Quotes about women
page 38

“Women are good listeners, but it’s a waste of time telling your troubles to a man unless there’s something specific you want him to do.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

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

Janusz Korwin-Mikke photo
André Maurois photo
Madonna photo
Alan Keyes photo

“It must be someone collecting for charity. Respectable women never call the family for any other reason.”

Caryl Brahms (1901–1982) English critic, novelist, and journalist

Ooh! La-La!

Willem de Kooning photo
Mary Wollstonecraft photo
Wendy Doniger photo

“There is generally, therefore, an inverse ratio between the worship of goddesses and the granting of rights to human women. Nor are the goddesses by and large compassionate; they are generally a pretty bloodthirsty lot. Goddesses are not the solution.”

Wendy Doniger (1940) American Indologist

Wendy Doniger, Quoted in The Washington Post. Quoted in Antonio de Nicolas, Krishnan Ramaswamy, and Aditi Banerjee (eds.) (2007), Invading the Sacred: An Analysis Of Hinduism Studies In America (Publisher: Rupa & Co., p. 13), also in Rajiv Malhotra: Wendy's Child Syndrome https://rajivmalhotra.com/library/articles/risa-lila-1-wendys-child-syndrome/, also in Rajiv Malhotra: Academic Hinduphobia: A Critique of Wendy Doniger's Erotic School of Indology (2016)

Matthew Prior photo

“That if weak women went astray,
Their stars were more in fault than they.”

Matthew Prior (1664–1721) British diplomat, poet

Hans Carvel (1700).

Warren Farrell photo

“Dads in the family are even more important than women in the workplace: The workplace benefits from women, but the family needs dads.”

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

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 114.

Jussi Halla-aho photo
Adrienne Rich photo
François Bernier photo
Muhammad bin Tughluq photo

“All sultans were keen on making slaves, but Muhammad Tughlaq became notorious for enslaving people. He appears to have outstripped even Alauddin Khalji and his reputation in this regard spread far and wide. Shihabuddin Ahmad Abbas writes about him thus:
“The Sultan never ceases to show the greatest zeal in making war upon infidels… Everyday thousands of slaves are sold at a very low price, so great is the number of prisoners”. Muhammad Tughlaq did not only enslave people during campaigns, he was also very fond of purchasing and collecting foreign and Indian slaves. According to Ibn Battuta one of the reasons of estrangement between Muhammad Tughlaq and his father Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq, when Muhammad was still a prince, was his extravagance in purchasing slaves. Even as Sultan, he made extensive conquests. He subjugated the country as far as Dwarsamudra, Malabar, Kampil, Warangal, Lakhnauti, Satgaon, Sonargaon, Nagarkot and Sambhal to give only few prominent place-names. There were sixteen major rebellions in his reign which were ruthlessly suppressed. In all these conquests and rebellions, slaves were taken with great gusto. For example, in the year 1342 Halajun rose in rebellion in Lahore. He was aided by the Khokhar chief Kulchand. They were defeated. “About three hundred women of the rebels were taken captive, and sent to the fort of Gwalior where they were seen by Ibn Battutah.” Such was their influx that Ibn Battutah writes: “At (one) time there arrived in Delhi some female infidel captives, ten of whom the Vazir sent to me. I gave one of them to the man who had brought them to me, but he was not satisfied. My companion took three young girls, and I do not know what happened to the rest.” Iltutmish, Muhammad Tughlaq and Firoz Tughlaq sent gifts of slaves to Khalifas outside India….. Ibn Battutah’s eye-witness account of the Sultan’s gifting captured slave girls to nobles or arranging their marriages with Muslims on a large scale on the occasion of the two Ids, corroborates the statement of Abbas. Ibn Battutah writes that during the celebrations in connection with the two Ids in the court of Muhammad bin Tughlaq, daughters of Hindu Rajas and those of commoners, captured during the course of the year were distributed among nobles, officers and important foreign slaves. “On the fourth day men slaves are married and on the fifth slave-girls. On the sixth day men and women slaves are married off.” This was all in accordance with the Islamic law. According to it, slaves cannot many on their own without the consent of their proprietors. The marriage of an infidel couple is not dissolved by their jointly embracing the faith. In the present case the slaves were probably already converted and their marriages performed with the initiative and permission the Sultan himself were valid. Thousands of non-Muslim women were captured by the Muslims in the yearly campaigns of Firoz Tughlaq, and under him the id celebrations were held on lines similar to those of his predecessor. In short, under the Tughlaqs the inflow of women captives never ceased.”

Muhammad bin Tughluq (1290–1351) Turkic Sultan of Delhi

Lal, K. S. (1994). Muslim slave system in medieval India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 5 (quoting Masalik-ul-Absar, E.D., III, 580., Battutah)

Gunnar Myrdal photo
Sandra Fluke photo
Neil Diamond photo

“Two bit manchild I was
Born for nothin' mostly
Good time with sometime women.
Nothin' ain't ever hold me.
You can't change me none.”

Neil Diamond (1941) American singer-songwriter

Two-Bit Manchild
Song lyrics, Velvet Gloves and Spit (1968)

Cat Stevens photo
Chinua Achebe photo
Gillian Anderson photo
Richard Dawkins photo

“The absolute morality that a religious person might profess would include what, stoning people for adultery, death for apostasy, punishment for breaking the Sabbath. These are all things which are religiously based absolute moralities. I don’t think I want an absolute morality. I think I want a morality that is thought out, reasoned, argued, discussed and based upon, I’d almost say, intelligent design [pun intended]. Can we not design our society, which has the sort of morality, the sort of society that we want to live in – if you actually look at the moralities that are accepted among modern people, among 21st century people, we don’t believe in slavery anymore. We believe in equality of women. We believe in being gentle. We believe in being kind to animals. These are all things which are entirely recent. They have very little basis in Biblical or Quranic scripture. They are things that have developed over historical time through a consensus of reasoning, of sober discussion, argument, legal theory, political and moral philosophy. These do not come from religion. To the extent that you can find the good bits in religious scriptures, you have to cherry pick. You search your way through the Bible or the Quran and you find the occasional verse that is an acceptable profession of morality and you say, ‘Look at that. That’s religion,’ and you leave out all the horrible bits and you say, ‘Oh, we don’t believe that anymore. We’ve grown out of that.’ Well, of course we’ve grown out it. We’ve grown out of it because of secular moral philosophy and rational discussion.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Richard Dawkins-George Pell Q&A (2012)

Bell Hooks photo
John Bright photo

“If a man have three or four children, he has just three or four times as much interest in having the Corn Laws abolished as the man who has none. Your children will grow up to be men and women. It may be that your heads will be laid in the grave before they come to manhood or womanhood; but they will grow up, and want employment at honest trades—want houses and furniture, food and clothing, and all the necessaries and comforts of life. They will be honest and industrious as yourselves. But the difficulties which surround you will be increased tenfold by the time they have arrived at your age. Trade will then have become still more crippled; the supply of food still more diminished; the taxation of the country still further increased. The great lords, and some other people, will have become still more powerful, unless the freemen and electors of Durham and of other places stand to their guns, and resolve that, whatever may come of Queen, or Lords, or Commons, or Church, or anybody—great and powerful, and noble though they be—the working classes will stand by the working classes; and will no longer lay themselves down in the dust to be trampled upon by the iron heel of monopoly, and have their very lives squeezed out of them by evils such as I have described.”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech during the general election of 1843, quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), pp. 113-114.
1840s

Warren Farrell photo

“I would suggest that just as women who make it in the world of business need male business mentors, perhaps men who make it in the world of emotions will need female emotional mentors.”

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

Source: Why Men Are the Way They Are (1988), p. 317.

Mike Huckabee photo
Ellen Willis photo

“Take back the night? How can women take back the night when they've never had it?”

Ellen Willis (1941–2006) writer, activist

From a conversation with Alice Echols, quoted by Echols in "Ellen Willis, 1941-2006" http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061127/ellen_willis, The Nation (10 November 2006)

“Women usually love what they buy, yet hate two-thirds of what is in their closets.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

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

Betty Friedan photo
Laurie Penny photo

“Dark women cannot be heroines in Bollywood.”

Nikita Gokhale (1990) Indian Actress, Indian Model

TNN. "‘Dark women cannot be heroines in Bollywood’" http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/marathi/movies/news/Nikita-Gokhale-Subhash-Ghai-Nude-Kanchi-Smita-Patil-Dark-Ravi-Jadhav/articleshow/37388188.cms.Timesofindia. Jan 13, 2017.

Warren Farrell photo
Roger Ebert photo
Elizabeth Hand photo
Clive Barker photo
Garrison Keillor photo

“None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Idea.”

Garrison Keillor (1942) American radio host and writer

Referring to the Military Commissions Act of 2006, in "Congress's Shameful Retreat From American Values" in The Chicago Tribune (4 October 2006) http://www.truthout.org/article/garrison-keillor-congresss-shameful-retreat-from-american-values

Ron Paul photo
Sydney Smith photo

“As the French say, there are three sexes, — men, women, and clergymen.”

Sydney Smith (1771–1845) English writer and clergyman

Vol. I, ch. 9
Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

Margaret Sanger photo

“Well, of course, people are only human," said Dudley to his brother, as they walked to the house behind the women. "But it really does not seem much for them to be.”

Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884–1969) English writer

A Family and a Fortune (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, [1939] 1949) p. 54.

“Women never look so well as when one comes in wet and dirty from hunting.”

Robert Smith Surtees (1805–1864) English writer

Source: Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour (1853), Ch. 21

Adrianne Wadewitz photo

“We definitely wanna increase the number of women. But just increasing the number of women isn’t necessarily going to– improve the– the fact that content on Wikipedia itself is skewed.”

Adrianne Wadewitz (1977–2014) academic and Wikipedian

Wholf, Tracy (May 18, 2014). "'Wikipedian' editor took on website’s gender gap" http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/wikipedian-editor-took-wikipedias-gender-gap/. PBS NewsHour (PBS). Retrieved May 19, 2014.

John Major photo
Paulo Freire photo

“Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it.”

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher

Source: Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970), Chapter 2

Charles Kingsley photo

“For men must work, and women must weep,
And there's little to earn, and many to keep,
Though the harbor bar be moaning.”

Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) English clergyman, historian and novelist

The Three Fishers http://www.bartleby.com/246/572.html (1851), st. 1.

Alija Izetbegović photo
Mike Pence photo

“Police officers are the best of us. Men and women, white, African-American, Asian, Latino, Hispanic – they put their lives on the line every single day.”

Mike Pence (1959) 48th Vice President of the United States

Vice presidential debate (October 4, 2016)
Vice presidential debate (October 4, 2016)

Annie Besant photo

“For centuries the leaders of Christian thought spoke of women as a necessary evil, and the greatest saints of the Church are those who despise women the most.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

The Freethinker's Text Book: Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its ... http://books.google.co.in/books?id=9Ja-JNYYySYC&pg=PT262

Muhammad photo
Sarah Grimké photo
George Bernard Shaw photo
Robert Jordan photo

“That was all he ever really wanted from women; a smile, a dance, a kiss, and to be remembered fondly.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Matrim Cauthon
(15 October 1993)

Lucy Lawless photo

“Growing up, I looked up to real women. I didn't go in for hero worship and I still don't. Everybody has feet of clay.”

Lucy Lawless (1968) New Zealand actress

Benjamin Morrison (January 14, 1997) "Visiting Warriors - Xena and Hercules Flex Their Muscles at NATPE", The Times-Picayune, p. F1.

Margaret Fuller photo
Andrea Dworkin photo

“Women do not know how to be women exactly; men constantly fail to be men.”

Source: Intercourse (1987), Chapter 8, "Law"

Nannie Helen Burroughs photo

“For a number of years there has been a righteous discontent, a burning zeal to go forward in His name among the Baptist women of our churches and it will be the dynamic force in the religious campaign at the opening of the 20th century.”

Nannie Helen Burroughs (1879–1961) American activist

How the Sisters Are Hindered from Helping September 1900 National Baptist Convention.
Speech given at 1900 National Baptist Convention, Richmond Virginia.

Rebecca Latimer Felton photo
Wyndham Lewis photo
David Brin photo
Donald J. Trump photo
Stephen King photo
Elizabeth May photo
Rudolf Karl Bultmann photo
Helen Keller photo

“The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labour. Surely we must free men and women together before we can free women. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands -- the ownership and control of their lives and livelihood -- are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind are ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease. How can women hope to help themselves while we and our brothers are helpless against the powerful organizations which modern parties represent and which contrive to rule the people? They rule the people because they own the means of physical life, land, and tools, and the nourishers of intellectual life, the press, the church, and the school. You say that the conduct of the woman suffragists is being disgracefully misrepresented by the British press. Here in America the leading newspapers misrepresent in every possible way the struggles of toiling men and women who seek relief. News that reflects ill upon the employers is skillfully concealed -- news of dreadful conditions under which labourers are forced to produce, news of thousands of men maimed in mills and mines and left without compensation, news of famines and strikes, news of thousands of women driven to a life of shame, news of little children compelled to labour before their hands are ready to drop their toys. Only here and there in a small and as yet uninfluential paper is the truth told about the workman and the fearful burdens under which he staggers.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Out of the Dark (1913), To a Woman-Suffragist

George Hendrik Breitner photo

“The so-called bourgeoisie doesn't provide any substance for my art. The character [of the models] there is too faint and without any spirit. It doesn't represent a race in an artistic sense. So there is no other choice for me [than folk women].”

George Hendrik Breitner (1857–1923) Dutch painter and photographer

translation from the original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek
version in original Dutch (citaat van Breitner, in het Nederlands:) De zogenaamde burgerij levert geen stof voor mijn kunst. Het karakter [van de modellen] dáár is te flauw en geesteloos. Het vertegenwoordigt in artistieken zin geen ras. Mij rest dus geen andere keuze [dan volksvrouwen].
Quote of Breitner; as cited by B. van Garrel, in his article 'Het getekende bestaan van G.H. Breitner', Dutch newspaper Haagse Post, 23 June 1973, jrg. 60, nr. 25
The young saleswoman of hats, nl:Geesje Kwak was Breitner's model for several years
undated quotes

H. Havelock Ellis photo

“The text of the Bible is but a feeble symbol of the Revelation held in the text of Men and Women.”

H. Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) British physician, writer, and social reformer

Impressions and Comments http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8ells10.txt (1914)

Julia Ward Howe photo

“We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) American abolitionist, social activist, and poet

Mother's Day Proclamation (1870)

Camille Paglia photo
Jane Fonda photo
David Irving photo
Camille Paglia photo
Tina Fey photo
David Berg photo

“You can urinate when you're big & hard, but it's a little difficult. The Lord made it difficult so we wouldn't urinate inside you women!”

David Berg (1919–1994) Children of God founder

Uncircumcision! To be, or not to be?

Andrea Dworkin photo
Samuel Johnson photo

“Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Letter from Johnson to John Taylor, 18 August 1763. The Yale Book of Quotations edited by Fred R. Shapiro, pg 400.

John Gay photo
Camille Paglia photo

“Male mastery in marriage is a social illusion, nurtured by women exhorting their creations to play and walk. At the emotional heart of every marriage is a pietà of mother and son.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 53

Russell Brand photo
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk photo

“Everything we see in the world is the creative work of women.”

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) Turkish army officer, revolutionary, and the first President of Turkey

As quoted in The Macmillan Dictionary of Political Quotations (1993) by Lewis D. Eigen and Jonathan Paul Siegel, p. 424; also in Ataturk: First President and Founder of the Turkish Republic (2002) by Yüksel Atillasoy, p. 15

Phyllis Chesler photo
Ayaan Hirsi Ali photo

“I cannot think of a system of law that dehumanizes & degrades women more than Islamic Law.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali (1969) Dutch feminist, author

7 News Sydney, (April 4, 2017)

Robert G. Ingersoll photo

“It is a waste of money to pay priests to frighten our children, and paralyze the intellect of women.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

My Reviewers Reviewed (lecture from June 27, 1877, San Francisco, CA)

Vannevar Bush photo
Tucker Max photo
Rudyard Kipling photo
Regina Jonas photo

“It is nothing special to see women, it is a matter of being accustomed, it does not excite the fantasies of a man.”

Regina Jonas (1902–1944) rabbi

Can a Woman Be a Rabbi According to Halachic Sources?

Charles Darwin photo
Voltairine de Cleyre photo

“Georgie Pringle: The word of the LORD came again unto me, saying, Son of man, there were two women, the daughters of one mother: And they committed whoredoms in Egypt; they committed whoredoms in their youth: there were their breasts pressed, and there they bruised the teats of their virginity.”

Dennis Potter (1935–1994) English television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist

Pringle, "the class comic", has been asked to choose the bible reading for a secondary school class. He has a reputation for knowing "all the dirty bits in the bible off by heart," according to Nigel Barton's narration. The quote is from Ezekiel, chapter 23, verses 1-3.
Stand up, Nigel Barton (1965)

Al Gore photo
Yusuf Qaradawi photo

“Men put roadblocks in front of women as a way of hiding their inefficiencies.”

Bernadette Lahai (1960) Sierra Leonean politician

30% (Women and Politics in Sierra Leone), Anna Cady, 2018-06-18 https://vimeo.com/43595116,

C. Wright Mills photo