Quotes about women

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“No, you can't deny women their basic rights and pretend it's about your 'religious freedom'. If you don't like birth control, don't use it. Religious freedom doesn't mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.”

“… the women of this nation in 1876, have greater cause for discontent, rebellion and revolution than the men of 1776.”

“That is the corrosive paradox of gender feminism's misandrist stance: no group of women can wage war on men without at the same time denigrating the women who respect those men.”

“Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.”

“A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.”

“Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?”

“Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.”

“All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”

“Women are the only people I am afraid of who I never thought would hurt me”

“The specific character of [women's] oppression cannot be explained away by equating different situations through superficial and childish simplifications[:]

It is true that both the woman and the male worker are condemned to silence by their exploitation. But under the current system, the worker's wife is also condemned to silence by her worker-husband. In other words, in addition to the class exploitation common to both of them, women must confront a particular set of relations that exist between them and men, relations of conflict and violence that use physical differences as their pretext.”

“Men should think twice before making widowhood women's only path to power.”

“Girls aren't beautiful, they're pretty. Beautiful is too heavy a word to assign to a girl. Women are beautiful because their faces show that they know they have lost something and picked up something else.”

“As I nodded and smiled and'd and'd my way down the drive, I wondered if boys had any sort of magazine that told them how to attract women and, if so, did it ever tell them to put the girls' interests first?”

“I am sick of women who love one. Women who hate one are much more interesting.”

“Nobody knows much about women, not even Freud, not even women themselves.
But it's like electricity: you don't need to know how it works to get a shock on the fingers.”

“More than two millennia later…. Hawthorne puts forward a similar vision: A woman must bring the 'new truth…. in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness' (The Scarlet Letter p.241)…. With the brilliant economy of the letter A, he demonstrates why this vision is doomed to failure. The very passion that renders a woman able to see through the "iron framework" of Puritanism also disables her by causing her to be seen in the eyes of the Puritans as an impure woman, a woman who has been adulterated. This double vision… at once frees and imprisons women.”

“Men don't think and differently from women - they just make more noise about being able to.”

“At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.”

“Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.”

“We are not men, to have need of another, an eternal life; we are women, and for us one moment with man we love is everlasting Paradise, one moment far from the man we love is everlasting hell. It is here on earth that we women love out eternity”

“The weakness of men is the facade of strength; the strength of women is the facade of weakness.”

“The number of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one’s clean linen in public.”

“…She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul.”

“You know that look that women get when they want to have sex? Me neither.”

“And yet women-good women--frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep.”

“You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded woman… I have been traveling over the old world during the last few years and have found new food for thought. What power is it that makes the Hindoo woman burn herself upon the funeral pyre of her husband? Her religion. What holds the Turkish woman in the harem? Her religion. By what power do the Mormons perpetuate their system of polygamy? By their religion/ Man, of himself, could not do this; but when he declares, 'Thus saith the Lord,' of course he can do it. So long as ministers stand up and tell us Christ is the head of the church, so is man the head of woman, how are we to break the chains which have held women down through the ages? You Christian women look at the Hindoo, the Turkish, the Mormon women, and wonder how they can be held in such bondage…

Now I ask you if our religion teaches the dignity of woman? It teaches us the abominable idea of the sixth century--Augustine's idea--that motherhood is a curse; that woman is the author of sin, and is most corrupt. Can we ever cultivate any proper sense of self-respect as long as women take such sentiments from the mouths of the priesthood?”

“The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen.”

“I spent half my money on gambling, alcohol and wild women. The other half I wasted.”

“​Courage is a virtue appreciated in a male but considered a defect in our gender. Bold women are a threat to a world that is badly out of balance, in favor of men.”

“When you rape, beat, maim, mutilate, burn, bury, and terrorize women, you destroy the essential life energy on the planet.”

“Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.”

“The first rule that a geisha is taught, at the age of nine, is to be charming to other women… Every girl in the world should have geisha training.”

“for we women are not only the deities of the household fire, but the flame of the soul itself.”

“A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.”

“For we think back through our mothers if we are women.”

“Since a time has come, Mademoiselle, when the severe laws of men no longer prevent women from applying themselves to the sciences and other disciplines, it seems to me that those of us who can should use this long-craved freedom to study and to let men see how greatly they wronged us when depriving us of its honor and advantages. And if any woman becomes so proficient as to be able to write down her thoughts, let her do so and not despise the honor, but rather flaunt it instead of fine clothes, necklaces, and rings. For these may be considered ours only by use, whereas the honor of being educated is ours entirely.”

“The feminine section of the proletarian army is of particularly great significance… the success of a revolution depends on the extent to which women take part in it.”

“Women cannot complain about men anymore until they start getting better taste in them.”

“Our Job is not to make young women grateful. It is to make the ungrateful so they keep going. Gratitude never radicalized anybody”

“How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl?”

“Men destroy countries; Women destroy universes.”

“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”

“It is interesting to note that an overwhelming majority of citizens in the world's three largest democracies have different religions: India (81 percent Hindu), the United States (76 percent Christian), and Indonesia (87 percent Muslim). Two of them have elected women as leaders of their government.”

“The world still wants to ask that a woman primarily be pretty and if she is not, the mob pouts and asks querulously, 'What else are women for?”

“Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.”

“Women fake orgasms and men fake finances.”

“Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.”

“I'll bet you anything you like that half an hour after they have met, they will be calling each other sister.
Women only do that when they have called each other a lot of other things first.”

“Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.”

“Every woman wants to be first to someone sometime in her life and that desire is the explanation for many strange things women do.”

“The condition of women in a nation is the real measure of its progress.”

“That little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Jesus Christ wasn't a woman!”

“Above all, we must realize that no arsenal or no weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women.”

“Plain women are always jealous of their husbands. Beautiful women never are. They are always so occupied with being jealous of other women's husbands.”

“In love, women are professionals, men are amateurs”

“Women are the bloodthirsty sex," said Ric sadly. "We get the reputation, but it is only because the women stand behind us, and say, 'Kill it. Squish it.”

“I know it's not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction of costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don't know where. I only know it isn't where women think.”

“You ride as a man, fight as a man, and you think as a man-"
"I think as a human being," she retorted hotly. "Men don't think any differently from women- they just make more noise about being able to.”

“The enemy isn't men, or women, it's bloody stupid people and no one has the right to be stupid.”

“Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.”

“Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.”

“There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer them, or turn them into literature.”

“Women always need other women to lean on. They become friends in order to hate each other better. The more they hate each other, the more inseparable they become.”

“The late Kenyan Nobel peace laureate Wangari Maathai put it simply and well when she said, the higher you go, the fewer women there are.”

“When we consider that women are treated as property it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.”

“Don't think about making women fit the world -- think about making the world fit women.”

“Women. They are a complete mystery.”

“Unseen University had never admitted women, muttering something about problems with the plumbing, but the real reason was an unspoken dread that if women were allowed to mess around with magic they would probably be embarrassingly good at it…”

“Dear little Swallow,’ said the Prince, ‘you tell me of marvelous things, but more marvelous than anything is the suffering of men and of women. There is no Mystery so great as Misery.”

“The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I'm thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad.”

“One frequently only finds out how really beautiful a women is, until
after considerable acquaintance with her.”

“No doubt exists that all women are crazy; it's only a question of degree.”

“I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.”

“Women are considered profound. Why? Because we never fathom their depths. But women aren't even shallow.”

“With the possible exception of clothes, beauty salons and Frank Sinatra, there are few subjects all women agree upon.”

“Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”

“I have always thought that if women's hair posed so many problems, God would certainly have made us bald.”

“There are three intolerable things in life - cold coffee, lukewarm champagne, and overexcited women…”

“Then may I tell you that the very next words I read were these – ‘Chloe liked Olivia…’ Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.”

“Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs.”

“To my thinking, a great librarian must have a clear head, a strong hand, and, above all, a great heart. And when I look into the future, I am inclined to think that most of the men who achieve this greatness will be women.”

“I pray every single moment of my life; not on my knees but with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with men. Work and worship are one with me.”

“A study in the Washington Post says that women have
better verbal skills than men. I just want to say to the
authors of that study: 'Duh.”

“Men know life too early. Women know life too late. That is the difference between men and women.”

“He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.”

“When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.”

“We are either going to have a future where women lead the way to make peace with the Earth or we are not going to have a human future at all.”

“Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of women hating.”

“Women should have free access to every field of labor which they care to enter, and when their work is as valuable as that of a man it should be paid as highly.”

“Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him -- or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them.”

“It is very often nothing but our own vanity that deceives us. Women fancy admiration means more than it does.
And men take care that they should.”

“You cannot win in a fight against women, cause men have a need to make sense”

“The real question is how much suffering we've caused our womenfolk by turning headscarves into symbols - and using women as pawns in a political game.”

“A world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves. And this is how to start: We must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently.”

“The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”

“As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.”

“You women listen more to your heart and less to all the nonsense. That's why you live longer.”

“Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.”

“Well-behaved women seldom make history.”