Quotes about women
page 35

“When women go to see men strip, we never accuse you of hating men.”

Joe Rogan (1967) American martial artist, podcaster, sports commentator and comedian

Joe Rogan: Live (2006)

Men, Hate

“We do not yet understand that when we neglect men, we rape women.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part III: Government as substitute husband, p. 336.

Men, Understanding

“While the law dealt thus with her in regard to her property, it dealt still more hardly with her in regard to her children. No married mother could have any right to her child, and in most of the states of the Union that is the law to-day. But the law's in regard to the personal and property rights of women have been greatly changed and improved, and we are very grateful to the men who have done it.”

Lucy Stone (1818–1893) American abolitionist and suffragist

The Progress of Fifty Years (1893)

Men, Children, Law, Change

“And then he remembered that the other function of sex is punishment – men use it to humiliate women. And since turnabout is fair play, women often use it to humiliate men”

Alice Borchardt book The Dragon Queen

The Dragon Queen

Men, Sex

“It is said that it is not good for man to be alone. This is true, not only in the sense in which our women’s rights’ friends so zealously and wisely teach, but it is true as to nations. The voice of civilization speaks an unmistakable language against the isolation of families, nations and races, and pleads for composite nationality as essential to her triumphs. Those races of men who have maintained the most distinct and separate existence for the longest periods of time; which have had the least intercourse with other races of men are standing confirmation of the folly of isolation. The very soil of the national mind becomes in such cases barren, and can only be resuscitated by assistance from without.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

Men, Family, Sense, Time

“I have always believed that fashion was not made only to make women more beautiful, but also to reassure them, give them confidence.”

Yves Saint Laurent (1936–2008) fashion designer

As quoted in "50 Days of Everyday Fashion" in Yours magazine.

Beauty, Confidence, Fashion

“I collected 599 pictures of Elizabeth Taylor — some people find that obsessive. I collected 599. Not 600, but 599. I feel that genius and obsession be the same thing. It is rare when a woman is driven by obsession. Similarly, it is rare when a woman is a genius. That's why I said one of my most notorious sentences, that there is no woman Mozart because there is no woman Jack the Ripper. Men are more prone to obsession because they are fleeing domination by women. They flee to a chess game or to a computer or to fixing a car, or whatever, to attempt to complete their identities, because they always feel incomplete.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Playboy interview (May 1995)

Men, People, Cars, Feeling

“In many of Albrecht Dürer’s engravings there are harrowing depictions of his own melancholia; the manic wheeling stars of Van Gogh are the precursors of the artist’s plunge into dementia and the extinction of self. It is a suffering that often tinges the music of Beethoven, of Schumann and Mahler, and permeates the darker cantatas of Bach. The vast metaphor which most faithfully represents this fathomless ordeal, however, is that of Dante, and his all-too-familiar lines still arrest the imagination with their augury of the unknowable, the black struggle to come:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
Ché la diritta via era smarrita.
In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood,
For I had lost the right path.
One can be sure that these words have been more than once employed to conjure the ravages of melancholia, but their somber foreboding has often overshadowed the last lines of the best-known part of that poem, with their evocation of hope. To most of those who have experienced it, the horror of depression is so overwhelming as to be quite beyond expression, hence the frustrated sense of inadequacy found in the work of even the greatest artists. But in science and art the search will doubtless go on for a clear representation of its meaning, which sometimes, for those who have known it, is a simulacrum of all the evil of our world: of our everyday discord and chaos, our irrationality, warfare and crime, torture and violence, our impulse toward death and our flight from it held in the intolerable equipoise of history. If our lives had no other configuration but this, we should want, and perhaps deserve, to perish; if depression had no termination, then suicide would, indeed, be the only remedy. But one need not sound the false or inspirational note to stress the truth that depression is not the soul’s annihilation; men and women who have recovered from the disease — and they are countless — bear witness to what is probably its only saving grace: it is conquerable.”

William Styron book Darkness Visible

Source: Darkness Visible (1990), X

Life, Death, Men, Truth

“America will take the side of brave men and women who advocate these values around the world, including the Islamic world, because we have a greater objective than eliminating threats and containing resentment. We seek a just and peaceful world beyond the war on terror.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2002, State of the Union address (January 2002)

Men, War, World, Peace

“Narrated 'Aisha: I asked the Prophet, "O Allah's Messenger! Should the women be asked for their consent to their marriage?" He said, "Yes." I said, "A virgin, if asked, feels shy and keeps quiet."”

Aisha (605–678) Muhammad's wife

He said, "Her silence means her consent." Sahih Bukhari, 9:85:79 https://sunnah.com/bukhari/89/7

Marriage, Feeling, Silence

“I have a lot of respect and admiration for Anthony Rapp as an actor. I'm beyond horrified to hear his story. I honestly do not remember the encounter, it would have been 30 years ago. But if I did behave then as he describes, I owe him the sincerest apology for what would have been deeply inappropriate drunken behavior, and I am sorry for the feelings he describes having carried with him all these years. This story has encouraged me to address other things about my life. I know that there are stories about me and that some have been fueled by the fact that I have been so protective of my privacy. As those closest to me know, in my life I have had relationships with both men and women. I have loved and had romantic encounters with men throughout my life, and I choose now to live as a gay man. I want to deal with this honestly and openly and that starts with examining my own behavior.”

Kevin Spacey (1959) American actor, director and producer

official statement on Twitter https://twitter.com/kevinspacey?lang=en regarding Anthony Rapp's allegations of sexual assault, October 29, 2017

Love, Life, Men, Behavior

“The problem is that women try to dress like celebrities whose shape they just don't have. When you emulate someone else's dress sense with a different body shape it just doesn't work. And when you look bad, your confidence dips. Our advice is to go shopping armed with our body shape rules.”

Trinny Woodall (1964) English fashion advisor and designer, television presenter and author

As quoted in "Mistresses of the makeover" by Cathrin Schaer in New Zealand Herald (25 February 2008)

Confidence, Problem, Sense

“One has never known a good man to whom dogs were not dear; but many of the best women have no such fondness. You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men. For the attractive woman, dogs are mere dumb and restless brutes — possibly dangerous, certainly soulless. Yet will coquetry teach her to caress any dog in the presence of a man enslaved by her.”

Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) English writer

Source: Zuleika Dobson http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/zdbsn11.txt (1911), Ch. VI

Men, Dogs

“Two men as two women and as a man and a woman can have a loving relationship and make a commitment. And that's what marriage is about.”

John Barrowman (1967) Scottish-American actor, singer, dancer, musical theatre performer, writer and television personality

Fern Britton Meets John Barrowman BBC 2012

Love, Men, Marriage

“The female body’s unbearable hiddenness applies to all aspects men’s dealings with women. What does it look like in there? Did she have an orgasm? Is it really my child? Who was my real father? Mystery surrounds women’s sexuality. This mystery is the main reason for the imprisonment man has imposed on women. Only by confining his wife in a locked harem guarded by eunuchs could he be certain that her son was also his.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 22

Men

“(Television) Women hold up half the sky. (Sylvia) Uh huh, but in a poor neighborhood.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 206

“Oil painting and color, said Michelangelo, are for “women and the lazy.” His sharp-edged Apollonian style is the only way to beat back mother nature.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 158

Color, Way, Nature, Painting

“With a tongue like a razor he will kiss
the mother, the child,
and we three will color the stars black
in memory of his mother
who kept him chained to the food tree
or turned him on and off like a water faucet
and made women through all these hazy years
the enemy with a heart of lies.”

Anne Sexton book The Book of Folly

"The Wifebeater"
The Book of Folly (1972)

Food, Color, Star, Kiss

“When feminist discourse is unable to discriminate the drunken fraternity brother from the homicidal maniac, women are in trouble.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

on date rape, p. 33
Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality"

“I've looked on many women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times. God knows I will do this and forgives me.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Interview in Playboy magazine (1976), while a candidate for President.
Pre-Presidency

God, Forgiveness, Time, Heart

“Just as the referential system of religion in the politics of indigenous peoples raises hackles with the sophisticated outside observer, so too does the self-referential language of motherhood and identification with the earth often used by women in these movements. In the postmodern, deconstructive mode now fashionable in anthropology, the very category of women is decried as essentialist.... We must go beyond deconstruction of the rhetoric to discover the incentives generating a common collective image among indigenous movements.”

June Nash (1927–2019) American anthropologist

Source: Foreword to Christine Eber,Christine Kovi (eds.), Women of Chiapas: Making History in Times of Struggle and Hope. (2003) p. xiv

People, Religion, Fashion

“Many a woman shudders … at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians.”

Sarah Grimké (1792–1873) American abolitionist

Written in 1852, as quoted in ch. 87.
The Female Experience (1977)

Life, Art, Literature, Science

“I think that mind-sets are changing in the Middle East. Poll after poll is showing that men see the value of greater female participation and empowerment. We still have a long way to go, but Islam should not be used as a scapegoat. The obstacles that face women today are more cultural. It's not about the religion.”

Queen Rania of Jordan (1970) Queen consort of Jordan

TIME interview (2007)

Men, Religion, Way, Thinking

“The new, independent women should have no need to exploit a man's vestigial sense of chivalry. If they are truly suited to compete with men, they should be able to do so without special rules, privileges and protections. Men should not have to curb their behavior so that women can achieve. If "equality" were truly desired, men would never have to ask, "Mother, may I?"… To ask men to radically alter their behavior to facilitate the success of complete stranger with whom they may well be in direct or indirect competition is absurd. That's not "equality" any more than asking a boxer to fight with one hand tied behind his back and calling it a "fair fight."”

Jack Donovan (1974) American activist, editor and writer

And yet this is exactly what feminists ask of men... Men need to reject this.
"Mother May I" Masculinity
A Sky Without Eagles (2014)

Men, Behavior, Sense, Success

“The story of the labor movement needs to be taught in every school in this land… America is a living testimonial to what free men and women, organized in free democratic trade unions can do to make a better life … we ought to be proud of it!”

Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978) Vice-President of the USA under Lyndon B. Johnson

Address to the 1977 Minnesota State AFL-CIO Convention.

Life, Men, School

“Feminists are often asked whether pornography causes rape. The fact is that rape and prostitution caused and continue to cause pornography. Politically, culturally, socially, sexually, and economically, rape and prostitution generated pornography; and pornography depends for its continued existence on the rape and prostitution of women.”

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

Pornography and Male Supremacy http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/WarZoneChaptIVH.html (1981), Letters from a War Zone, p 230.

Dependency

“The two Christians met on the way many people who were going to their towns, women and men, with a firebrand in the hand, herbs to drink the smoke thereof, as they are accustomed.”

Cristoforo Colombo (1451–1506) Explorer, navigator, and colonizer

On smoking, 6 November 1492
Journal of the First Voyage

Men, People, Way, Drink

“Women care about specifics, about details. Men care about generalities, about abstract principles.”

Rudy Rucker (1946) American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author and philosopher

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 153-154

Men

“[W]hat Reconstruction succeeded in doing: it helped us avoid a renewed outbreak of civil war (which, considering the history of civil conflicts, is no small achievement); it laid the legal and constitutional foundations for a more egalitarian America, foundations that it took only sixty-five years to revitalize into the Civil Rights Movement; it restored the original balance of constitutional federalism, putting aside the states’ rights absolutism of the pre-war Southern aristocracy. But I do not say this to encourage any historical Pollyannaism about Reconstruction. That restored federal balance permitted the emergence of the first women’s voting rights legislation, the curtailing of municipal corruption, and the introduction of widespread public schooling; it also permitted the emergence of Jim Crow. But as Lincoln said, “this is a world of compensation.””

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

The historical good and the evil, even in Reconstruction, do not come unmixed.
2010s, Interview with Sara Gabbard (2018)

War, World, School, History

“More than ten million women march to work every morning side by side with the men. Steadily the importance of women is gaining not only in the routine tasks of industry but in executive responsibility. I include also the woman who stays at home as the guardian of the welfare of the family. She is a partner in the job and wages. Women constitute a part of our industrial achievement.”

Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) 31st President of the United States of America

The New Day: Campaign Speeches of Herbert Hoover (1928)

Men, Family, Home, Parting

“It has already been observed that women, wherever placed, however high or low in the scale of cultivation, hold the destinies of human kind. Men will ever rise or fall to the level of the other sex.”

Frances Wright (1795–1852) American activist

Lecture II: Of Free Inquiry, considered as a Means for obtaining Just Knowledge
A Course of Popular Lectures (1829)

Men, Sex

“They fell upon an ungenial climate, where there were nine months of winter and three months of cold weather, and that called out the best energies of the men, and of the women too, to get a mere subsistence out of the soil, with such a climate. In their efforts to do that they cultivated industry and frugality at the same time — which is the real foundation of the greatness of the Pilgrims.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

On the Pilgrims, in a speech at a New England Society Dinner (22 December 1880).
1880s

Men, Effort, Winter, Time

“(Second Bad Girl) Women who form relationships with murderers [in prison]. I don't get it. (First bad girl) Well, you know where they are at nights. (Second bad girl) At least, they're not lying on your couch watching TV.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 67

Girl, Lying, Night

“When the candles are out all women are fair.”

Plutarch book Moralia

Conjugal Precepts
Moralia, Others

“(On the prospect of Thatcher's death) Be serious - this is just a fantasy, because if she were killed, would it actually make any difference? Would things get any better? Course they wouldn't; don't kid yourself. They'd get worse, because she would become a martyr – this monetarist martyr - a cult figure, like Eva Peron. Can you imagine the televised funeral? There she'd be, laid out in a glass coffin, in the blue gear, the hair-do and all the rest of it. She'd be laying there just really life-like - just like she was in life - a bit warmer. It would be on the telly. You thought Winston Churchill was bad; you can imagine what this would be like. And then, of course, it wouldn't stop at that. There would be films - The Night Brighton Rocked. There'd be musicals. Tim Rice would be churning out the musicals about her life - Magita. There'd be Elaine Page belting out the big numbers: 'Don't Cry for Me, Barnet Finchley”

Linda Smith (1958–2006) comedian

Token Women, 1984
Stand-up

Life, Death, Music, Imagination

“We know that more than 70 to 80% of women masturbate, and 90% of men masturbate, and the rest lie.”

Joycelyn Elders (1933) American pediatrician, public health administrator, and former Surgeon General of the United States

Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, "Abstinence" http://www.sho.com/site/video/player.do?video=/134/2006/abstinence&seriesid=134 [4.10], 5 June 2006 Masturbation

Men, Lie

“All agree in recognising the fact that females exist in the human species; today as always they make up about one half of humanity. And yet we are told that femininity is in danger; we are exhorted to be women, remain women, become women. It would appear, then, that every female human being is not necessarily a woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity.”

Simone de Beauvoir book The Second Sex

Introduction : Woman as Other http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/2nd-sex/introduction.htm The Second Sex (1949)

Reality, Appearance

“The most frequent way men are raped by adult women is "birth control rape."”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part III: Government as substitute husband, p. 335.

Men, Way, Birth

“When I speak of the erotic, then I speak of it as an assertion of the life force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.”

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) writer and activist

entry for June 26 Living Life Fully in Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much, Anne Wilson Schaef, c. 1990

Love, Life, History, Knowledge

“I want a revamped feminism. Putting the vamp back means the lady must be a tramp. My generation of Sixties rebels wanted to smash the bourgeois codes that had become the authoritarian totems of the Fifties. The 'nice' girl with her soft, sanitized speech and decorous manners had to go. Thirty years later, we're still stuck with her — in the official spokesmen and the anointed heiresses of the feminist establishment… Equal opportunity feminism, which I espouse, demands the removal of all barriers to woman's advance in the political and professional world — but not at the price of special protections for women which are infantilizing and anti-democratic.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), p. ix

World, Girl

“Women now fly heavy planes successfully; they help build planes, do mechanics' work. In England they've taken over a large share of all material labor in fields and factories; they've taken over police and home defence duties. In China a corps of 300,000 women under the supreme command of Madame Chiang Kai-shek perform the dangerous function of saving lives and repairing damage after Japanese air raids. This huge female strong- arm squad is officered efficiently by 3,000 women. Here in this country we've started a Women's Auxilary Army and Navy Corps that will do everything men soldiers and sailors do except the actual fighting. Prior to the First World War nobody believed that women could perform these feats of physical strength. But they're performing them now and thinking nothing of it. In this far worse: war, women will develop still greater female power; by the end of the war that traditional description the weaker sex" will be a joke-it will cease to have any meaning.”

William Moulton Marston (1893–1947) American psychologist, lawyer, inventor and comic book writer

As interviewed by Richard, Olive, "Our Women are Our Future": Sylvia Family Circle, (Aug 14, 1944) 14-17, 19 as quoted in The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times, edited by Joeph J Darowski, p.7 in the essay "William Marston's Feminist Agenda", in Containing Wonder Woman: Fredric Wertham's Battle Against the Mighty Amazon by Craig This, p.32.

Men, War, World, Sex

“The price for misreading and misinterpreting a woman has become extremely high; divorce battles, custody fights, poisonous interactions, accusations of abuse, incest, harassment, and even rape alongside the everyday unhappiness lead to a need to escape through self-destructive behaviors and addictions. It is "crunch time" for men today. Their personal isolation and dependency on women is greater than ever, while women's anger, withdrawal from relationships with men, and defensive sense of being victimized also are at a peak.”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

Introduction, p. 1
What Men Still Don't Know About Women, Relationships, and Love (2007)

Men, Behavior, Sense, Time

“My old lip color could barely keep up with my busy schedule. In the time it takes to notice the wide discrepancy between my salary and that of my male peers, I'd have to reapply! In the seconds to count the number of women in high political office, seated on corporate executive boards and featured in film and television over the age of 40, my lip color would be as invisible as this glass ceiling only inches above my head! L'Oreal. Because I am worth it. And because holding myself to an impossible standard of beauty keeps me from starting a riot!”

Maria Bamford (1970) American actress and comedian

How to WIN! (2006)

Age, Beauty, Color, Business

“For people may not know what they think
about politics in the Balkans,
or the vexed question of men and women,
but everyone has a definite opinion
about the flavour of shredded coconut.”

Louis Simpson (1923–2012) Jamaican poet

Chocolates (l. 18-22) (1980)
Poetry quotes

Men, People, Question, Thinking

“The problem that has no name (which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities) is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.”

Betty Friedan book The Feminine Mystique

Source: The Feminine Mystique (1963), Ch. 14 "A New Life Plan for Women".

Health, Disease, Problem, Country

“I think, with never-ending gratitude, that the young women of today do not and can never know at what price their right to free speech and to speak at all in public has been earned.”

Lucy Stone (1818–1893) American abolitionist and suffragist

The Progress of Fifty Years (1893)

Thinking, Gratitude

“[T]he train system is so chronic now, that any journey you undertake by train in Britain is identical to the one taken by Omar Sharif in Doctor Zhivago; that's what it's like - the same drama and misery. Ancient, knackered rolling-stock limping painfully across the land, shuddering to a halt for no apparent reason, with the lights flickering on and off; everyone running up and down - 'What's going on? What's up ahead? I don't know… Is it Rod Steiger with the White Guard?' - desperate women in headscarves running alongside the carriages, throwing their babies into the train, shouting 'I'LL NEVER SEE PURLEY OAKS, BUT MY CHILD MIGHT!' (Wrap Up Warm tour, May 2004)”

Linda Smith (1958–2006) comedian

Stand-up

Light, Baby, Training

“The girl slept on, motionless, in that curled-up looseness achieved by some women and all cats.”

Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) Novelist, screenwriter

"'I'll Be Waiting' (short story), published in the Saturday Evening Post, October 14, 1939

Girl, Cats

“Most women are not so young as they are painted.”

Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) English writer

A Defense of Cosmetics (1895)

Painting

“I know what women expect, and give it to them without disagreeable argument; they'll get it anyway.”

E. W. Howe (1853–1937) Novelist, magazine and newspaper editor

Source: Ventures in Common Sense (1919), p35.

“It was a hard life, but, physically, they throve on it, the men standing up well to the hard labour of the fields and the women, in addition to their washing, scrubbing and cooking and nursing, bearing a child almost annually.”

Flora Thompson (1876–1947) English author and poet

Source: Dashpers http://www.dashper.net.nz/dashpers.htm (unfinished, unpublished novel), Chapter Two - A House is built

Life, Men, Cooking

“Haven't we heard enough from these ancient white guys? There is this silent agreement that everyone everywhere has made regarding old white men. They are the bottom line, the last word, no matter what. The saying "It's not over 'til the fat lady sings is erroneous, because women who are fat are never listened to."”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, INVISIBILITY

Men, Guy, Singing

“No movement calls [migrant workers] oppressed for providing money for women from whom they are receiving neither cooking nor cleaning; for providing their wives with homes while they sleep on the ground.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 111.

Money, Home, Sleep, Cooking

“Her iron will won international respect. Her unabashed femininity gained women’s. Margaret Thatcher was a lady’s lady.”

Louise Burfitt-Dons (1953) Activist, writer, blogger

Speech to CWCC, London (April 2013)

“I should have done violence to my convictions of duty, had I not made use of all the lawful means in my power to liberate those people, and assist them to become men and women, rather than leave them in the condition of chattels personal.”

Thomas Garrett (1789–1871) American abolitionist

Said after his conviction (1848), as quoted in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853) by Harriet Beecher Stowe, p. 55

Men, People, Law, Personality

“I verily believe that a man’s way with women is in inverse ratio to his prowess among men. The weakling and the saphead have often great ability to charm the fair sex, while the fighting man who can face a thousand real dangers unafraid, sits hiding in the shadows like some frightened child.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book A Princess of Mars

Source: A Princess of Mars (1917), Chapter 16

Men, Sex, Way, Fight

“I am much more open about categories of gender, and my feminism has been about women's safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality. I was never against the category of men.”

Judith Butler (1956) American philosopher and gender theorist

"As a Jew, I was taught it was ethically imperative to speak up" in Haaretz. February 24, 2010

Men

“An examination of history proves that in Christian Russia as in Christian England the husband could release himself from the marriage bond by killing his wife, over whom under Christian law he had power of life and death. Her children, as to-day in Christian England and America, are not under her control; she is to bear children but not to educate them, for as under Catholic and Protestant Christianity, women are looked upon as a lower order of beings, of an unclean nature.”

Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–1898) American abolitionist, writer

Source: Woman, Church and State (1893), pp. 380-381

Life, Death, Marriage, Children

“The entire village left the next day in about thirty canoes, leaving us alone with the women and children in the abandoned houses. [Le village entier partit le lendemain dans une trentaine de pirogues, nous laissant seuls avec les femmes et les enfants dans les maisons abandonnées.]”

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) French anthropologist and ethnologist

Notes in an early work, often cited as an extreme example of androcentrism, even among leading anthropologists, " Contribution à l'étude de l'organisation sociale des Indiens Bororo http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/jsa_0037-9174_1936_num_28_2_1942?_Prescripts_Search_tabs1=standard&" (1936) p. 283

Children, Housing

“The fact is that men need women more than women need men; and so, aware of this fact, man has sought to keep woman dependent upon him economically as the only method open to him of making himself necessary to her. Since in the beginning woman would not become his willing slave, he has wrought through the centuries a society in which woman must serve him if she is to survive.”

Elizabeth Gould Davis book The First Sex

The First Sex, ch. 22 - Woman in the Aquarian Age (1971).

Men, Dependency

“One of the things near and dear to me is art therapy. Even as an art teacher and someone very involved in the arts, I never knew what art therapy even was. These men and women go to graduate school and they actually are therapists that use art, especially at Riley, they’re making such a difference, so I’m looking forward to that.”

Karen Pence (1958) First Lady of Indiana, schoolteacher

Karen Pence focuses on moving family forward amid hoopla http://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2017/01/20/karen-pence-focuses-moving-family-forward-amid-hoopla/96828962/ (January 20, 2017)

Men, School, Art, Teachers

“Most women would like to dress imaginatively, but they glare at any woman who does.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

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

Imagination

“It is the custom of all men, everywhere, to be obtuse where women are concerned.”

Murray Leinster book The Pirates of Zan

Source: The Pirates of Zan (1959), Chapter 10

Men

“Silence equals nonexistence. If I don't give too much information, if I don't go there, it's like I was never there in the first place. I noticed this most right after September 11, when there were no gays or lesbians invited to give their opinion about what was going on. There were no women invited to give their opinion. There were hardly any people of color invited, and if they were, they were Muslim-Americans and Arab-Americans talking about the violence that they'd experienced because they shared the same skin color as the terrorists, which is heinous and dumb!”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

That's like arresting Emmanuel Lewis because Gary Coleman punched that woman!
From Her Tours and CDs, Revolution Tour

People, Color, Silence

“The emphasis of the men’s group was on understanding, coping, changing the situation and then, if all else failed, getting out; the emphasis of battered women’s groups is on getting out first, and second, locking up the problem”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

the man
Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000)

Men, Understanding, Problem, Change

“"Do not die that we may not die," the dead cry out within you. "We had no time to enjoy the women we desired; be in time, sleep with them! We had no time to turn our thoughts into deeds; turn them into deeds! We had no time to grasp and to crystallize the face of our hope; make it firm!" …
But you must choose with care whom to hurl down again into the chasms of your blood, and whom you shall permit to mount once more into the light and the earth.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Saviors of God

The Saviors of God (1923)

Hope, Sleep, Light, Time

“Sex work is an economic question, not a moral one: in a world where shame and sexual violence are still hard currency, the normalization of the sex industry is a symptom not of social degeneration, but of the economic exploitation of women on a unprecedented scale.”

Laurie Penny book Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

Source: Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism (2010), Chapter One

World, Sex, Question

“While I think men and women are equal, they are also different and I think it's inevitable and I don't think it's a bad thing at all that we always have, say, more women doing things like physiotherapy and an enormous number of women simply doing housework”

Tony Abbott (1957) Australian politician

Quoted in "Rudd hands PM a crucial lifeline" by : Laurie Oakes http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/rudd-hands-pm-a-crucial-lifeline/story-e6frfhqf-1225902277655 in the Herald Sun, August 6, 2010. 2010

Men, Thinking

“Bill Clinton is like a lot of white politicians. They eat soul food, they party with black women, they play the saxophone, but when it comes to domestic and foreign policy, they make the same decisions that are destructive to African people in this country and throughout the world.”

Sister Souljah (1964) American hip hop-generation author, activist, recording artist, and film producer

The Today show (16 June 1992)

People, World, Food, Soul

“The witches, the wise women, and the healers were also always the counselors. It's a whole other tradition of knowledge and learning that has been suppressed because it had political implications.”

Starhawk (1951) American author, activist and Neopagan

As quoted in The Burning Times (1990)

Knowledge, Learning

“For a woman to be complete, she has to be a blend of Paro and Chandramukhi [the two women who love Devdas. I feel that I am that woman.”

Rekha (1954) Indian film actress

Quoted in Rekha: The divine diva, 17 May 2003, 7 December 2013, Rediff.com http://www.rediff.com/entertai/2003/may/17dinesh.htm,

Love, Feeling

“Mankind, from Adam, have been women's fools;
Women, from Eve, have been the devil's tools:
Heaven might have spar'd one torment when we fell;
Not left us women, or not threatened hell.”

George Granville, 1st Baron Lansdowne (1666–1735) 1st Baron Lansdowne

She-Gallants; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), "Women", p. 886-97.

Fools, Hell

“Suppose, now, there is such a thing as an all-round inferior race. Is that any reason why we should propose to preserve it for ever…? Whether there is a race so inferior I do not know, but certainly there is no race so superior as to be trusted with human charges. The true answer to Aristotle’s plea for slavery, that there are “natural slaves,” lies in the fact that there are no “natural” masters… The true objection to slavery is not that it is unjust to the inferior but that it corrupts the superior. There is only one sane and logical thing to be done with a really inferior race, and that is to exterminate it. Now there are various ways of exterminating a race, and most of them are cruel. You may end it with fire and sword after the old Hebrew fashion; you may enslave it and work it to death, as the Spaniards did the Caribs; you may set it boundaries and then poison it slowly with deleterious commodities, as the Americans do with most of their Indians; you may incite it to wear clothing to which it is not accustomed and to live under new and strange conditions that will expose it to infectious diseases to which you yourselves are immune, as the missionaries do the Polynesians; you may resort to honest simple murder, as we English did with the Tasmanians; or you can maintain such conditions as conduce to “race suicide,” as the British administration does in Fiji. Suppose, then, for a moment, that there is an all-round inferior race… If any of the race did, after all, prove to be fit to survive, they would survive—they would be picked out with a sure and automatic justice from the over-ready condemnation of all their kind. Is there, however, an all-round inferior race in the world? Even the Australian black-fellow is, perhaps, not quite so entirely eligible for extinction as a good, wholesome, horse-racing, sheep-farming Australian white may think. These queer little races, the black-fellows, the Pigmies, the Bushmen, may have their little gifts, a greater keenness, a greater fineness of this sense or that, a quaintness of the imagination or what not, that may serve as their little unique addition to the totality of our Utopian civilisation. We are supposing that every individual alive on earth is alive in Utopia, and so all the surviving “black-fellows” are there. Every one of them in Utopia has had what none have had on earth, a fair education and fair treatment, justice, and opportunity…Some may be even prosperous and admired, may have married women of their own or some other race, and so may be transmitting that distinctive thin thread of excellence, to take its due place in the great synthesis of the future.”

H. G. Wells book A Modern Utopia

Source: A Modern Utopia (1905), Ch. 10, sect. 3

Death, World, Education, Disease

“They had a person who was extremely proud that a number of the women had become doctors. And I wasn't interested.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Comments about his ownership of Miss Universe on the Howard Stern Show https://soundcloud.com/user-735086019/101g1 (11 April 2005) 2000s

Personality

“Bin Laden's real audience is the Middle East, his other Muslims. I think he thought that, by this act, he would win large numbers of converts to his cause … [to] bring Arab regimes down. He would perhaps even take power in this or that country, preferably Saudi Arabia. That is where he is looking to; that is who is the audience. That is who his symbols are directed towards. So this is unlike anything else in the history of Islam. Early Muslims, when they left the Arabian Peninsula and entered the [Fertile Crescent], were conquerors. They converted peoples, and they gave them time to convert. So they didn't force them sometimes, and they were perfectly happy ruling over them. They were setting up a state, and then people converted over time. Syria remained Christian for hundreds of years after the Muslim conquest. So something different is going on here. The obvious sense in which the United States is evil is in the cultural icons that are seen everywhere. They are seemingly trivial things, the influence of the America culture, which is everywhere: TV, how women dress, the lack of importance of religion. So these are the senses in which they are rejecting the United States. But you're right; they don't see Americans as people. … They block that out. They only see as people the Muslims they want to convert to their side, and that's terrifying.”

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero" http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/faith/interviews/makiya.html, PBS Frontline (2002)

People, Religion, History, Thinking

“Your women bathing come from the cow house.”

Narcisse Virgilio Díaz (1807–1876) French painter

Quote of Diaz to Millet, c. 1860's, viewing a Nude painting of Millet; as quoted by Arthur Hoeber in The Barbizon Painters – being the story of the Men of thirty – associate of the National Academy of Design; publishers, Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York 1915, p. 17
Quotes of Diaz

Housing

“Economic reforms based on the idea of limitless growth in a limited world, can only be maintained by the powerful grabbing the resources of the vulnerable. The resource grab that is essential for “growth” creates a culture of rape—the rape of the earth, of local self-reliant economies, and of women.”

Vandana Shiva (1952) Indian philosopher

On economic reforms in India and rape in India, from " Vandana Shiva: Our Violent Economy is Hurting Women http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/violent-economic-reforms-and-women" Yes Magazine (18 January 2013)

World, Idea

“Women find little pleasure in the society of women.”

Arthur Desmond (1859–1929) New Zealnd writer

Rival Caesars (1903)

Pleasure

“The best way to learn to write is to study the work of the men and women who are doing the kind of writing you want to do.”

William Zinsser (1922–2015) writer, editor, journalist, literary critic, professor

Source: On Writing Well (Fifth Edition, orig. pub. 1976), Chapter 13, Bits & Pieces, p. 136.

Men, Way, Study, Learning

“Just imagine for a moment what life in this country might have been if women had been properly represented in Congress. Would a Congress where women in all their diversity were represented tolerate the countless laws now on the books that discriminate against women in all phases of their lives? Would a Congress with adequate representation of women have allowed this country to reach the 1970s without a national health care system? Would it have permitted this country to rank fourteenth in infant mortality among the developed nations of the world? Would it have allowed the situation we now have in which thousands of kids grow up without decent care because their working mothers have no place to leave them? Would such a Congress condone the continued butchering of young girls and mothers in amateur abortion mills? Would it allow fraudulent packaging and cheating of consumers in supermarkets, department stores and other retail outlets? Would it consent to the perverted sense of priorities that has dominated our government for decades, where billions have been appropriated for war while our human needs as a people have been neglected?”

Bella Abzug (1920–1998) American politician

Bella!, “February 7” section (1972)

Life, War, People, Health

“After the wars and the killings had ended, when usually there survived only some boys, some women, and children, these survivors were distributed among the Christians to be slaves.”

Bartolomé de las Casas (1474–1566) Spanish Dominican friar, historian, and social reformer

History of the Indies (1561)

War, Children, Boy

“It is my duty, gentlemen, to inform you that women are dictators
all, and I recommend to you this moral:
In real life it takes only one to make a quarrel.”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

"I Never Even Suggested It"
Many Long Years Ago (1945)

Life

“Are women really wonderful things? Maybe they are. Yes, women are wonderful things, but when all is said and done, they aren't really “things."”

Mo Yan book Big Breasts and Wide Hips

Big Breasts and Wide Hips (1996)

“[T]he male …. tries to convince himself and women - he's succeeded best at convincing women - that the female function is to bear and raise children and relax, comfort and boost the egos of the male, that her function is such as to make her interchangeable with every other female. In actual fact, the female function is to relate, groove, love and be herself, irreplacable by anyone else; the male function is to produce sperm. We now have sperm banks.”

Valerie Solanas (1936–1988) American radical feminist and writer. Attempted to assassinate Andy Warhol.

Source: SCUM MANIFESTO (1967), p. 6 (hyphens (not en- or em-dashes); "the egos of the male" so in original & "irreplacable" so in original).

Love, Children

“Guaranteeing equal pay won’t just increase paychecks for women – it will boost family budgets and get incomes rising across the board. And I don’t understand why Trump’s against that. Paid family leave won’t only make life easier for Moms and Dads – it will also keep skilled, talented Americans in the workforce and grow our economy. That’s why every other advanced country already has it. Again, he’s against it. Raising the federal minimum wage won’t just put more money in the pockets of low-income families – it also means they will spend more at the businesses in their neighborhoods. Trump’s against that as well. … And protecting and expanding Social Security doesn't just help older Americans retire with dignity – it helps to ease burdens on families and communities. And I also believe the same thing about comprehensive immigration reform.”

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

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Speech in Warren, Michigan (August 11, 2016)

Life, Money, Family, Communication

“The outburst of the first crusade was splendid even in a military sense, but it was great beyond comparison in its reflexion in architecture, ornament, poetry, color, religion and philosophy. Its men were astonishing, and its women were worth all the rest.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Men, Religion, Color, Sense

“Why do we resist giving help to homeless men? In part because we don’t understand how our pressure on men to support families often forces men to take transient jobs that are but a step away from homelessness (the death-of-a-salesman jobs, the migrant worker jobs…) and in part because we respond differently to men who fail”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

than women who fail
Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 209.

Death, Men, Family, Understanding

“The weak point in the system of the Circles — if a humble Square may venture to speak of anything Circular as containing any element of weakness — appears to me to be found in their relations with Women.”

Edwin Abbott Abbott book Flatland

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART I: THIS WORLD, Chapter 12. Of the Doctrine of our Priests

Appearance

“If you conclude, as I do, that the only hope of a permanent peace and happiness for humanity on this planet is an increased expression of love, and that women are the primary carriers of this great force, one of the problems we face is to provide women with more opportunity for using their love powers. The last six thousand years have demonstrated quite conclusively, I believe, that woman under the domination of man can increase but meagerly the world's total love supply. Our obvious goal, than must be to devise social mechanisms whereby man is brought under the love domination of woman.”

William Moulton Marston (1893–1947) American psychologist, lawyer, inventor and comic book writer

Women: Servants for Civilization (1941), p. 44, as quoted in The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times, edited by Joseph J. Darowski, p. 9; in the essay "William Marston's Feminist Agenda", by Michelle R. Finn.

Love, World, Peace, Hope

“Perhaps the wrong of rape has proven so difficult to articulate because the unquestionable starting point has been that rape is definable as distinct from intercourse, when for women it is difficult to distinguish them under conditions of male dominance.”

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

Source: Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence (1983) Signs Vol. 8 No. 4, p. 647

“The Christian ethic did not raise the worth of female life much above the Jewish: nor did the clinical ethic raise it much above the clerical. This is why most of those identified as witches by male inquisitors were women; and why most of those diagnosed as hysterics by male psychiatrists were also women.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 162.

Life

“In Massachusetts, where properly qualified "persons" were allowed to practice law, the Supreme Court decided that a woman was not a "person," and a special act of the legislature had to be passed before Miss Lelia Robinson could be admitted to the bar. But today women are lawyers.”

Lucy Stone (1818–1893) American abolitionist and suffragist

The Progress of Fifty Years (1893)

Law, Personality

“… the aggressive, occupying Zionist regime is not bound by the laws of society and of humanity. It takes no pity on men, children and women, and continues to kill and rape”

Hassan Rouhani (1948) 7th President of Islamic Republic of Iran

them Remarks in August 20, 2015 speech on Iran's World Mosque Day, as quoted in "Iranian President Rohani: 'We Will Not Forget The Bitter Memory Of The Arson At The Muslims' First Direction Of Prayer'; Israel Continues 'To Kill And Rape'" http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/8717.htm, MEMRI, (August 25, 2015)

Men, Children, Law

“I hope that in its richness, as well as in its incompleteness, Gyn/Ecology will continue to be a Labrys enabling women to learn from our mistakes and our successes, and cast our Lives as far as we can go, Now, in the Be-Dazzling Nineties.”

Mary Daly (1928–2010) American radical feminist philosopher and theologian

Source: Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978–1990), p. xxxiii (New Intergalactic Introduction).

Hope, Learning, Success

“We may find women who have never indulged in an intrigue, but it is rare to find those who have intrigued but once.”

François de La Rochefoucauld book Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims

On peut trouver des femmes qui n'ont jamais eu de galanterie; mais il est rare d'en trouver qui n'en aient jamais eu qu'une.
Maxim 73.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)