Quotes about female (709 quotes, page 7)

“The joker in the deck of lesbian fidelity is female vanity: no woman of fifty is going to undress in front of a woman of twenty no matter how much she might lust for her.”

Florence King (1936–2016) American writer

The Florence King Reader (1995)

“Instead of wishing to see more doctors made by women joining what there are, I wish to see as few doctors, either male or female, as possible. For, mark you, the women have made no improvement — they have only tried to be men and they have only succeeded in being third-rate men.”

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing

Letter to John Stuart Mill (12 September 1860), published in Florence Nightingale on Society and Politics, Philosophy, Science, Education (2003) edited by Lynn McDonald

Women , Men

“As important as it is for the producers to pay more attention to the female roles, it's more important for us to take control over this situation and define who we are. Because if they just give us the parts, it's their point of view of who we are. What's important is that we define who we are and don't wait for the men to give us the roles.”

Salma Hayek (1966) Mexican-American actress and producer

O interview (2003)

Men , Waiting , Parting

“Ms. Wadewitz’s interest in rock climbing played out on Wikipedia. Her last editing was to improve an article about Steph Davis, a prominent female climber and wingsuit flier. In Ms. Wadewitz’s hands, the article became filled with personal details, spectacular photos, a highlighted quotation and 25 footnotes.”

Adrianne Wadewitz (1977–2014) academic and Wikipedian

Cohen, Noam. (April 18, 2014). "Adrianne Wadewitz, 37, Wikipedia Editor, Dies After Rock Climbing Fall" http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/19/business/media/adrianne-wadewitz-37-wikipedia-editor-dies-after-rock-climbing-fall.html. The New York Times.
About

Photo , Personality

“Human beings are, by nature, the kind of animal that falls in love. The cross-cultural record also suggests that humans are also the kind of animal that commonly provides biparental care for its young. In 95% to 97% of mammalian species, only the females care for the young. We would no more expect males in these species to invest in their offspring than we would expect them to get pregnant or lactate. Humans are not like that.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 147

Love , Nature , Animals

“Each boat is worth the price of a new university and they are watched by gin-soaked yachting types, male and female, in captain's hats lounging in deckchairs inside Perspex covered enclosures at the front of yet more expensive, floating country houses representing nothing more than elegantly vulgar expressions of dodgy wealth. The America's Cup.”

Ralph Steadman book The Joke's Over

The America's Cup, p. 45
The Joke's Over (2006)

Universe , Housing , Country , Wealth

“Bombay is far ahead of Bengal in the matter of female education. I have visited some of the best schools in Bengal and Bombay, and I can say from my own experience that there are a larger number of girls receiving public education in Bombay than in Bengal; but while Bengal has not come up to Bombay as far as regarded extent of education, Bengal is not behind Bombay in the matter of solidarity and depth.”

Keshub Chunder Sen (1838–1884) Indian academic

Speech delivered at the East India Association, London, on 13th May 1870. See Female Education in India for full speech.

Education , School , Girl

“To say that genetic differences are relevant to hetero- and homosexuality is not, however, to say that there are “genes for homosexuality” or even that there is a “genetic tendency to homosexuality.” This critical point can be illustrated by an example I owe to the philosopher of science, Elliott Sober. If we look at the chromosomes of people who knit and those who do not, we will find that with few exceptions, knitters have two X chromosomes, while people with one X and one Y chromosome almost never knit. Yet it would be absurd to say that we had discovered genes for knitting. The possession of two X chromosomes causes an embryo, with rare exceptions, to develop into an anatomical and physiological female, while the possession of a Y chromosome leads almost always to male development, and in our culture women are taught to knit while men are not. The beauty of this example is its historical (and geographical) contingency. Had we made the observations before the end of the eighteenth century (or even now in a few Irish, Scottish and Newfoundland communities), the result would have been reversed. Hand knitting was men’s work before the introduction of knitting machines around 1790, and was turned into a female domestic occupation only when mechanization made it economically marginal.”

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

Genes and Sexuality: An Exchange (1995)

Women , Men , People , Beauty

“In today's anti-drug climate, people don't want to hear about the commercial potential of marijuana. The reason is that the flowering top of a female hemp plant contains a drug. But from 1842 through the 1890s a powerful concentrated extract of marijuana was the second most prescribed drug in the United States. In all that time the medical literature didn't list any of the ill effects claimed by today's drug warriors.”

Hugh Downs (1921) American broadcaster

"Hugh Downs commentary on hemp, for ABC News, NY, 11/90"

People , Flowers , Literature , Time

“Amartya Sen is not Indian. He had lost his Indian-ness after he left his Bengali ex-wife and married two foreign females. He has lived abroad and only visits the country for a couple of months, which cannot make you Indian.”

Subramanian Swamy (1939) Indian politician

On Amartya Sen, "Sen 'lost Indian-ness' after dumping Bengali wife for foreign brides: Swamy" http://www.business-standard.com/article/politics/sen-lost-indian-ness-after-dumping-bengali-wife-for-foreign-brides-swamy-113072300490_1.html#.Ue8bEFEgKO4.twitter, Business Standard (23 July 2013)
2011-2014

Country

“Standardized personality differences between the sexes are of this order, cultural creations to which each generation, male and female, is trained to conform.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1930s, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), p. 48

Sex , Personality , Training

“Women enter the sciences, but "womanliness"—those qualities that have always been stereotypically attributed to females—is not yet entirely welcome”

Theodore Roszak (1933–2011) American social historian, social critic, writer

Source: The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999), Ch.11 Only Connect
Context: Women enter the sciences, but "womanliness"—those qualities that have always been stereotypically attributed to females—is not yet entirely welcome, whether it comes into the laboratory wearing pants or a skirt.

Women , Science

“The Moon was the symbol of the passive capacity of nature to produce, the female, of which the life-giving power and energy was the male.”

Albert Pike book Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. I : Apprentice, The Twelve-Inch Rule and Common Gavel, p. 1
Context: The Sun is the ancient symbol of the life-giving and generative power of the Deity. To the ancients, light was the cause of life; and God was the source from which all light flowed; the essence of Light, the Invisible Fire, developed as Flame manifested as light and splendor. The Sun was his manifestation and visible image; and the Sabæans worshipping the Light — God, seemed to worship the Sun, in whom they saw the manifestation of the Deity.
The Moon was the symbol of the passive capacity of nature to produce, the female, of which the life-giving power and energy was the male. It was the symbol of Isis, Astarte, and Artemis, or Diana. The "Master of Life" was the Supreme Deity, above both, and manifested through both; Zeus, the Son of Saturn, become King of the Gods; Horus, son of Osiris and Isis, become the Master of Life; Dionusos or Bacchus, like Mithras, become the author of Light and Life and Truth.

Life , Nature

“If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

Todd Akin (1947) American politician

KTVI interview,
asked whether abortions should be allowed for rape victims.
Context: It seems to me, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, that's really rare. If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let's assume that maybe that didn't work or something: I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.

Way

“Except during my childhood, when I was probably influenced by Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel depiction of God with a flowing white beard, I have never tried to project the Creator in any kind of human likeness. The vociferous debates about whether God is male or female seem ridiculous to me.”

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

Living Faith (2001), p. 222
Post-Presidency
Context: Except during my childhood, when I was probably influenced by Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel depiction of God with a flowing white beard, I have never tried to project the Creator in any kind of human likeness. The vociferous debates about whether God is male or female seem ridiculous to me. I think of God as an omnipotent and omniscient presence, a spirit that permeates the universe, the essence of truth, nature, being, and life. To me, these are profound and indescribable concepts that seem to be trivialized when expressed in words.

God , Childhood

“Sex is the balance of male and female in the universe, the attraction, the repulsion, the transit of neutrality, the new attraction, the new repulsion, always different, always new.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1929)
Context: Sex is the balance of male and female in the universe, the attraction, the repulsion, the transit of neutrality, the new attraction, the new repulsion, always different, always new. The long neuter spell of Lent, when the blood is low, and the delight of the Easter kiss, the sexual revel of spring, the passion of midsummer, the slow recoil, revolt, and grief of autumn, greyness again, then the sharp stimulus of winter of the long nights. Sex goes through the rhythm of the year, in man and woman, ceaselessly changing: the rhythm of the sun in his relation to the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and the equinox! This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilised vase on the table.

Sex , Universe

“If any of us hopes to survive, s/he must meet the extremity of the American female condition with immediate and political response.”

June Jordan (1936–2002) Poet, essayist, playwright, feminist and bisexual activist

"The Case for the Real Majority" (1982), from Moving Towards Home: Political Essays (1989)
Context: If any of us hopes to survive, s/he must meet the extremity of the American female condition with immediate and political response. The thoroughly destructive and indefensible subjugation of the majority of Americans cannot continue except at the peril of the entire body politic.

Hope

“On all operations, female soldiers and officers have proven themselves worthy of the best traditions of the Australian Army. They are vital to us, maintaining our capability now, and in to the future. If that does not suit you, then get out!”

David Morrison (1956) Australian army general

Message regarding unacceptable behaviour (2013)
Context: On all operations, female soldiers and officers have proven themselves worthy of the best traditions of the Australian Army. They are vital to us, maintaining our capability now, and in to the future. If that does not suit you, then get out! You may find another employer where your attitude and behaviour is acceptable, but I doubt it. The same goes to those who think toughness is built on humiliating others.

Future

“Many tribal peoples have both all-male and all-female secret societies, which help maintain the cultural values or reality tunnel.”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

Freemasonry, p. 187; in the final sentence here, inimitable perhaps should be "inimicable"
Everything Is Under Control (1998)
Context: Many tribal peoples have both all-male and all-female secret societies, which help maintain the cultural values or reality tunnel. Freemasonry is certainly the largest, and probably the oldest, and still the most controversial of the all-male secret societies surviving in our world. No two scholars can even agree on how old it is, much less on how "good" or "evil" it is. … Although Masonry is often denounced as either a political or religious "conspiracy", Freemasons are forbidden to discuss either politics or religion within the lodge. Gary Dryfoos of the Massachusetts Institute of technology, who maintains the best Masonic site on the web http://web.mit.edu/dryfoo/Masonry/, always stresses these points and also offers personal testimony that after many years as a Mason, including high ranks, he has not yet been asked to engage in pagan or Satanic rituals or plot for any reason for or against any political party. The more rabid anti-Masons, of course, dismiss such testimony as flat lies.
The enemies of Masonry, who are usually Roman Catholics or Fundamentalist Protestants, insist that the rites of the order contain "pagan" elements, e. g., the Yule festival, the Spring Solstice festival, the dead-and-resurrected martyr (Jesus, allegedly historical, to Christians; Hiram, admittedly allegorical, to Masons). All these and many other elements in Christianity and Masonry have a long prehistory in paganism, as documented in the 12 volumes of Sir James George Frazer's Golden Bough.
The major offense of Masonry to orthodox churches is that it, like our First Amendment, encourages equal tolerance for all religions, and this tends, somewhat, to lessen dogmatic allegiance to any one religion. Those who insist you must accept their dogma fervently and renounce all others as devilish errors, correctly see this Masonic tendency as inimitable [sic] — to their faith.

People , Secret , Reality , Help

“I'm a female. Why would I give all the best ideas to a male?”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Acceptance Speech for the Margaret Edwards Award (1998)
Context: Wrinkle, when it was finally published in 1962, after two years of rejections, broke several current taboos. The protagonist was female, and one of the unwritten rules of science fiction was that the protagonist should be male. I'm a female. Why would I give all the best ideas to a male?
Another assumption was that science and fantasy don't mix. Why not? We live in a fantastic universe, and subatomic particles and quantum mechanics are even more fantastic than the macrocosm. Often the only way to look clearly at this extraordinary universe is through fantasy, fairy tale, myth. During the fifties Erich Fromm published a book called The Forgotten Language, in which he said that the only universal language which breaks across barriers of race, culture, time, is the language of fairy tale, fantasy, myth, parable, and that is why the same stories have been around in one form or another for hundreds of years.
Someone said, "It's all been done before."
Yes, I agreed, but we all have to say it in our own voice.

Idea

“The female woman is one of the greatest institooshuns of which this land can boste.”

Artemus Ward (1834–1867) American writer

Woman's Rights.
Artemus Ward, His Book http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/eafbin2/toccer-eaf?id=Weaf482&tag=public&data=/www/data/eaf2/private/texts&part=0 (1862)

“For our God is not an abstract thought, a logical necessity, a high and harmonious structure made of deductions and speculations.
He is not an immaculate, neutral, odorless, distilled product of our brains, neither male nor female.
He is both man and woman, mortal and immortal, dung and spirit. He gives birth, fecundates, slaughters — death and eros in one — and then he begets and slays once more, dancing spaciously beyond the boundaries of a logic which cannot contain the antinomies.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Saviors of God

The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: I do not care what face other ages and other people have given to the enormous, faceless essence. They have crammed it with human virtues, with rewards and punishments, with certain ties. They have given a face to their hopes and fears, they have submitted their anarchy to a rhythm, they have found a higher justification by which to live and labor. They have fulfilled their duty.
But today we have gone beyond these needs; we have shattered this particular mask of the Abyss; our God no longer fits under the old features.
Our hearts have overbrimmed with new agonies, with new luster and silence. The mystery has grown savage, and God has grown greater. The dark powers ascend, for they have also grown greater, and the entire human island quakes.
Let us stoop down to our hearts and confront the Abyss valiantly. Let us try to mold once more, with our flesh and blood, the new, contemporary face of God.
For our God is not an abstract thought, a logical necessity, a high and harmonious structure made of deductions and speculations.
He is not an immaculate, neutral, odorless, distilled product of our brains, neither male nor female.
He is both man and woman, mortal and immortal, dung and spirit. He gives birth, fecundates, slaughters — death and eros in one — and then he begets and slays once more, dancing spaciously beyond the boundaries of a logic which cannot contain the antinomies.

Death , God , Birth , Dance

“If you cannot see that divinity includes male and female characteristics and at the same time transcends them, you have bad consequences.”

Hans Küng (1928) Swiss Catholic priest, theologian and author

Newsweek interview, July 8, 1991
Context: If you cannot see that divinity includes male and female characteristics and at the same time transcends them, you have bad consequences. Rome and Cardinal O'Connor base the exclusion of women priests on the idea that God is the Father and Jesus is His Son, there were only male disciples, etc. They are defending a patriarchal Church with a patriarchal God. We must fight the patriarchal misunderstanding of God.

Time

“We five women were fortunate to have the choice, not just the opportunity but the choice, to play such rich, complex female characters.”

Frances McDormand (1957) American actress

Acceptance speech as "best actress" at the 69th Annual Academy Awards (24 March 1997) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Phno8FKSl48, for her performance in Fargo · Full text online at the Academy Awards Acceptance Speech Database http://aaspeechesdb.oscars.org/link/069-3/
Context: It is impossible to maintain one's composure in this situation. What am I doing here? — especially considering the extraordinary group of women with whom I was nominated. We five women were fortunate to have the choice, not just the opportunity but the choice, to play such rich, complex female characters. And I congratulate producers like Working Title and Polygram for allowing directors to make autonomous casting decisions based on qualifications and not just market value. And I encourage writers and directors to keep these really interesting female roles coming — and while you're at it you can throw in a few for the men as well.

Women

“When a person has inwardly struggled with his anima or with her animus for a sufficiently long time and has reached the point where he or she is no longer identified with it in an unconscious fashion, the unconscious once again takes on a new symbolic form in relating with the ego. It then appears in the form of the psychic core, that is, the Self. In the dreams of a woman, the Self, when it personifies itself, manifests as a superior female figure, for example, as a priestess, a sorceress, an earth mother, or a nature or love goddess. In the dreams of a man, it takes the form of some-one who confers initiations (an Indian guru), a wise old man, a nature spirit, a hero, and so forth. An Austrian fairy tale recounts the following:
A king posts a soldier to keep watch on the coffin of a cursed black princess who has been bewitched. It is known that every night she comes to life and tears the guard to pieces. In despair, not wanting to die, the soldier runs away into the forest. There he meets an "old zither player who was, however, the Lord God himself," and this old musician advises him how to hide in different places in the church and what to do so that the black princess cannot find him. With the help of this miraculous old man, the soldier succeeds in evading the princess's attack and in this way is able to redeem her. He marries her and becomes the king.
The old zither player who is really God himself, expressed in psychological language, is a symbol of the Self. He helps the soldier, that is, the ego, to overcome the destructive anima figure and even to redeem it. In a woman, as we have said, the Self takes on a feminine form.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998) Swiss psychologist and scholar

Source: Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche (1994), The Self, p. 324 - 325

Love , Life , God , Dreams

“To what purpose, pray, exist all these things that be born? Whence come male and female?”

Julian (emperor) (331–363) Roman Emperor, philosopher and writer

Upon The Mother Of The Gods (c. 362-363)
Context: To what purpose, pray, exist all these things that be born? Whence come male and female? Whence the difference in kind of all things that be, amongst visible species, unless there be certain pre-existing and previously established Reasons and Causes subsisting beforehand, in the nature of a pattern? With regard to which, though we are dull of sight, yet let us strive to clear away the mist from the eyes of the soul.

“Can you imagine my astonishment, in turn, at learning that part of my own nature was female, and bird-formed, and beautiful?”

Philip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy

Stanislaus Grumman in Ch. 10 : The Shaman
His Dark Materials, The Subtle Knife (1997)
Context: People here cannot conceive of worlds where dæmons are a silent voice in the mind and no more. Can you imagine my astonishment, in turn, at learning that part of my own nature was female, and bird-formed, and beautiful?

Beauty , Imagination , Nature , Bird

“No division of race or color, class or caste, rich or poor, male or female, is found in the teaching of Jesus.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Source: Something More, A Consideration of the Vast, Undeveloped Resources of Life (1920), p. 45
Context: Jesus teaches the kinship and equality of all children of God. No division of race or color, class or caste, rich or poor, male or female, is found in the teaching of Jesus.

Color

“People that haven't seen us yet are shocked because they think that Alice Cooper must be a female folksinger.”

Alice Cooper (1948) American rock singer, songwriter and musician

Poppin (1969)
Context: People that haven't seen us yet are shocked because they think that Alice Cooper must be a female folksinger. They don't expect the whole thing. And the whole thing is a direct product of television and movies and America, 'cause that's where America's based. That's where their heart is from the sex and violence of TV and the movies, and that was our influence.

People , Thinking

“At some point during almost every romantic comedy, the female lead suddenly trips and falls, stumbling helplessly over something ridiculous like a leaf, and then some Matthew McConaughey type either whips around the corner just in the nick of time to save her or is clumsily pulled down along with her.”

Chelsea Handler (1975) American comedian, actress, author and talk show host

That event predictably leads to the magical moment of their first kiss. Please. I fall ALL the time. You know who comes and gets me? The bouncer.
My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands (2005)

Time

“My protagonists, male and female, are me.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

The Crosswicks Journal, The Irrational Season (1977)
Context: My protagonists, male and female, are me. And so I must be able to recall exactly what it was like to be five years old, and twelve, and sixteen, and twenty-two, and.... For, after all, I am not an isolated fifty-seven years old; I am every other age I have been, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven... all the way up to and occasionally beyond my present chronology.

“Much of what is written on the craft is biased in one way or another, so weed out what is useful to you and ignore the rest. I see the next few years as being crucial in the transformation of our culture away from the patriarchal death cults and toward the love of life, of nature, of the female principle.”

Starhawk (1951) American author, activist and Neopagan

As quoted in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion (1979) by Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow
Context: Much of what is written on the craft is biased in one way or another, so weed out what is useful to you and ignore the rest. I see the next few years as being crucial in the transformation of our culture away from the patriarchal death cults and toward the love of life, of nature, of the female principle. The craft is only one path among the many opening up for women, and many of us will blaze new trails as we explore the uncharted country of our own interiors. The heritage, the culture, the knowledge of the ancient priestesses, healers, poets, singers, and seers were nearly lost, but a seed survived the flames that will blossom in a new age into thousands of flowers. The long sleep of Mother Goddess is ended. May She awaken in each of our hearts — Merry meet, merry part, and blessed be.

Love , Life , Death , Way

“BB: Are there any men in?
(no response)
BB: Any women?
Female voices: Yes!
BB: Ah, you see, there's this crisis in masculine identity at the moment. Women, totally at home with their sexuality. 'I am woman, wo-man, I, wo-MAN.' Men 'Er.. (awkward expression) Someone else'll shout out, I'll be alright'. Alright, is there any blokes in?
Masculine voices: Yeah!
BB: You see, there's a term that men feel more comfortable with. Bloke, blokey bloke bloke. It's a kind of friendly term. 'Oh, he's a bloke, lovely bloke, nice bloke, blokey bloke. I'm a bloke, you're a bloke, wahey!' It doesn't impose any unnecessary demands on us as men. 'Bloke', that's just basically 'carry stuff, don't get in the way'. 'Man', that's all kinds of other things, isn't it? That's nobility, gallantry, wisdom… that conjures up some image of a bloke in a cardigan with a pipe saying 'Cover up those table legs, mother, they're inflaming my sexual ardour'.
Ch. 24, 53:21”

Bill Bailey (1965) English comedian, musician, actor, TV and radio presenter and author

Bewilderness (DVD, 2001)

Love , Wisdom , Women , Men

“Men are run ragged by female sexuality all their lives. From the beginning of his life to the end, no man ever fully commands any woman. It's an illusion.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

As quoted in Sexuality and Gender (2002) by Christine R. Williams and Arlene Stein, p. 213
Context: Men are run ragged by female sexuality all their lives. From the beginning of his life to the end, no man ever fully commands any woman. It's an illusion. Men are pussy-whipped. And they know it. That's what the strip clubs are about; not woman as victim, not woman as slave, but woman as goddess.

Life , Men

“Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid.”

Margaret Fuller book Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)
Context: Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.
History jeers at the attempts of physiologists to bind great original laws by the forms which flow from them. They make a rule; they say from observation what can and cannot be. In vain! Nature provides exceptions to every rule. She sends women to battle, and sets Hercules spinning; she enables women to bear immense burdens, cold, and frost; she enables the man, who feels maternal love, to nourish his infant like a mother.

“I think … someone might do a little research on some of the inherent qualities of sex – its cruelty, its bullyingness, for instance. It seems to me that bending someone else to your will is the very stuff of sex, by force or neglect if you are male, by spitefulness or nagging or scenes if you are female.”

Philip Larkin (1922–1985) English poet, novelist, jazz critic and librarian

Letter to Monica Jones (1 November 1951) as quoted in "Philip Larkin's women" (23 October 2010) http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/23/martin-amis-philip-larkin-letters-monica
Context: I think … someone might do a little research on some of the inherent qualities of sex – its cruelty, its bullyingness, for instance. It seems to me that bending someone else to your will is the very stuff of sex, by force or neglect if you are male, by spitefulness or nagging or scenes if you are female. And what's more, both sides would sooner have it that way than not at all. I wouldn't. And I suspect that means not that I can enjoy sex in my own quiet way but that I can't enjoy it at all. It's like rugby football: either you like kicking & being kicked, or your soul cringes away from the whole affair. There's no way of quietly enjoying rugby football.

Sex , Thinking

“This Attis, therefore, the intelligible Power, the holder together of things material below the Moon, having intercourse with the pre-ordained Cause of Matter, holds intercourse therewith, not as a male with a female, but as though flowing into it, since he is the same with it.”

Julian (emperor) (331–363) Roman Emperor, philosopher and writer

Upon The Mother Of The Gods (c. 362-363)
Context: It is not Matter itself that is here meant, but the ultimate Cause of things incorporeal, which also existed before Matter. Moreover, it is asserted by Heraclitus: "Death unto souls is but a change to liquid." This Attis, therefore, the intelligible Power, the holder together of things material below the Moon, having intercourse with the pre-ordained Cause of Matter, holds intercourse therewith, not as a male with a female, but as though flowing into it, since he is the same with it.

Intelligence

“I encourage writers and directors to keep these really interesting female roles coming — and while you're at it you can throw in a few for the men as well.”

Frances McDormand (1957) American actress

Acceptance speech as "best actress" at the 69th Annual Academy Awards (24 March 1997) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Phno8FKSl48, for her performance in Fargo · Full text online at the Academy Awards Acceptance Speech Database http://aaspeechesdb.oscars.org/link/069-3/
Context: It is impossible to maintain one's composure in this situation. What am I doing here? — especially considering the extraordinary group of women with whom I was nominated. We five women were fortunate to have the choice, not just the opportunity but the choice, to play such rich, complex female characters. And I congratulate producers like Working Title and Polygram for allowing directors to make autonomous casting decisions based on qualifications and not just market value. And I encourage writers and directors to keep these really interesting female roles coming — and while you're at it you can throw in a few for the men as well.

Men

“Just as it sometimes happens that deformed offspring are produced by deformed parents, and sometimes not, so the offspring produced by a female are sometimes female, sometimes not, but male, because the female is as it were a deformed male.”

Aristotle book Generation of Animals

Generation of Animals as translated by Arthur Leslie Peck (1943), p. 175
Generation of Animals

Parent

“Many people think that female circumcision only started with the advent of Islam.”

Nawal El-Saadawi (1931) Egyptian feminist writer, activist, physician and psychiatrist

The Hidden Face of Eve (1980)
Context: Many people think that female circumcision only started with the advent of Islam. But as a matter of fact it is well known and widespread in some areas of the world before the Islamic era, including the Arabian peninsula. Mohammad the Prophet tried to oppose this custom since he considered it harmful to the sexual health of the woman.

People , Thinking

“In language gender is particularly confusing. Why, please, should a table be male in German, female in French, and castrated in English?”

Marlene Dietrich (1901–1992) German-American actress and singer

“And the Reason is this, Every single, Male and Female, is a perfect Creature in himself; and the same Spirit that made thh Globe, dwels in man to Govern the globe; so that the flesh of man being subject to Reason, his Maker, hath him to be his Teacher and Ruler within himself, therefore needs not run abroad after any Teacher or Ruler without him, for he needs not that any man should teach him, for the same Anoynting that ruled in the Son of man, teacheth him all things.”

Gerrard Winstanley (1609–1676) English Protestant religious reformer, political philosopher, and activist

The True Levellers Standard Advanced (1649)

Perfection , Teachers

“Humor, if we are to be serious about it, arises from the ineluctable fact that we are all born into a losing struggle. Those who risk agony and death to bring children into this fiasco simply can’t afford to be too frivolous. (And there just aren’t that many episiotomy jokes, even in the male repertoire.) I am certain that this is also partly why, in all cultures, it is females who are the rank-and-file mainstay of religion, which in turn is the official enemy of all humor. One tiny snuffle that turns into a wheeze, one little cut that goes septic, one pathetically small coffin, and the woman’s universe is left in ashes and ruin. Try being funny about that, if you like. Oscar Wilde was the only person ever to make a decent joke about the death of an infant, and that infant was fictional, and Wilde was (although twice a father) a queer. And because fear is the mother of superstition, and because they are partly ruled in any case by the moon and the tides, women also fall more heavily for dreams, for supposedly significant dates like birthdays and anniversaries, for romantic love, crystals and stones, lockets and relics, and other things that men know are fit mainly for mockery and limericks. Good grief! Is there anything less funny than hearing a woman relate a dream she’s just had?”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

“And then Quentin was there somehow. And so were you, in a strange sort of way. And it was all so peaceful.” Peaceful?
"Why Women Aren’t Funny" https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2007/01/, Vanity Fair, (January 1, 2007).
2000s, 2007

Birthday , Religion , Making love , Personality

“I think there’s a deep societal fear of female rage, partly because it hasn’t been experienced a lot. Men—I speak in vast generalities—are often very afraid of what they don’t know how to handle. And they haven’t had to handle female rage a lot, and they think they need to handle it.”

Gillian Flynn (1971) American author and critic

On how she perceives female rage in “Gillian Flynn Isn’t Going to Write the Kind of Women You Want” https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/06/gillian-flynn-isnt-going-to-write-the-kind-of-women-you-want in Vanity Fair (2018 Jun 28)

Thinking , Fear , Men , Rage

“Female rage is not really permitted in real life. Angry women are called bitches, too emotional, hysterical, whereas male rage is often portrayed as heroic, righteous, intelligent. In Monstress, Arcanics wear collars around their necks to keep them from exercising their full selves. And I think one of the collars around the necks of women is society’s views about female rage. Which isn’t to say anger is necessarily a force for good. Rage can be energizing and sustaining, but it’s ultimately problematic if it doesn’t lead you to a deeper exploration of the source…”

Marjorie M. Liu (1979) American writer

On how female rage is portrayed in Monstress in “Marjorie Liu on the Road to Making Monstress” https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/09/marjorie-liu-monstress-interview/539394/ in The Atlantic (2017 Sep 14)

Anger , Bitch , Intelligence , Thinking

“Living on the hyphen is a complex cultural existence at times, and we’re often pulled in many directions where allegiance is always demanded. It is a fractured state of being, though I don’t think it’s necessarily bad; at least the having multiple ways of looking at life-the Mexican and American/the male and female. Where that goes awry is when we want to make one way of approaching life, The One Way. That’s where things begin to disintegrate, loyalties are questioned, and patriarchies are born…”

Isabel Quintero

On the Mexican American experience in “2015 Morris Award: An Interview with Finalist Isabel Quintero” http://www.yalsa.ala.org/thehub/2015/01/26/morris-award-finalist-interview-isabel-quintero/ in YALSA (2015 Jan 26)

Life , Time , Question , Bad luck

“The Transhumanist Party aims to motivate and mobilize both female and male scientists and engineers to take on additional responsibilities as rational politicians. It does not mean replacing democracy with technocracy. It means that our government needs help in making the right policies and investing in science, health, and technology for the improvement of the human condition and the long-term survival of the human race.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

The Transhumanism Handbook, 2019

Democracy , Help , Health , Motivation

“Ten thousand years ago, when man the nomad took root in one place, he brought animals with him into human service. But domestication was to be his fate too, as he fell under architecturally reinforced female control.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

pg. 8
The Birds

Animals , Fate

“My protagonists, male and female, are me. And so I must be able to recall exactly what it was like to be five years old, and twelve, and sixteen, and twenty-two, and.... For, after all, I am not an isolated fifty-seven years old; I am every other age I have been, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven... all the way up to and occasionally beyond my present chronology.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

The Crosswicks Journal, The Irrational Season (1977)

Way , Age

“I didn’t start writing to tell happy, little stories. I started writing to make some impact on the world in which I live. If you don’t want to say anything about sexual assault, that’s your business, but I want to say something about it. I think it is absolutely and unequivocally wrong. We have no right because we are in the military to rape fellow soldiers who just happen to be females. A lot of victims are male as well. In the Army I was in, the life of the person next to you was as valuable as your own. You would never do anything to hurt your comrade. Your life depended on him, and in the case of Iraq, those gentlemen’s lives depended on the women they were raping. It’s horrifying.”

Charles Fuller (1939–2022) American playwright

On writing about a female sexual assault victim serving in the military in his play One Night in “Charles Fuller Discusses ‘One Night’” https://catf.org/charles-fuller-discusses-one-night/ in Contemporary American Theater Festival (2014 Jun 1)

Hurt , Dependency , Business , Personality

“Mother love is not a human invention. It has been inherited. It is older than the Rocky Mountains. Mother love in man came from the same source as the backbone in man from pre-human forms. Mother love among men is the same thing exactly as mother love among birds and quadrupeds. The mother monkey loves her child with almost the same tenderness as the human mother. When a monkey child dies, the mother carries the little corpse around with her for clays, refuses to eat, and sits often in silence and grief. Mother birds will risk their very lives for their young. So will mother bears, and lions, and whales, and the females of many other species.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"Mother Love", p. 61
Savage Survivals (1916), Wild Survivals in Domesticated Animals

Mountain , Silence , Bird , Love

“If we would return to the shaggy condition of primitive ages, we need only acquire an environment which will favor from age to age those whose peripheries retain to the intensest extent the hirsute tendency. If the disparities between the sexual tastes of male and female would be leveled or inverted, the conditions which have caused the existing disparity must be reversed. The horse exposed to a fad for dwarfs would, in the course of ages, the length of time depending on the pitch of discrimination, be dwindled to its fox-like proportions of eocene times. In an environment requiring courage, foxes would either disappear or grow heroic. Serpents could be rendered as loving as doves by a procedure no more laborious than that by which they have been made vindictive. And beardless aesthetes may become philosophers as easily as have men.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Race Culture, pp. 208–209

Courage , Time , Dependency , Horse

“The much loved classical diva of 20th century India Akhtaribai Faizabadi, or Begum Akhtar was the last of the great female singers from the courtesan (tawaif) community.”

Begum Akhtar (1914–1974) Indian musician

In New Release: Begum Akhtar: Love’s Own Voice, 31 August 2009, 2 January 2014, Hindustan Times http://www.hindustantimes.com/lifestyle/books/new-release-begum-akhtar-love-s-own-voice/article1-448844.aspx,

Love , Making love , Communication

“I think it’s easier to honor the male in our culture because it’s much more accepted. There are almost no truly powerful and sustained images of female power. None. Look at Marilyn Monroe? The Virgin Mary? And what images exist for Indian women? The big question is, How do we describe ourselves as women in this culture? It’s unclear.”

Joy Harjo (1951) American writer

On finding ways to honor women in “Joy Harjo: An Interview” https://www.pw.org/content/joy_harjo_an_interview in Poets & Writers (July/August 1993)

Thinking , Women , Question

“Certainly, female writing exists, but mainly because even writing is powerfully conditioned by the historical-cultural construction that is gender. That said, gender has an increasingly wide mesh, its rules have been relaxed, and it is more and more difficult to reconstruct what has influenced and formed us as writers…”

Elena Ferrante (1943) Italian writer

On the concept of “female writing” in “In a rare interview, Elena Ferrante describes the writing process behind the Neapolitan novels” https://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-elena-ferrante-interview-20180517-htmlstory.html in Los Angeles Times (2018 May 17)

“I think it’s great that we have multiple female presidential candidates, so there’s not the woman running… I’m very excited about there being multiple women across — that can represent different parts of the political spectrum on the left, so that’s something that I’m thankful for… what we’re trying to do is is frame the debate and the conversation… that we’re going to be having in the next two years…”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (1989) American politician

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on her First Weeks In Washington, The Intercept https://theintercept.com/2019/01/28/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-podcast/ (28 January 2019)
Quotes (2019)

Parting , Thinking , Women

“Some time previous to the death of this Rajah, a female member of the Kolathnaud family was adopted as a Princess of Travancore, and Her Highness gave birth to a Prince in the Kollum year 899. This was the renowned Rama Rajah, generally called Dharma Rajah.”

Dharma Raja (1724–1798) Maharaja of Travancore

A History of Travancore from the Earliest Times" by P.S. Menon. 1878. https://archive.org/stream/ahistorytravanc00menogoog/ahistorytravanc00menogoog_djvu.txt

Family , Time , Birth , Princess

“When a woman is suspected by her own kinsmen or by neighboring Brahmans of having been guilty of light conduct, she is under pain of ox-communication of all her kinsmen, placed under restraint. The maid-servant (Dasi or Vrshali), who is indispensable to every Nambutiri family, if not to every individual female thereof, is then interrogated, and if she should eliminate her mistress, the latter is forthwith segregated and a watch set upon her. When the family can find a suitable house for the purpose, the sadhanam (the thing of article or subject, as the suspected person is called) is removed to it; otherwise she is kept in the family house, the other members finding temporary accommodation elsewhere.”

William Logan (author) book Malabar Manual

Malabar Manual, Page 122 https://archive.org/details/MalabarLogan/page/n134
Malabar Manual (1887)

Family , Pain , Housing , Light

“Because I have been exploring some social and mental phenomena related to females in recent years now I have a lot to say to girls.”

Jolin Tsai (1980) Taiwanese singer, songwriter, and actress

C-Pop Star Jolin Tsai on LGBTQ+ Representation in Her Music: 'I Am Just Following My Heart', Billboard, 2017-6-28 https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/pride/7849254/jolin-tsai-on-lgbtq-representation-in-her-music,

Girl , Relation ships

“Men are so shit scared of female activities, especially if they are clandestine.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

In an interview in Cineaste, 1991
Interviews

Men

“I will shortly leave the job that it has been the honour of my life to hold. The second female prime minister, but certainly not the last. I do so with no ill will, but with enormous and enduring gratitude to have had the opportunity to serve the country I love.”

Theresa May (1956) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Theresa May quits: UK set for new PM by end of July https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-48395905 BBC News (24 May 2019)
2010s, On Brexit

Country , Gratitude , Love , Life

“There was a considerable time lag between the subordination of women in patriarchal society and the declassing of the goddesses. As we trace below changes in the position of male and female god figures in the pantheon of the gods in a period of over a thousand years, we should keep in mind that the power of the goddesses and their priestesses in daily life and in popular religion continued in force, even as the supreme goddesses were dethroned. It is remarkable that in societies which had subordinated women economically, educationally, and legally, the spiritual and metaphysical power of goddesses remained active and strong.”

Gerda Lerner (1920–2013) Austrian-American women's history scholar

The Creation of Patriarchy, ch. 7, pp. 141-142
The Creation of Patriarchy (1986)

God , Religion , Time , Strong

“Artemis: (to Spiro) About my name- Artemis- you were right. In London, it is generally a female name, after the Greek goddess of archery. But every now and then a male comes along with such a talent for hunting that he earns the right to use the name. I am that male. Artemis the Hunter. I hunted you.”

Eoin Colfer book Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code

Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code (2003)

“I am still far from being the type of the positively new women who take their experience as females with a relative lightness and, one could say, with an enviable superficiality, whose feelings and mental energies are directed upon all other things in life but sentimental love feelings. After all I still belong to the generation of women who grew up at a turning point in history. Love with its many disappointments, with its tragedies and eternal demands for perfect happiness still played a very great role in my life. An all-too-great role! It was an expenditure of precious time and energy, fruitless and, in the final analysis, utterly worthless. We, the women of the past generation, did not yet understand how to be free. The whole thing was an absolutely incredible squandering of our mental energy, a diminution of our labor power which was dissipated in barren emotional experiences. It is certainly true that we, myself as well as many other activists, militants and working women contemporaries, were able to understand that love was not the main goal of our life and that we knew how to place work at its center. Nevertheless we would have been able to create and achieve much more had our energies not been fragmentized in the eternal struggle with our egos and with our feelings for another. It was, in fact, an eternal defensive war against the intervention of the male into our ego, a struggle revolving around the problem-complex: work or marriage and love? We, the older generation, did not yet understand, as most men do and as young women are learning today, that work and the longing for love can be harmoniously combined so that work remains as the main goal of existence. Our mistake was that each time we succumbed to the belief that we had finally found the one and only in the man we loved, the person with whom we believed we could blend our soul, one who was ready fully to recognize us as a spiritual-physical force. But over and over again things turned out differently, since the man always tried to impose his ego upon us and adapt us fully to his purposes. Thus despite everything the inevitable inner rebellion ensued, over and over again since love became a fetter. We felt enslaved and tried to loosen the love-bond. And after the eternally recurring struggle with the beloved man, we finally tore ourselves away and rushed toward freedom. Thereupon we were again alone, unhappy, lonesome, but free–free to pursue our beloved, chosen ideal …work. Fortunately young people, the present generation, no longer have to go through this kind of struggle which is absolutely unnecessary to human society. Their abilities, their work-energy will be reserved for their creative activity. Thus the existence of barriers will become a spur.”

Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) Soviet diplomat

The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)

Soul , History , Personality , Perfection

“Kundalini in my view is more boldly transcendent, more euphoric, than other yoga that I’ve done, so I obviously got totally addicted to it and started doing it all the time. The experience wasn’t entirely free from ego either as I was quite prolific in my physical engagement with female members of the class and eventually nominated myself as leader and took over the entire shebang, like Hitler in a sari.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Time

“Being female in this world is having been robbed of he potential for human choice by men who love to hate s. One does not make choices in freedom. Instead, one conforms in body type and behavior and values to become an object of male sexual desire, which requires an abandonment of a wide-ranging capacity for choice Objectification may well be the most singly destructive aspect of gender hierarchy, specially as it exists in relation to intercourse.”

Andrea Dworkin book Intercourse

Source: Intercourse (1987), Chapter 7

Hate , Freedom , Relation ships , World

“Because boys lack a biological marker like menstruation, to be man is to be not female.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Contemporary feminism called this "misogyny," but it was wrong. Masculine identity is embattled and fragile. In the absence of opportunity for heroic physical action, as in the modern office world, women's goodwill is crucial for preserving the male ego, which requires, alas, daily maintenance. It is in the best interests of the human race, and of women themselves, for men to be strong.
Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 85

Boy

“Films of the mating behavior of most other species — a staple of public television of America — demonstrate that the female chooses.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Males pursue, show off, brawl, scuffle, and make general fools of themselves for love. A major failing of most feminist ideology is its dumb, ungenerous stereotyping of men as tyrants and abusers, when in fact — as I know full well from my own mortifying lesbian experience — men are tormented by women’s flirtatiousness and hemming and hawing, their manipulations and changeableness, their humiliating rejections. Cock teasing is a universal reality. It is part of women’s merciless testing and cold-eyed comparison shopping for potential mates. Men will do anything to win the favor of women.
Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 35

Behavior

“Sex is not part of a relationship, but is, to the contrary, a solitary experience as well as being non-creative and a gross waste of time. The female can easily - far more easily than she may think - condition her sex drive away, leaving her completely cool and cerebral and free to pursue truly worthy relationships and activities; but the male, who seems to dig women sexually and who seeks constantly to arouse them, stimulates the highly-sexed female to frenzies of lust, throwing her into a sex bag from which few women ever escape. The lecherous male excites the lustful female; he has to - when the female transcends her body, rises above animalism, the male, whose ego consists of his cock, will disappear.”

Valerie Solanas book SCUM Manifesto

Source: SCUM MANIFESTO (1967), p. 12 (hyphens (not en- or em-dashes) so in original; line break across "highly-"/"sexed").

Time , Animals , Sex , Thinking

“Being an incomplete female, the male spends his life attempting to complete himself, become female. He attempts to do this by constantly seeking out, fraternizing with and trying to live through and fuse with the female and by claiming as his own all female characteristics - emotional strength and independence, forcefulness, dynamism, decisiveness, coolness, objectivity, assertiveness, courage, integrity, vitality, intensity, depth of character, grooviness, etc.”

Valerie Solanas book SCUM Manifesto

and projecting onto women all male traits - vanity, frivolity, triviality, weakness, etc. It should be said, though, that the male has one glaring area of superiority over the female - public relations. He has done a brilliant job of convincing millions of women that men are women and women are men.
Source: SCUM MANIFESTO (1967), p. 2 (hyphens (not en- or em-dashes) so in original).

Courage , Life , Decision

“Your pianos travel with you. So does your manager. You have no time for girls. Your manager sees to it that no young predatory females get very far.”

George Antheil (1900–1959) American avant-garde composer, pianist, author and inventor

Girl , Travel , Time

“I’ve seen a dog & bitch indulging in full 69. Males of many species including Drosophila lick female genitals before copulation.”

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

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/448240882710757376 (24 March 2014)
Twitter

Bitch , Dogs

“So often the story of rock’n’roll is told from a male perspective. So often it feels like men own music. And I still get as angry and frustrated about that as I ever did. Reading those women’s accounts of their lives has reminded me how much they paved the way back then. And history too often erases the women, in all art forms. Every single published story of a female artist goes a small way towards redressing the balance, and is another one saved from the fire.I didn’t try to be a soul singer, a jazz singer, a blues singer – no category…My music is my expression of what I feel and believe in a moment.”

Tracey Thorn (1962) English singer and songwriter

On women being excluded from music history in “Tracey Thorn: ‘I went through a phase of carrying Camus under my arm’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/25/tracey-thorn-interview-another-planet-memoir in The Guardian (2020 Jan 25)

Soul , Reading , History , Art

“One feature of our own society that seems decidedly anomalous is the matter of sexual advertisement. As we have seen, it is strongly to be expected on evolutionary grounds that, where the sexes differ, it should be the males that advertise and the females that are drab. Modern western man is undoubtedly exceptional in this respect. It is of course true that some men dress flamboyantly and some women dress drably but, on average, there can be no doubt that in our society the equivalent of the peacock’s tail is exhibited by the female, not by the male. Women paint their faces and glue on false eyelashes. Apart from special cases, like actors, men do not.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 9. Battle of the Sexes

Painting , Sex , Falseness , Women

“I, therefore, did learn a lesson: The female mind is capable of understanding analytic geometry. Those people who have for years been insisting (in the face of all obvious evidence to the contrary) that the male and female are equally capable of rational thought may have something. The difficulty may just be that we have never yet discovered a way to communicate with the female mind. If it is done in the right way, you may be able to get something out of it.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

address " What is Science? http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/what_is_science.html", presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, in New York City (1966), published in The Physics Teacher, volume 7, issue 6 (1969), p. 313-320

Understanding , People , Learning , Communication

“Many social scientists, including anthropologists, have been interested in the power inherent in gender relations, often described through the idiom of female oppression. It can be argued that men usually tend to exert more power over women than vice versa. In most societies, men generally hold the most important political and religious positions, and very often men control the formal economy. In some societies, it may even be prescribed for women to cover their body and face when they appear in the public sphere, and, paradoxically, these practices sometimes become more common as their societies become more modern. On the other hand, women are often capable of exerting considerable informal power, not least in the domestic sphere. Anthropologists cannot state unequivocally that women are oppressed before they have investigated all aspects of their society, including how the women (and men) themselves perceive their situation. One cannot dismiss the possibility that certain women in western Asia (the Middle East) see the ‘liberated’ western woman as more oppressed – by professional career pressure, demands to look good and other expectations – than themselves.
When studying societies undergoing change, which perhaps most anthropologists do today, it is important to look at the value conflicts and tensions between different interest groups that are particularly central. Often these conflicts are expressed through gender relations.”

Thomas Hylland Eriksen (1962) Norwegian social anthropologist and professor

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 2 : Key Concepts

Study , Appearance , Relation ships , Change

“Nature's sturdiest buds and her best-fed butterflies belong to this sex; her female spiders are large enough to eat up a score of her little males; some of her mother-fishes might parody the nursery-song, "I have a little husband no bigger than my thumb."”

Antoinette Brown Blackwell (1825–1921) American minister

September 1874, Popular Science Monthly Vol. 5, Article: The Alleged Antagonism Between Growth and Reproduction , p. 608
The Alleged Antagonism Between Growth and Reproduction (1874)

Fish , Sex , Nature

“The invisibility of women in canonical histories might lead us to believe that women have no history. Surely then a female history is an essential tool in the emancipation of women? This is partly because if we have no history we are ‘trapped’ in the present where oppressive social relations can continue unchallenged. Furthermore, history can be seen as evidence that things can and do change.”

Dana Arnold (1961) Middlessex uni prof

Source: Reading Architectural History (2002), Ch. 6 : Reading architectural herstories : The discourses of gender

History , Relation ships , Women , Change

“'Females of all description' is not a music genre. It's sexist. [There would] never be a 'males of all description' section because the rest of the shop and all other music genres are considered male. Female is not a genre. Don't categorise my sex.”

Kate Nash (1987) English pop singer and actor

Source: Kate Nash calls out 'sexist' record shop for 'females of all description' category, 1 September 2016, The Independent, Jess, Denham https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/kate-nash-calls-out-record-shop-for-sexist-labelling-after-spotting-females-of-all-description-a7219586.html,

Music , Sex

“I grew up in Kentucky so that's the land of casseroles and barbecue and meat. So when I transitioned over to an entirely plant-based diet, I wasn't sure if I was gonna survive. And I actually became like a machine. […] I just immediately started feeling like I could go kick ass and not need the recovery in between. It was mind-blowing to my teammates. […] I was about ready to retire, as I should've been, because I'm like 35 at that time. But I just kept getting better, and so they had to take me to the Olympics. We were complete underdogs as Team USA. In our semi-final ride against Australia, we were down by 1.7 seconds. No one's ever come back in team pursuit from a deficit that large. And we beat them on the line by eight one-hundredths of a second. I was 39 and a half years old when I stood on the Olympic podium. I'm still the oldest person, male or female, to even go to the Olympic Games in my event. My diet was the most powerful aspect to me being able to perform and produce for the US team at the Olympic Games.”

Dotsie Bausch (1973) cyclist

Interview in the documentary-film The Game Changers by Louie Psihoyos (2018).

Personality , Game , Time , Feeling

“Women were my obvious focus…because it is not always easy having power and being female…That’s the way it was. It wasn’t that all men were terrible or that the situation was unbearable. It was a cultural problem.”

Goldie Hawn (1945) American actress, film director, and producer.

On playing female characters during the 1980s who were women caught in a macho world in “Goldie Hawn: ‘I was born with a high set point for happiness’” https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/apr/13/goldie-hawn-i-was-born-with-a-high-set-point-for-happiness in The Guardian (2020 Apr 13)

Way , Problem , Women , Men

“When I try to psychoanalyze myself, I find that my desires to look female, to look feminine, and to look beautiful are not exactly the same, but they're woven together so tightly that it's kind of difficult to untangle them.”

Natalie Wynn ContraPoints

psychoanalyze https://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/Psychoanalysis
ContraPoints

Beauty

“We won't kill you. We will just shoot your [female rebels] vagina so that if there are no vaginas, it would be useless.”

Rodrigo Duterte (1945) Filipino politician and the 16th President of the Philippines

'We will shoot your vagina': Philippines president on communist rebels https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRzx4DTO4v4(February 13, 2018)

“How could Sun Wukong crush in female monsters? When you want to spoof something, spoof your grandparents rather than Journey to the West!”

Liu Xiao Ling Tong (1959) Chinese actor

(zh-CN) 孙悟空怎么能跟女妖谈恋爱呢？要恶搞，回去恶搞你爷爷奶奶去，别恶搞《西游记》！

Source: [六小龄童：要恶搞，就去恶搞你爷爷奶奶！, http://book.people.com.cn/GB/69360/5535778.html, People's Daily Online, 11 January 2019, 29 March 2007]

Sun

“You can see the other female strawweights fighting, and c’mon. They cannot compare themselves to me. They are all are only jealous and talking too much all the time. I’m telling them, bow down. I’m the queen.”

Joanna Jędrzejczyk (1987) Polish mixed martial artist

Joanna Jedrzejczyk shocked at UFC 223 loss to Namajunas, tells other strawweights: 'Bow down', Edward Vkanty, May 14, 2017, August 25, 2017 https://mmajunkie.com/2018/04/joanna-jedrzejczyk-shocked-at-ufc-223-loss-tells-strawweights-bow-down-rose-namajunas,

Jędrzejczyk to other women's strawweight fighters, at UFC 223 post-fight press conference, after her second loss to Rose Namajunas.

Fight , Time

“The Church of Euthanasia has as its four stations of the cross sodomy, suicide, abortion and cannibalism. In their activism towards the end of human life on the planet, their posthumanism interestingly resonates with human minoritarian activism. Roughly, these correlate as sodomy with queer (where sodomy is defined as any non-reproductive sexual act, including masturbation, asexuality and heterosexual intercourse with no intention of procreation), abortion with female/feminist sexuate rights, cannibalism with animal rights, where human carcasses are used as a source of food instead of murdering animals, and suicide with agency over one's own life and thus death, including euthanasia with disability rights in reference to the right to die versus the enforcement of life on those who express a wish to die but cannot execute their own death. It shouldn't need to be pointed out that neither group advocates murder or eugenics (however ironically that may sit considering the murder advocated by sanctioned capital and war machines). These are two of the longest established of now many groups advocating human extinction.”

Patricia MacCormack Australian Scholar

Embracing Death, pp. 143-144
The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene (2020)

Life , Food , War , Animals

“The higher-ups that I’m negotiating with are always men, I think if you asked any of them, they’re really liberal guys and they’d be like, ‘We wish there were more female directors.’ But whenever they have this large amount of money and they are about to invest it in something and they need to pick somebody to be at the helm for it and represent them, they look for somebody that’s the most like them. Unconsciously! They’re like, ‘I wish there were more female directors, but for this movie [made with] my money, I’m going to pick the guy that’s like me.’”

Misty Talley American film director and editor

Source: Meet Misty Talley, The First Female Director Of A Syfy Original Movie https://medium.com/the-establishment/meet-misty-talley-the-first-female-director-of-a-syfy-original-movie-f56179cf2f7b (July 28, 2016)

Money , Guy , Thinking , Men

“Most important, you are not alone. With you, beside you, interlocked in you are others. They do not have names, nor are you aware of them as shapes, but you know them and you are bonded to them with a great single knowledge. They are exactly like you, they are you, and like you, they are Home. You feel with them, like gentle waves of electricity passing between you, a completeness of love, of which all the facets you have experienced are but segments and incomplete portions. Only here, the emotion is without need of intense display or demonstration. You give and receive as an automatic action, with no deliberate effort. It is not something you need or that needs you. The "reaching out" is gone. The interchange flows naturally. You are unaware of differences in sex, you yourself as a part of the whole are both male and female, positive and negative, electron and proton. Man-woman love moves to you and from you, parent-child-sibling-idol and idyll and ideal—all interplay in soft waves about you, in you, and through you. You are in perfect balance because you are where you belong. You are Home.”

Robert Monroe (1915–1995) American founder of The Monroe Institute

Journeys Out of the Body (1971), Chapter 8. Because the Bible Tells Me So

Home , Nature , Knowledge , Sex

“Yet another of these useless, pestilential little creatures! All his life the author has suffered from his susceptibility to this kind of female. The commentator has suffered all his life too from the same weakness. Other people derive pleasure from encountering such characters in their reading, but I, because of the harm they have done me in real life, derive only pain. The susceptible author is extremely grateful for the comment!”

Zhiyanzhai

Comment on a scene involving Baoyu with the maid Number Four in chapter 21, as reported and quoted by John Minford in Berkshire Dictionary of Chinese Biography, ed. Kerry Brown, Vol. III (Berkshire Publishing Group, 2017), p. 1109

Pain , Reading , People , Suffering

“A serious difficulty in understanding how to educate and regulate the relations of sex arises from the fact that it is the relation of two equal but distinct halves of the human race, and exists in the dual form—male and female. Unless the distinctive characteristics and requirements of each of these equal halves are fully understood, the relation between them cannot be satisfactory.”

Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910) England-born American physician, abolitionist, women's rights activist

p. 8 https://books.google.com/books?id=7VlHAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=snippet&q=regulate&f=false
Essays in Medical Sociology (1899)

Education , Understanding , Sex , Relation ships

“The gross perversion and destruction of motherhood by the abortionist filled me with indignation, and awakened active antagonism. That the honourable term 'female physician' should be exclusively applied to those women who carried on this shocking trade seemed to me a horror. It was an utter degradation of what might and should become a noble position for women.”

Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910) England-born American physician, abolitionist, women's rights activist

p. 30 https://books.google.com/books?id=GHkIAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA30
Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women (1895)

Women

“I think the whole movement of #MeToo is not just calling out the sexual harassers, which is really important, but also crying out that we want equal pay, equal representation, equal opportunities, and that we want to see more female directors and photographers.”

Jamie Chung (1983) American actress

As quoted in "#MeToo not just about calling out sexual harassers" in The Korea Times (31 March 2018) http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/art/2018/04/398_245997.html?utm_source=dable

Thinking , Cry

“Lynda Carter played Wonder Woman and was one of the first female superheroes. It gives me more of an encouragement that we can be strong and can do whatever a guy can do.”

Thuy Trang (1973–2001) Vietnamese actress (1973-2001)

Power Rangers Unlimited: Thuy Trang Interview https://myriahac.tripod.com/id8.html (December 24, 1994)

Strong , Guy

“It's been proven that people will take information from a female voice, but they will only take a warning from a male voice. Now that's its own American gender nightmare that we don't have time to get into.”

John Mulaney (1982) American actor and comedian

John Mulaney Stand-Up Monologue - SNL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mSGwndFMp8, 03 March 2019

Time , People

“In the dusk I saw her smile, that incredible female smile. It is called wisdom but it isn't that but rather an understanding that makes wisdom unnecessary.”

John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent

Source: The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Part One, Chapter VII

Understanding , Smile , Wisdom

“... Female song is uncommon in birds.”

David Lack (1910–1973) British ornithologist and biologist

[The Life of the Robin, https://books.google.com/books?id=wZs_AAAAYAAJ, 1943, H.F. & G. Witherby Limited] p. 28
The Life of the Robin (1943)

Bird

“Nowadays, men are acting like women and women like men. Thus, the rise in female presidents in the world.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

World , Women , Men

“Right now, the industry might have gotten bigger. More people may be watching films. Those are positive aspects. But diversity in Korean cinema has decreased a lot since then. There are more female film students in schools.”

Moon So-ri (1974) South Korean actress

On highlighting the need for diversity in Korean film industry in "Now a director and scriptwriter, actress Moon So-ri speaks about her film" in The Korea Herald (6 Septmeber 2017) http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20170906000677

People , School

“Not all the roles that I've gotten were stereotypical, but in Korea, especially for TV, it's a bit limited for women in their twenties and thirties. There aren't enough female roles.”

Claudia Kim (1985) South Korean actress

As quoted in "Everyone Is Going to Be Talking About Fantastic Beasts Actress Claudia Kim" in Glamour (14 November 2018) https://www.glamour.com/story/fantastic-beasts-claudia-kim

Women

“As men, you stand at the center of the universe. You spout pearls of wisdom that shape the future of the world. So when your female friend comes to you, you might wonder: ‘Is she hoping to share her sadness with me? No, she must be hoping to learn something from me!’”

Yang Li (1992) Chinese stand-up comedian

Source: "The ‘Punchline Queens’ Ripping Into Chinese Comedy’s Boys’ Club" in Sixth Tone https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1006067/the-punchline-queens-ripping-into-chinese-comedys-boys-club (21 August 2020)

Learning , Universe , World , Sadness

Quotes about female page 7

Quotes about female
page 7