“The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself.”

—  Erica Jong

Becoming Light: Poems New and Selected (1991)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself." by Erica Jong?
Erica Jong photo
Erica Jong95
Novelist, poet, memoirist, critic 1942

Related quotes

Anaïs Nin photo

“She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Variant: She lacks the core of sureness, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on reflections of herself in others' eyes. She does not dare to be herself.
Source: Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

Rick Riordan photo

“She often had to remind herself that she couldn't do everything alone. She wasn't always the best person for the job. Sometimes she got tunnel vision and forgot about what other people needed.”

Rick Riordan The Mark of Athena

Source: The Mark of Athena

“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening.”

Angela Carter (1940–1992) English novelist

Source: The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

George Carlin photo

“If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Margaret Sanger photo

“The basic freedom of the world is woman's freedom. A free race cannot be born of slave mothers. A woman enchained cannot choose but give a measure of that bondage to her sons and daughters. No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.”

Margaret Sanger book Woman and the New Race

Source: Woman and the New Race, (1922), Chapter 8, "Birth Control; A Parents' Problem or Woman's?"

“Much was made by abolitionists that the King James version of the Bible didn't use the word slaves, but, instead, servants. This meant, in their minds, that God didn't really approve of slavery. But that argument was linguistic at best. Slavery was codified and even sanctified in the tenth commandment, throwing slaves (and wives) in with other property belonging to one's neighbor that one must not covet. The Bible even regulated--as opposed to banning outright--the killing of slaves, stating that if a slave were beaten to death, the slave owner should be punished (though not killed himself, as would be his fate were he to kill a freeman), but if the slave didn't die until a day or two after the beating, the slave owner "shall not be punished, for he [the slave] is his money."”

Derrick Jensen book The Culture of Make Believe

Source: The Culture of Make Believe (2003), p. 56

Bernart de Ventadorn photo

“This is how she shows herself a woman indeed,
My lady, and I reproach her for it:
She does not want what one ought to want,
And what she is forbidden to do, she does.”

Bernart de Ventadorn troubador

Can vei la lauzeta mover, line 33; translation by Frederick Goldin, from Boris Ford (ed.) Medieval Literature: The European Inheritance (1983) p. 440.

Nicholas Sparks photo

“…She had the rare ability to be exactly what people needed when she was with them and yet still remain true to herself.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

John Tyree, Chapter 7, p. 93
2000s, Dear John (2006)

Joey Comeau photo

“Sometimes Margaret tells herself that there's a moral difference between killing kittens for no reason and what she does.”

Joey Comeau (1980) writer

One Bloody Thing After Another

“Mary places herself between her Son and mankind in the reality of our hardships and sufferings. She places herself in the middle - she becomes a mediator not as a stranger, but in her role as true mother, aware that as such she makes present to her Son the needs of mankind.”

José Luis Mollaghan (1946) Argentinian archbishop

Argentinean bishop: Rosary helps Catholics face difficulties of life https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/21189/argentinean-bishop-rosary-helps-catholics-face-difficulties-of-life (18 October 2010)

Related topics