotes about women
page 28

Robert A. Heinlein photo
Antonio Llidó photo

“Every evening after dinner, a new life began. There was no hurry. Some walked in the garden. Others smoked. About nine o’clock we made our way alone or in twos and threes to the Study House. Outdoor shoes came off and soft shoes or moccasins were put on. We sat quietly, each on his or her own cushion, round the floor in the centre. Men sat on the right, women on the left; never together.

Some went straight on to the stage and began to practice the rhythmic exercises. On our first arrival, each of us had the right to choose his own teacher for the movements. I had chosen Vasili Ferapontoff, a young Russian, tall, with a sad studious face. He wore pince-nez, and looked the picture of the perpetual student, Trofimov, in The Cherry Orchard. He was a conscientious instructor, though not a brilliant performer. I came to value his friendship, which continued until his premature death ten years later. He told me in one of our first conversations that he expected to die young.

The exercises were much the same as those I had seen in Constantinople three years before. The new pupils, such as myself, began with the series called Six Obligatory Exercises. I found them immensely exciting, and worked hard to master them quickly so that I could join in the work of the general class.”

John G. Bennett (1897–1974) British mathematician and author

Source: Witness: the Story of a Search (1962), p. 90–91 cited in: "Gurdjieff’s Temple Dances by John G. Bennett", Gurdjieff International Review, on gurdjieff.org; About Fontainebleau 1923

Germaine Greer photo
Jair Bolsonaro photo

“Over time, due to liberal habit, drugs, women also working, the number of homosexuals has really increased. I also tend to say if your son starts hanging out with certain people with a certain behavior, he'll adopt that sort of behavior. He'll think it's normal.”

Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect

Interview to Ellen Page in March 2016. "Você foge a normalidade", diz Jair Bolsonaro a Ellen Page https://www.opovo.com.br/noticias/brasil/2016/03/voce-foge-a-normalidade-diz-jair-bolsonaro-a-ellen-page.html. O Povo (11 March 2016).

Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo
George William Russell photo

“Bored with your present enemies? Make new ones! Tell two of your women friends that they look alike.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Women & men

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam photo

“The human heart is an undiscovered country; men and women are forever perishing as they explore its wilds.”

Frank Crane (1861–1928) American Presbyterian minister

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

Kunti photo
Joseph Strutt photo
Kathy Griffin photo

“You've got the two titans. Streisand. Oprah. Both strong black women.”

Kathy Griffin (1960) American actress and comedian

Is... Not Nicole Kidman (2005)

Orson Scott Card photo
Warren Farrell photo
Kate Winslet photo

“I do think it’s important for young women to know that magazine covers are retouched. People don’t really look like that. In films I might look glamorous, but I’ve been in hair and make-up for two hours.”

Kate Winslet (1975) English actress and singer

Marie Clare, Kate Winslet interview by Harvey Marcus on Thursday 30 April 2009 http://www.marieclaire.co.uk/celebrity/interviews/322173/kate-winslet-interview.html

George Meredith photo

“What a woman thinks of women is the test of her nature.”

George Meredith (1828–1909) British novelist and poet of the Victorian era

Source: Diana of the Crossways http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4470/4470.txt (1885), Ch. 1.

Hillary Clinton photo

“If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights once and for all.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

September 5, 1995
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/hillaryclintonbeijingspeech.htm
White House years (1993–2000)

Mary Meeker photo
Phyllis Chesler photo

“Women must begin to "save" themselves and their daughters before they "save" their husbands and their sons; before they "save" the whole world.”

Phyllis Chesler (1940) Psychotherapist, college professor, and author

Women and Madness (2005), pp. 348–349, and Women and Madness (1972), p. 301.
Women and Madness (1972, 2005)

Margaret Mead photo
Hillary Clinton photo
Sienna Guillory photo
André Maurois photo
Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Salman al-Ouda photo

“My brother Osama, how much blood has been spilt? How many innocent people, children, elderly, and women have been killed … in the name of Al Qaeda? Will you be happy to meet God Almighty carrying the burden of these hundreds of thousands or millions of victims on your back?”

Salman al-Ouda (1956) journalist

In 2007, around the sixth anniversary of September 11 attacks, Alodah addressed Osama bin Laden on MBC television network. http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=702bf6d5-a37a-4e3e-a491-fd72bf6a9da1&k=
2007

Steven Pinker photo
Tawakkol Karman photo
Catharine A. MacKinnon photo

“Postmodernism is an academic theory, originating in academia with an academic elite, not in the world of women and men, where feminist theory is rooted.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon (1946) American feminist and legal activist

"Postmodernism and Human Rights" (2000), p. 62
Are Women Human?: and Other International Dialogues (2006)

Janusz Korwin-Mikke photo

“Women must earn less than men because they are weaker, smaller and less intelligent. They must earn less, that's all.”

Janusz Korwin-Mikke (1942) polish politician

Source: EU Parliament, 03 March 2017 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNs_nn_qBIQ

George W. Bush photo
John Buchan photo

“He knew less about women than he knew about the physics of hyperspace.”

Source: The House of the Four Winds (1935), Ch. XI

William Cobbett photo
Lois McMaster Bujold photo
John Masefield photo
Elizabeth Cheney photo

“Sometimes there is a tendency to talk about women as though we are a herd…women believe this or women want that. But we very much vote on the issues depending on what's important.”

Elizabeth Cheney (1966) American lawyer

G. Robert Hillman, "New Bush Campaign Aims to Appeal to Women Voters," Dallas Morning News, May 12, 2004.

Warren Farrell photo

“Divorces led to bodies of men (called legislatures) protecting women collectively as other men (called husbands) failed to protect women individually.”

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 238.

Matthew Mitcham photo
Warren Farrell photo
Janusz Korwin-Mikke photo

“[Women] Inferior? Superior! I am sexist, of course.”

Janusz Korwin-Mikke (1942) polish politician

Superstacja 19.08.2009 http://www.viddler.com/explore/ciauprtv/videos/748/597.418/, Answer for question: "Are you sexist? Do you think that women are inferior to men??"

Franklin D. Roosevelt photo
Gillian Anderson photo

“If I chose to have a nanny, I'd be able to pay to have a nanny - a lot of women don't have that opportunity. I don't feel like I'm a working single mom, because I have that option that a lot of people don't have.”

Gillian Anderson (1968) American-British film, television and theatre actress, activist and writer

Alasdair Ferguson (June 7, 2002) "As The X-Files ends, I realise how much", The Express.
2000s

Ilana Mercer photo

“Arisen online and beyond is a niche-market of nudniks (nags): Women talking, blogging, vlogging, writing and publishing about women in high-technology or their absence therefrom; women beating the tom-tom about discrimination and stereotyping, but saying absolutely nothing about the technology they presumably love and help create.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

" James Damore Confronts The Hags of High-Tech (& Loses) https://townhall.com/columnists/ilanamercer/2017/08/12/james-damore-confronts-the-nagging-harridans-of-hightech--loses-n2367635," Townhall.com, August 12, 2017.
2010s, 2017

Akbar photo
David Attenborough photo
Abigail Scott Duniway photo

“The young women of today, free to study, to speak, to write, to choose their occupation, should remember that every inch of this freedom was bought for them at a great price. It is for them to show their gratitude by helping onward the reforms of their own times, by spreading the light of freedom and of truth still wider. The debt that each generation owes to the past it must pay to the future.”

Abigail Scott Duniway (1834–1915) American suffragist, writer, journalist, pioneer

Abigail Scott Duniway, quoted in Westward the Women https://books.google.com/books?id=Xy50CwAAQBAJ&pg=PT127&lpg=PT127&dq=%22+young+women+of+today,+free+to+study,+to+speak,+to+write%22&source=bl&ots=9gDARyV3TU&sig=qp7E9Zg0u1yJCbJVQ-pqBeu49JE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi_zKKCp5zZAhUEyGMKHTdVCcQQ6AEINTAC#v=onepage&q=%22%20young%20women%20of%20today%2C%20free%20to%20study%2C%20to%20speak%2C%20to%20write%22&f=false and by the Hatfield School of Govennment's Center for Women's Leadership https://www.pdx.edu/womens-leadership/abigail-scott-duniway-speaker-series

Richard Rodríguez photo
H. Havelock Ellis photo
Winston S. Churchill photo
Muhammad photo
Kofi Annan photo
Margaret Cho photo
Warren Farrell photo
Stendhal photo

“A strange effect of marriage, such as the nineteenth century has made it! The boredom of married life inevitably destroys love, when love has preceded marriage. And yet, as a philosopher has observed, it speedily brings about, among people who are rich enough not to have to work, an intense boredom with all quiet forms of enjoyment. And it is only dried up hearts, among women, that it does not predispose to love.”

Étrange effet du mariage, tel que l'a fait le XIXe siècle! L'ennui de la vie matrimoniale fait périr l'amour sûrement, quand l'amour a précédé le mariage. Et cependant, dirait un philosophe, il amène bientôt chez les gens assez riches pour ne pas travailler, l'ennui profond de toutes les jouissances tranquilles. Et ce n'est que les âmes sèches parmi les femmes qu'il ne prédispose pas à l'amour.
Vol. I, ch. XXIII
Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) (1830)

Peter Thiel photo
Jodie Foster photo
André Maurois photo
Lois McMaster Bujold photo

“Women do desperately need models for power other than the maternal.”

Lois McMaster Bujold (1949) Science Fiction and fantasy author from the USA

Correspondence with feminist scholar and author Sylvia Kelso, published in Women of Other Worlds (1999), also quoted in "Women’s Hero Journey : An Interview With Lois McMaster Bujold on Paladin of Souls by Alan Oak at WomenWriters.net (June 2009) http://womenwriters.net/june09/paladin_interview.html

Chuck Hagel photo

“This is a ping-pong game with American lives. These young men and women that we put in Anbar province, in Iraq, in Baghdad, are not beans. They're real lives. And we better be damn sure we know what we're doing, all of us, before we put 22,000 more Americans into that grinder.”

Chuck Hagel (1946) United States Secretary of Defense

On the Iraq troop surge of 2007, Excerpts From Senate Iraq Meeting, The Bellingham Herald, 24 January 2007, 2007-01-25 http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_IRAQ_EXCERPTS?SITE=WABEL&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT,
2007

Alan Charles Kors photo

“The cognitive behavior of Western intellectuals faced with the accomplishments of their own society, on the one hand, and with the socialist ideal and then the socialist reality, on the other, takes one's breath away. In the midst of unparalleled social mobility in the West, they cry "caste." In a society of munificent goods and services, they cry either "poverty" or "consumerism." In a society of ever richer, more varied, more productive, more self-defined, and more satisfying lives, they cry "alienation." In a society that has liberated women, racial minorities, religious minorities, and gays and lesbians to an extent that no one could have dreamed possible just fifty years ago, they cry "oppression." In a society of boundless private charity, they cry "avarice." In a society in which hundreds of millions have been free riders upon the risk, knowledge, and capital of others, they decry the "exploitation" of the free riders. In a society that broke, on behalf of merit, the seemingly eternal chains of station by birth, they cry "injustice." In the names of fantasy worlds and mystical perfections, they have closed themselves to the Western, liberal miracle of individual rights, individual responsibility, merit, and human satisfaction. Like Marx, they put words like "liberty" in quotation marks when these refer to the West.”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

2000s, Can There Be an "After Socialism"? (2003)

Rebecca West photo

“There is one common condition for the lot of women in Western civilization and all other civilizations that we know about for certain, and that is, woman as a sex is disliked and persecuted, while as an individual she is liked, loved, and even, with reasonable luck, sometimes worshipped.”

Rebecca West (1892–1983) British feminist and author

Speech to the Fabian Society (1928) "Dame Rebecca West Dies in London" http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/09/10/specials/west-obit.html, The New York Times (16 March 1983)

Johannes Lichtenauer photo

“Men feel that women somehow drag them down, and women feel that way about men. It's possible they are right.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Women & men

Anthony Burgess photo
Grace Kelly photo

“Women's natural role is to be a pillar of the family.”

Grace Kelly (1929–1982) American actress and Princess consort of Monaco

Attributed to Kelly in: Paula Munier (2004) On Being Blonde: Wit And Wisdom From The World's Most Infamous Blondes. p. 78

Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Phyllis Chesler photo

“If women take their bodies seriously—and ideally we should—then its full expression, in terms of pleasure, maternity, and physical strength, seems to fare better when women control the means of production and reproduction. From this point of view, it is simply not in women's interest to support patriarchy or even a fabled "equality" with men. That women do so is more a sign of powerlessness than of any biologically based "superior" wisdom.”

Phyllis Chesler (1940) Psychotherapist, college professor, and author

Women and Madness (N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, rev'd & updated ed., 1st ed., 2005, ISBN 1-4039-6897-7, pp. 337–338 (emphases in original), and Women and Madness (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972, ISBN 0-385-02671-4, p. 287 (emphases in original).
Women and Madness (1972, 2005)

George Bernard Shaw photo
Warren Farrell photo
Patrick Rothfuss photo

“Like all boys my age, I was an idiot when it came to women.”

Source: The Name of the Wind (2007), Chapter 62, “Leaves” (p. 465)

Bill Bryson photo
Howard Zinn photo
Rajendra Prasad photo

“Today, for the first time in our long and chequered history, we find the whole of this vast land… brought together under the jurisdiction of one constitution and one union which takes over responsibility for the welfare of more than 320 million men and women who inhabit it.”

Rajendra Prasad (1884–1963) Indian political leader

On 26 January 1950 when took over as the President of India after it was proclained by the 34th and last Governor-General of India, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari as a Republic.
Source: BBC News: 1950: India becomes a republic http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/january/26/newsid_3475000/3475569.stm, BBC News, 26 January 2005

Jaime Pressly photo

“We're both strong, and there's something that all Southern women have in common — the survivor instinct.”

Jaime Pressly (1977) American actress, model, producer

Of her character Joy Turner in My Name Is Earl.
Jaime Pressly Opens Up About Her Divorce And Memoir

Gloria Allred photo

“Some say 'the women’s movement is all about older women,' but this is a movement about younger women asserting their rights that women before them fought for and won.”

Gloria Allred (1941) American civil rights lawyer

December 6, 2014, Gloria Allred: The Battle Over Sexual Assault is the ‘Civil Rights Movement of Our Time’, May 15, 2014, Time magazine, Gloria Allred http://time.com/100055/campus-sexual-assault-gloria-allred/,

Wangari Maathai photo
Nick Hornby photo
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi photo

“I will talk to my sister, my daughter and my mother, the women, in July 24, when I asked you to gave me the mandate and the order to combat possible terrorism, The Egyptian woman with all her plainness, took her husband, her children, her food during Ramadan and took the streets. and the world watched her. take them again and let the world see you again.”

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (1954) Current President of Egypt

Remarks by el-Sisi asking Egyptian women to go vote on the referendum during a cultural symposium organized by MOD Department of Moral Affairs on 11 January 2014 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w50oWry07E.
2014

Lois Duncan photo

“It came naturally. I came from a family of strong women.”

Lois Duncan (1934–2016) American young-adult and children's writer

On writing female characters, interview with Megan Abbott (2011)
2003–2016

Mary Wollstonecraft photo

“All love is probationary, a fact which frightens women and exhilarates men.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Women & men

Jayapala photo
Phyllis Chesler photo

“I am not saying that a female-dominated or Amazon society based on the oppression of men is any more "just" than is a male-dominated society based on the oppression of women. I am merely pointing out in what ways it is better for women.Perhaps someday a choice between forms of injustice will not be necessary.”

Phyllis Chesler (1940) Psychotherapist, college professor, and author

Women and Madness (2005), p. 338 (emphasis in original), and see Women and Madness (1972), pp. 287–288 (similar text).
Women and Madness (1972, 2005)

Camille Paglia photo
Catharine A. MacKinnon photo