Quotes about woman (4135 quotes, page 21)

“We're not playing some minor game in Scientology. It isn't cute or something to do for lack of something better. The whole agonized future of this planet, every Man, Woman and Child on it, and your own destiny for the next endless trillions of years depend on what you do here and now with and in Scientology.”

L. Ron Hubbard Keeping Scientology Working

"Keeping Scientology Working" (7 February 1965).
Scientology Policy Letters

Game , Future , Dependency

“What does a woman desire?' she asked, speaking as if to herself, and her voice was soft as she gazed over the valley. 'Men think it is a handsome face or a brisk air or a smooth tongue. And some will have it that it is a deep purse or a high station. But I think it is the honest heart that goes all the way with a woman's love. We are not so blind as to believe that the glitter is the gold. We love romance, but we seek it in its true home.”

John Buchan book Salute to Adventurers

Source: Salute to Adventurers (1915), Ch. 28 "How Three Souls Found Their Heritage"

Love , Men , Way , Home

“There were so many different characters that I have played. Radha in Sangam was a very sophisticated woman and the setting was very refined, while in Dhanno in Gunga Jumna was rustic, a village belle. Even the language was different.”

Vyjayanthimala (1936) Indian actress, politician & dancer

Why Vyjayanthimala has 'nothing to say' about today's heroines

“The Bible … does not contain a single sentence that could not have been written by a man or woman living in the first century.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris, Reply to a Christian http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=sharris_26_4 (May 2006)
2000s

“The woman shook her head. "Not easy," she said. "I believe that we have much less free will than we think. Quite frankly, we delude ourselves if we think that we are completely free. We aren’t. And that means if dear Bruce must have rather a lot of girlfriends, then there’s not very much he can do about it." Pat said nothing. Bruce had said nothing about the neighbours, and perhaps this was the reason.”

Alexander McCall Smith book 44 Scotland Street

44 Scotland Street, chapter 2.
The 44 Scotland Street series

Thinking

“To really love a woman,
To understand her, you gotta know her deep inside.
Hear every thought, see every dream.
And give her wings, when she wants to fly.
Then when you find yourself lyin' helpless in her arms,
You know you really love a woman.”

Bryan Adams (1959) Canadian singer-songwriter

Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?, written by Bryan Adams, Mutt Lange, and Michael Kamen
Song lyrics, 18 til I Die (1996)

Love , Dreams , Understanding , Flying

“Many a man isn't as good as his woman, but I never knew a husband who was better than his wife.”

Orson Scott Card book Saints

Saints (1983)

““What do I care for the god?” the woman suddenly screamed, catching up her dead child. “What god is he that takes away my son and leaves me nothing?””

Tanith Lee book The Birthgrave

Book Two, Part II “The Water”, Chapter 1 (p. 173)
The Birthgrave (1975)

God , Dead

“You are very attractive, but the coat you're wearing makes me think you are either a very rich woman or a very rich man's mistress.”

Marlon Brando (1924–2004) American screen and stage actor

Stated to Ashraf Pahlavi of Iran, as quoted in Faces in a Mirror (1980) by Ashraf Pahlavi, p. 129

Thinking

“Here comes Johnny singing oldies, goldies
Be-Bop-A-Lula, Baby What I Say
Here comes Johnny singing I Gotta Woman
Down in the tunnels, trying to make it pay.
He got the action, he got the motion
Oh yeah the boy can play.
Dedication, devotion
Turning all the night time into the day.”

Mark Knopfler (1949) English guitarist

Walk of Life
Song lyrics, Brothers in Arms (1985)

Boy , Singing , Time , Baby

“It’s nothing to be born ugly. Sensibly, the ugly woman comes to terms with her ugliness and exploits it as a grace of nature. To become ugly means the beginning of a calamity, self-willed most of the time.”

Colette (1873–1954) 1873-1954 French novelist: wrote Gigi

Journey for Myself (1971) “Beauties,” Quatre Saisons (c. 1928).

Nature , Time

“He heard that whenever a woman was to blame for a disappointment, the best way to avoid a scene was to inculpate oneself.”

Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) English writer

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

Disappointment , Way

“No man has seen her, this pitiful ghost,
And no woman either, but heard her at most,
Sighing and tapping and sighing again,
You have weaned me too soon, you must nurse me again.”

Stevie Smith (1902–1971) poet, novelist, illustrator, performer

"The Wanderer"
Selected Poems (1962)

“Jack so obviously demanded from a woman-a relationship between a man and a woman where a man would be the leader and a woman would be his wife. With Adlai Stevenson you could have another relationship-where you know, he'd be sort of be sweet and you could talk, but you wouldn't ever,.. I've always thought women who were scared of sex loved Adlai.”

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929–1994) public figure, First Lady to 35th U.S. President John F. Kennedy

Liking Ike: Eisenhower, Advertising and the Rise of Celebrity Politics (2016) David Haven Blake
The "Camelot" interview (29 November 1963)

Love , Women , Sex

“Even if you meet the perfect person, it ain't gonna be at the perfect time. You're married, they're single. That's right. You're Jewish, they're Palestinian. You're a Mexican, they're a raccoon. You're a black woman, he's a black man.”

Chris Rock (1965) American comedian, actor, screenwriter, television producer, film producer, and director

Never Scared (HBO, 2004)

Time , Personality , Perfection

“Man can never know the kind of loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in a woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. The woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which he has bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love is a taking of man within her, and act of birth and rebirth, of child bearing and man bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to BE. But for a woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment when man rests inside of her.”

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

May 25, 1932
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Love , Pleasure , World , Art

“Satan knows some seed of the woman is going to bruise his head. He didn't want that to happen so his plan apparently is to try to kill every human being on the planet. He wants to kill everybody. Remember when Herod wanted to kill baby Jesus in Bethlehem? What did he do? He slew all the children, "Let's just kill them all to be sure to get the right one." Satan wants to kill every human on the planet. And some of his followers and helpers down here are working at that goal right now.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The dangers of evolution

Children , Baby

“They suppose that Woman's Love is Sin; in consequence all the Loves & Graces with them are Sin.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

1780s, Annotations to Lavater (1788)

Love

“In fact, there may be a day in the near future when you find yourself in a conversation about this book, and someone will ask you what the story is really about, beyond the rudimentary narrative of a cross-country death trip based on a magazine article. And it's very likely you will say, "well, the larger thesis is somewhat underdeveloped, but there is this point early in the story where he takes a woman to Ithaca for no real reason, and it initially seems innocuous, but - as you keep reading - you sort of see how this behaviour is a self-perpetuating problem that keeps reappearing over and over again." In all probability, you will also complain about the author's reliance on self-indulgent, postmodern self-awareness, which will prompt the person you're conversing with to criticize the influence of Dave Eggers on the memoir-writing genre. Then your cell phone will ring, and you will agree to meet someone for brunch.”

Chuck Klosterman book Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story

Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story (2005)

Death , Books , Problem , Reading

“Llonio said life was a net for luck; to Hevydd the Smith life was a forge; and to Dwyvach the Weaver-Woman a loom. They spoke truly, for it is all of these. But you,” Taran said, his eyes meeting the potter’s, “you have shown me life is one thing more. It is clay to be shaped, as raw clay on a potter’s wheel.”

Lloyd Alexander The Chronicles of Prydain

Source: The Chronicles of Prydain (1964–1968), Book IV: Taran Wanderer (1967), Chapter 21

Life

“I hope through The L Word to become an honorary member of the gay tribe. I cherish the thought that some young girl or woman somewhere may one night turn on the television and for the first time ever see her life represented -- not as an isolated incident but as a multiplicity. Her overwhelming fear may have been that she might never find her tribe, she might never find love and now she knows that they are both out there waiting for her.”

Jennifer Beals (1963) American actress and a former teen model

Speech at L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center Women's Night (17 April 2004) http://www.jennifer-beals.com/media/speeches/womensnight2004.html.

Love , Life , Fear , Hope

“How are all the details relevant to the case and the actual crime? When it is a case of an upper class woman, there is a titillating curiosity and over interest in her life. Her life becomes a free for all.”

Flavia Agnes (1947) Indian activist and lawyer

On the media attention on Indrani Mukerjea, as quoted in " The Maria Connection http://www.outlookindia.com/article/the-maria-connection/295258" Outlook India (6 September 2015)

Life

“A psychiatrist today has the power to (1) take a fancy to a woman (2) lead her to take wild treatment as a joke (3) drug and shock her to temporary insanity (4) incarnate her (5) use her sexually (6) sterilize her to prevent conception (7) kill her by a brain operation to prevent disclosure. And all with no fear of reprisal. Yet it is rape and murder… We want at least one bad mark on every psychiatrist in England, a murder, an assault, or a rape or more than one… This is Project Psychiatry. We will remove them.”

L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology

Confidential memo "Project Psychiatry" (22 February 1966).

Fear

“Today in a land where all women inherit civic responsibility, where professions and business are open to all comers without distinction of sex, leadership through direct influence is woman’s unchallenged heritage.”

Aurelia Henry Reinhardt (1877–1948) American educator and social activist

Speech delivered in 1922 to the American Association of College Women, in [Western Journal of Education, https://books.google.com/books?id=3XovAQAAMAAJ, 3 July 2018, 1922, Harr Wagner Publishing Company, 8]

Women , Sex , Business

“The woman raised her languid head,
And said, "My child was weak
He knew no one amid the dead
His daily food to seek!
My husband was a hunter good
As ever arrows bore :
I know my child will now have food,
Therefore I weep no more.
I sit and think upon the past,
And sing my mournful strain :
I know that we shall meet at last,
And never part again."”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The London Literary Gazette (24th January 1835) Versions from the German (Fourth Series.) 'The Huron's Child'— Herder.
Translations, From the German

Food , Thinking , Singing , Past

“To be in love is not the same as loving. You can be in love with a woman and still hate her.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) Russian author

The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)

Love , Hate

“Of course people who don't believe in masturbation are all for circumcision, because it's very difficult to masturbate if you're circumcised. Whereas if you're uncircumcised you can slide that skin up & down the penis & it makes it feel almost like it's inside of a woman in your fist!”

David Berg (1919–1994) Children of God founder

Uncircumcision! To be, or not to be?

People , Feeling

“The desire for security, very marked in women, draws the weaker among them to men who, by their strength or ability, seem to offer protection and support. In time of war they count a warrior's scalps; in time of peace they hunt for genius or wealth. To the man in love the giving of gifts is a way of asserting his power. The penguin and the banker offer pebbles of varying brilliance to their respective loved ones. The finch presents twigs and leaves to its mate as the young man presents woolen threads in the form of carpets and curtains to his fiancee. The swallow and the woman begin to thing of the nest the moment they have chosen their males.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Loving

Love , Women , Men , War

“An accomplished woman almost always knows more than we men, though her knowledge is of a different sort. I am sure you could teach me a thousand things--as an exquisite bird could teach a bear if there were any common language between them. Happily, there is a common language between women and men, and so the bears can get taught.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

Women , Men , Knowledge , Bird

“Oh, she had yet the task to learn
How often woman's heart must turn
To feed upon its own excess
Of deep yet passionate tenderness!
How much of grief the heart must prove
That yields a sanctuary to love!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Canto I
The Troubadour (1825)

Love , Learning , Passion , Heart

“This idea of oh poor little black person, oh poor little poor person, oh poor little woman, oh poor little indigenous person, everybody's a poor little something!”

Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect

Interview to Vice. Meet Brazil's Donald Trump: He's Deliberately Outrageous and He Wants to Be President https://news.vice.com/article/meet-brazils-donald-trump-hes-deliberately-outrageous-and-he-wants-to-be-president. Vice (27 April 2016).

Idea , Personality

“To be alone with the girl to whom he is not engaged, is a man's delight; — to be alone with the man to whom she is engaged is the woman's.”

Anthony Trollope book The Eustace Diamonds

The Eustace Diamonds, Ch. 18

Girl

“Options allow a woman to tailor her role to her personality, but if a man expects to provide well, he expects to wear a suit, not to wear what suits him.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 183.

Personality

“Nothing whatever is to be gained by driving the timorous and weak by lies or compulsion into pain which they will resent and responsibility which they will evade. Everything is to be gained by training a woman in knowledge, courage, and physical strength, and leaving it then to her own instinct and her mind to tell her that to create new human beings is worth the discomfort and the suffering she must necessarily undergo. Those in whom the courage to create survives when choice is free and all the facts are known are those best fitted to bring children into the world, and breed in them eagerness and intrepidity. The others will only pass on fear and distaste for life from which individuals and the community suffer far too much already.”

Dora Russell book Hypatia

Hypatia (1925), Ch. 4

Life , Pain , Children , World

“Watching a woman make Russian pancakes, you might think that she was calling on the spirits or extracting from the batter the philosopher’s stone.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Russian Pancakes or Bliny (1886)

Thinking

“An alternate career path for a woman lay in the Church, where as a nun she escaped the dangers of childbirth. In the convent she could hold any position except that of priest, and as an abbess or prioress she had great power and responsibility.”

Marilyn Stokstad (1929–2016) art historian

Overview: Castles in Context
Medieval castles (2005)

“Everywhere the need exists for maternal sympathy and help, and thus we are able to recapitulate in the one word motherliness that which we have developed as the characteristic value of woman. Only, the motherliness must be that which does not remain within the narrow circle of blood relations or of personal friends; but in accordance with the model of the Mother of Mercy, it must have its root in universal divine love for all who are there, belabored and burdened.”

Edith Stein (1891–1942) Jewish-German nun, theologian and philosopher

Essays on Woman (1996), The Significance of Woman's Intrinsic Value in National Life (1928)

Love , Universe , Help , Maternity

“Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Sententiæ
1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Love

“Mary's treatment of respectable and law-abiding people who had no favors to ask, and were reasonably confident of getting to heaven by the regular judgment, without expense, rankled so deeply that three hundred years later the puritan reformers were not satisfied with abolishing her, but sought to abolish the woman altogether as the cause of all evil in heaven and on earth. The puritans abandoned the New Testament in order to go back to the beginning, and renew the quarrel with Eve. This is the Church's affair, not ours, and the women are competent to settle it with Church or State, without help from outside; but honest tourists are seriously interested in putting the feeling back into the dead architecture where it belongs.”

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

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Women , People , Law , Feeling

“If the people at large be not already convinced that a sufficient general case has been made out for Administrative Reform, I think they never can be, and they never will be…. Ages ago a savage mode of keeping accounts on notched sticks was introduced into the Court of Exchequer, and the accounts were kept, much as Robinson Crusoe kept his calendar on the desert island. In the course of considerable revolutions of time, the celebrated Cocker was born, and died; Walkinghame, of the Tutor's Assistant, and well versed in figures, was also born, and died; a multitude of accountants, book-keepers and actuaries, were born, and died. Still official routine inclined to these notched sticks, as if they were pillars of the constitution, and still the Exchequer accounts continued to be kept on certain splints of elm wood called "tallies." In the reign of George III an inquiry was made by some revolutionary spirit, whether pens, ink, and paper, slates and pencils, being in existence, this obstinate adherence to an obsolete custom ought to be continued, and whether a change ought not to be effected.
All the red tape in the country grew redder at the bare mention of this bold and original conception, and it took till 1826 to get these sticks abolished. In 1834 it was found that there was a considerable accumulation of them; and the question then arose, what was to be done with such worn-out, worm-eaten, rotten old bits of wood? I dare say there was a vast amount of minuting, memoranduming, and despatch-boxing on this mighty subject. The sticks were housed at Westminster, and it would naturally occur to any intelligent person that nothing could be easier than to allow them to be carried away for fire-wood by the miserable people who live in that neighbourhood. However, they never had been useful, and official routine required that they never should be, and so the order went forth that they were to be privately and confidentially burnt. It came to pass that they were burnt in a stove in the House of Lords. The stove, overgorged with these preposterous sticks, set fire to the panelling; the panelling set fire to the House of Lords; the House of Lords set fire to the House of Commons; the two houses were reduced to ashes; architects were called in to build others; we are now in the second million of the cost thereof, the national pig is not nearly over the stile yet; and the little old woman, Britannia, hasn't got home to-night…. The great, broad, and true cause that our public progress is far behind our private progress, and that we are not more remarkable for our private wisdom and success in matters of business than we are for our public folly and failure, I take to be as clearly established as the sun, moon, and stars.”

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) English writer and social critic and a Journalist

"Administrative Reform" (June 27, 1855) Theatre Royal, Drury Lane Speeches Literary and Social by Charles Dickens https://books.google.com/books?id=bT5WAAAAcAAJ (1870) pp. 133-134

Wisdom , People , Books , Age

“His folly has not fellow
Beneath the blue of day
That gives to man or woman
His heart and soul away.”

A.E. Housman book A Shropshire Lad

No. 14, st. 3.
A Shropshire Lad (1896)

Soul , Heart

“The pleasure of talking is the inextinguishable passion of a woman, coeval with the act of breathing.”

Alain-René Lesage book Gil Blas

Book VII, ch. 7.
Gil Blas (1715-1735)

Pleasure , Passion

“Then there are guys who say 'I have never fantasized about being with a man.' They are lying. And the least offensive men I've been with in terms of their sexual politics and how they view me as a woman, have been men who have either slept with men, or at least kissed or held a man once. It opens up your thinking. You don't think that women are less-than you are.”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

From Sex book

Women , Men , Guy , Lying

“More: I am faint when I think of the worst that they may do to me. But worse than that would be to go without you not understanding why I go.
Alice: I don't!
More: Alice, if you can tell me that you understand, I think I can make a good death, if I have to.
Alice: Your death's no "good" to me!
More: Alice, you must tell me that you understand!
Alice: I don't! I don't believe this had to happen.
More: If you say that, Alice, I don't know how I'm to face it.
Alice: It's the truth!
More: You're an honest woman.
Alice: Much good it may do me! I'll tell you what I'm afraid of: that when you're gone, I shall hate you for it.”

Robert Bolt A Man for All Seasons

Act II
A Man for All Seasons (1960)

Death , Hate , Truth , Understanding

“A man in health questions whether there is a God, and he also doubts whether it be a sin to have intercourse with a woman, who is at liberty to refuse; but when he falls ill, or when his mistress is with child, she is discarded, and he believes in God.”

Jean de La Bruyère book Les Caractères

Of Freethinkers (6)
Les Caractères (1688)

God , Health , Question

“The meaning of the word “feminist” has not really changed since it first appeared in a book review in the Athenaeum of April 27, 1895, describing a woman who “has in her the capacity of fighting her way back to independence.” It is the basic proposition that, as Nora put it in Ibsen's A Doll's House a century ago, “Before everything else I'm a human being.” It is the simply worded sign hoisted by a little girl in the 1970 Women's Strike for Equality: I AM NOT A BARBIE DOLL. Feminism asks the world to recognize at long last that women aren't decorative ornaments, worthy vessels, members of a “special-interest group”. They are half (in fact, now more than half) of the national population, and just as deserving of rights and opportunities, just as capable of participating in the world's events, as the other half. Feminism's agenda is basic It asks that women not be forced to “choose” between public justice and private happiness. It asks that women be free to define themselves — instead of having their identity defined for them, time and again, by their culture and their men.”

Susan Faludi book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

Backlash (1992)

Women , Men , Books , World

“I've always liked to go down a different path. Being a woman of color, I never followed a cookie cutter way.”

Halle Berry (1966) American actress

Cindy Pearlman (November 17, 2002) "Female Bonding - Hot on the Heels of her Academy-Award Winning Turn in 'Monster's Ball,' Halle Berry Shares the Screen With 007", Chicago Sun-Times, p. 1.

Color , Way

“How do things stand, now, if the subject contains a large element of pathos?... Consider such an interesting subject as the scene taking place around the bed of a dying woman, for example; seize and render that ensemble by photography, if that is possible [photography was a very recent invention in Paris ca. 1853, a. o. by the photographer Nadar ]: it will be falsified in a thousand ways. The reason is that, according to the degree of your imagination, the subject will appear to you more or less beautiful, you will be more or less the poet in that scene in which you are an actor; you see only what is interesting, whereas the instrument puts in everything.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

In Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 233
quote circa 1853, in which Delacroix relates painting to theater from the view of the visitor / spectator
1831 - 1863

Beauty , Way , Imagination , Appearance

“Firstly, I must of necessity express some obvious qualifications about my remarks. Foremost, I can never fully imagine, much less experience, the issues faced by any woman. I was born male in an advanced Western nation, to comfortably well off parents. I have never routinely experienced discrimination in my career, nor the apprehension of violence in my personal life. Far too many women regardless of nationality, religion, or class status have known both. Most benefits of masculinity and patriarchy have accrued to me. Nonetheless, I hope those considerable limitations in my perspective can in part be offset by my sincere intent to support women in my organisation to thrive in the absence of both.”

David Morrison (1956) Australian army general

Address at the International Women's Day Conference (2013)

Life , Women , Religion , Hope

“When Mrs. Casaubon was announced he started up as from an electric shock, and felt a tingling at his fingerends. Any one observing him would have seen a change in his complexion, in the adjustment of his facial muscles, in the vividness of his glance, which might have made them imagine that every molecule in his body had passed the message of a magic touch. And so it had. For effective magic is transcendent nature; and who shall measure the subtlety of those touches which convey the quality of soul as well as body, and make a man’s passion for one woman differ from his passion for another as joy in the morning light over valley and river and white mountain-top differs from joy among Chinese lanterns and glass panels? Will, too, was made of very impressible stuff. The bow of a violin drawn near him cleverly, would at one stroke change the aspect of the world for him, and his point of view shifted— as easily as his mood. Dorothea’s entrance was the freshness of morning.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

World , Soul , Imagination , Mountain

“A woman capable of recollection in danger, of warding off groundless panics, of discerning the true mode of proceeding, and profiting by her best resources, is a prodigy.”

Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) American novelist, historian and editor

Wieland; or, the Transformation (1798)

“What Woman needs is not as a woman to act or rule, but as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely and unimpeded.”

Margaret Fuller book Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)

Soul , Nature

“The fireside is an emblem of the future heavenly home…To obtain the highest conception of the calling of a man and a woman in the capacity of parents, one must look upon them from an educational point of view, for from no other does the grandeur of this sacred relationship so well present itself to the mind with all its intricate complexity. The home is the sanctuary of the human race, where each generation is consecrated for its life's mission. The parents are the high priests, responsible to God for the spirit of their ministry”

Karl G. Maeser (1828–1901) prominent Utah educator and a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

School and Fireside (1898) pg 45, 59 https://archive.org/stream/schoolfireside00maesrich#page/58/mode/2up

Life , God , Education , Home

“No one lusting for blood is ever innocent. Or satisfied. I have not been innocent. Or satisfied. Just as the man who wants silver will not be satisfied with silver, a man who wants the blood of another will not be satisfied with having that blood, nor the woman with jewels be satisfied with jewels, and the man who wants women will not be satisfied with women. Don't try telling me different. Haven't I looked about me in the city and seen how all labor is for the mouth, yet the appetite is not filled? Don't I know myself that no want is ever satisfied? Wishes are granted, goals attained. But wants? Forget them. They live as long as the person they inhabit.”

Joseph Heller book God Knows

God Knows (1984)

Women , Personality , Forgetting

“Not beauty, wealth, or lineage e'er could raise
A woman's name (he said) to height of praise,
If not in action chaste.”

John Hoole (1727–1803) British translator

Book XLIII, line 628
Translations, Orlando Furioso of Ludovico Ariosto (1773)

Beauty , Wealth

“The sexist perception that violence by anyone against only women is anti-woman while violence by a woman against only men is just generic violence creates a political demand for laws that are even more protective of women.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 228.

Women , Men , Law

“Let us be honest. Suppose a man came into this city and should meet a funeral procession, and say, “Who is dead?” and they should reply, “The son of a widow; her only support.” Suppose he should say to the procession, “Halt!” and to the undertaker, “Take out that coffin, unscrew that lid. Young man, I say unto thee, arise!” and the dead should step from the coffin and in a moment afterward hold his mother in his arms. Suppose this stranger should go to your cemetery and find some woman holding a little child in each hand, while the tears fell upon a new-made grave, and he should say to her, “Who lies buried here?” and she should reply, “My husband;” and he should cry, “I say unto thee, oh grave, give up thy dead!” and the husband should rise, and in a moment after have his lips upon his wife’s, and the little children with their arms around his neck; do you think that the people of this city would kill him? Do you think any one would wish to crucify him? Do you not rather believe that every one who had a loved one out in that cemetery would go to him, even upon their knees, and beg him to give back their dead? Do you believe that any man was ever crucified who was the master of death?”

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

Orthodoxy (1884)

Love , Death , Children , People

“Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf.
This arrival in the wild country of the soul,
All approaches gone, being completely there,
Where the wild poem is a substitute
For the woman one loves or ought to love,
One wild rhapsody a fake for another.You touch the hotel the way you touch moonlight
Or sunlight and you hum and the orchestra
Hums and you say "The world in a verse,A generation sealed, men remoter than mountains,
Women invisible in music and motion and color,"
After that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

"Arrival at the Waldorf"
Parts of a World (1942)

Love , Women , Men , World

“O! what's a table richly spread
Without a woman at its head!”

Thomas Warton (1728–1790) English literary historian, critic, poet

"The Progress of Discontent" (1750), line 39.

“Many myths and fairy tales tell of a prince, who has been turned into an animal or a monster by sorcery, being saved by a woman. This is a symbolic representation of the development of the animus toward consciousness. Often the heroine may ask no questions of her mysterious lover, or she is only allowed to meet him in darkness. She is to save him through her blind faith and love, but this never works. She always breaks her promise and is only able to find her beloved again after a long quest.”

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

Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche (1994), The Animus, a Woman's Inner Man

Love , Faith , Lovers , Question

“You may think life is sweet now, but when death is a heartbeat away then life becomes unbearably desirable. And when you survive, everything you do will be enhanced and filled with greater joy: the sunlight, the breeze, a good wine, a woman's lips, a child's laughter.”

David Gemmell book Legend

Source: Drenai series, Legend, Pt 1: Against the Horde, Ch. 18

Life , Death , Thinking , Laughter

“Homophobia entails not only the fear of those who are abjectly identified (and depended on) but also the fear of being abjectly identifiable onself: the fear, as the word most literally means, of being 'the same as'. This latter fear is arguably a much stronger component of homophobia than of, say, sexism or racism (despite the mechanisms of projection and abjection doubtless at work in those forms of hatred), because the sexist male or the racist white is in much less 'danger' of being 'mistaken' for a woman or a nonwhite than the straight is of being 'mistaken' for a queer.”

Calvin Thomas (critical theorist) (1956) American academic

Source: Straight with a Twist (2000), p. 27.

Fear , Dependency

“A man must know when to retreat from a woman, but a wise man knows that sometimes he must stand and face her.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Davram Bashere
(15 October 1994)

“(After chatting about the Serbian sex machine invention and Karl said 'Did it have to be a woman or could they have got a gay fella in - butt plugs and that')..”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

On Sex

Sex

“She was an appetising woman with a full-cheeked smile, about thirty, a Nordic blonde but not icy, though ice was suggested in its tamed winter-sport aspects : the flush after skating, log-fires and hot rum and butter, fine heavy thighs, that would warm your hand like a muff, under a skirt that had swirled in a rink waltz. Her beaver lamb coat was thrust back from a green suit : solid charms, thoroughly wholesome, were indicated.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

Smile , Sport , Winter

“Being with a woman all night never hurt no professional baseball player. It's staying up all night looking for a woman that does him in.”

Casey Stengel (1890–1975) American baseball player and coach

As quoted in "L. M. Boyd" http://www.mediafire.com/view/ulp201hdoc2hs32/Screen%20Shot%202017-12-10%20at%203.10.58%20PM.png by Boyd, in The Sioux City Journal (April 20, 1981), p. A17

Hurt , Night

“Hello, boys. How are you all? I just love boys. […] Hello. Are you here alone? Who are you with? …A woman? At my show? …We'll make believe. It's theatre.”

Harvey Fierstein (1954) actor from the United States

This Is Not Going to Be Pretty, Live at the Bottom Line (1995)

Love , Boy

“I suppose you all grant that woman is a human being. If she has a right to life she has a right to earn a support for that life. If a human being, she has a right to have her powers and faculties as a human being developed. If developed, she has a right to exercise them.”

Ernestine Rose (1810–1892) American feminist activist

At a New York State convention, Rochester, N.Y. (1853), quoted in Kolmerten, Carol A., The American Life of Ernestine L. Rose, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999, p. 129-130.

Life , Exercises , Support

“Have fun—a smile is the most beautiful thing on a woman.”

Heidi Klum (1973) German model, television host, businesswoman, fashion designer, television producer, and actress

Discussing her beauty philosophy, as quoted by Prevention Magazine, April 2014

Smile , Beauty

“For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.”

W. H. Auden September 1, 1939

Source: September 1, 1939 (1939), Lines 62–66

Love , Error , Universe

“Jeff Davis did his best when he fled from Richmond to make out of himself a reconstructed woman. He made such a bad failure, however, that he deems the work simply impossible.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

Republic: A Monthly Magazine (1873), p. 384

Failure

“Because the most important thing any man can do in all his life is pick the right woman to breed with—I mean, marry first, then breed, because from the woman comes the—” “—comes the instinct to survive,” I said, having heard this for as long as I could remember. “Good,” said mi papa,”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

Life

“She can kill with a smile
She can wound with her eyes
She can ruin your faith with her casual lies
And she only reveals what she wants you to see
She hides like a child
But she's always a woman to me.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

She's Always a Woman.
Song lyrics, The Stranger (1977)

Faith , Smile

“If a woman isn't being hazed, she's not being tested; therefore, she is not being trusted.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part III: Government as substitute husband, p. 295.

“A very remarkable work… in the present state of light literature in England, a novel that actually tells a story. It 's quite incredible, I know. Try the book. It has another extraordinary merit, it isn't written by a woman.”

Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) British writer

The Works of Wilkie Collins: The Black Robe [P.F. Collier, 1900] (p. 328)
Also in Wilkie Collins: A Literary Life by Graham Law & Andrew Maunder [Springer, 2008, ISBN 0-230-22750-3] ( p. 15 https://books.google.com/books?id=kKyHDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA15&f=false)

Books , Literature , Light

“So Dubya goes to war because god told him to. There's a woman down in Texas who bashed in her kid's skulls for the same reason.”

Ed Krebs (1951) American photographer and musician

Had Enough Religious Bullshit

God , War

“It is not the right angle that attracts me, nor the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man. What attracts me is the free and sensual curve — the curve that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuous course of its rivers, in the body of the beloved woman.”

Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012) Brazilian architect

As quoted in Plans, Sections and Elevations : Key Buildings of the Twentieth Century (2004) by Richard Weston
Variant translations:
It is not the right angle that attracts me,
Nor the hard, inflexible straight line, man-made.
What attracts me are free and sensual curves.
The curves in my country’s mountains,
In the sinuous flow of its rivers,
In the beloved woman’s body.
As quoted in "Architect of Optimism" http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/db740a7a-e897-11db-b2c3-000b5df10621.html?nclick_check=1, Angel Gurria-Quintana, Financial Times (2007-04-13)
It is not the right angle that attracts me.
nor the straight line, tough, inflexible,
created by man.
what attracts me is the free, sensual curve.
the curve I find in the mountains of my country,
in the sinuous course of its rivers,
in the waves of the sea,
in the clouds of the sky,
in the body of the favourite woman.
Of curves is made all the universe.
As quoted on a Photo page on the Museum of Contemporary Art over Baia da Guanabara http://app.tabblo.com/studio/stories/view/122423/?nextnav=favs&navuser=1

Mountain , Country

“(Woman in office) Help, I am a rich woman being kept prisoner in a working woman's body.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 196

Help

“Did you hear the one about the woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly and left to die? When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak, her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly ask, "Where is that marvelous ape?"”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

Allegedly said in March 1986 during the U.S. senate race. The above quotation was pieced together by a journalist from the recollection of one or more sources, and prived in the Tucson Citizen on October 27, 1986 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/15/sources-recall-mccains-jo_n_112955.html http://www.rumromanismrebellion.net/2008/07/15/the-comedy-stylings-of-shecky-mccain/
Disputed

“The last speaker alluded to this movement as being that of a few disappointed women. From the first years to which my memory stretches, I have been a disappointed woman… I was disappointed when I came to seek a profession worthy an immortal being—every employment was closed to me, except those of the teacher, the seamstress, and the housekeeper. In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything, disappointment is the lot of woman. It shall be the business of my life to deepen this disappointment in every woman's heart until she bows down to it no longer.”

Lucy Stone (1818–1893) American abolitionist and suffragist

Remark made at a National Woman's Rights Convention in Cincinnati, Ohio. (1855) as quoted in Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings (1972) by Miriam Schnier

Life , Women , Marriage , Education

“The Labour party believes in the traditional values of society—in the idea that we have responsibilities one to another and that we are not just greedy all the time, looking out only for ourselves. Without being personal, the philosophy that has been propagated over the past 10 years has been wicked and evil…to set man against man, woman against woman and country against country and to build on nationalism and racism…and all the damage that has been done by the Conservatives has been disgraceful…I have a measure called the Margaret Thatcher (Global Repeal) Bill…It would be easy to reverse the policies and replace the personalities—the process has begun—but the rotten values that have been propagated from the platform of political power in Britain during the past 10 years will be an infection—a virulent strain of right-wing capitalist thinking which it will take time to overcome.”

Tony Benn (1925–2014) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1990/nov/22/confidence-in-her-majestys-government in the House of Commons (22 November 1990) on the day Margaret Thatcher announced her intention to resign.
1990s

Idea , Thinking , Evil , Time

“Frank standing on a stool on his wondrously functional pre-Libya legs, the bullet that would sever his spinal cord still twenty-five years away but already approaching: a woman giving birth to a child who will someday pull the trigger on a gun, a designer sketching the weapon or its precursor, a dictator making a decision that will spark in the fullness of time into the conflagration that Frank will go overseas to cover for Reuters, the pieces of a pattern drifting closer together.”

Emily St. John Mandel book Station Eleven

Source: Station Eleven (2014), Chapter 36 (p. 191)

Birth , Decision , Time

“All your problems come down to love. Your love life is what your problem is, and everybody else's on earth. God in existence is man and woman. There's nothing else. And unless you have loved God in existence - your duality which is woman or man - unless you have united with that through love and devotion without going through your feelings of love, you're not going to be enlightened.”

Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer

Love is not a feeling ~ The Interview (1995)

Love , Life , God , Feeling

“The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.”

Willa Cather book O Pioneers!

Part II, Ch. 4
O Pioneers! (1913)

History , Heart , Country

“A true woman loves a strong man because she knows his weaknesses. She protects as much as she is protected.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Marriage

Love , Strong

“Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be.”

Robert Southey (1774–1843) British poet

Letter to Charlotte Brontë in March 1837, reported in Gaskell The life of Charlotte Brontë, Vol. I (1857), p. 139, and in Mumby Letters of Literary Men, Vol. II (1906), p. 185.

Life , Literature , Business

“The love of awakened motherhood is a love and compassion felt not only towards one’s own children, but towards all people, animals and plants, rocks and rivers—a love extended to all of nature, to all beings. Indeed, to a woman in whom the state of true motherhood has awakened, all creatures are her children. This love, this motherhood, is Divine Love—and that is God.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

The Awakening of Universal Motherhood (2002)

Love , God , Children , People

“Although the backlash is not a movement, that doesn't make it any less destructive. In fact, the lack of orchestration, the absence of a single string-puller, only makes it harder to see — and perhaps more effective. A backlash against women's rights succeeds to the degree that it appears not to be political, that it appears not to be a struggle at all. It is most powerful when it goes private, when it lodges in a woman's mind and turns her vision inward, until she imagines the pressure is all in her head, until she begins to enforce the backlash, too — on herself.”

Susan Faludi book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

Page 16.
Backlash (1992)

Women , Imagination , Appearance

“Birth control is the first important step woman must take toward the goal of her freedom. It is the first step she must take to be man’s equal. It is the first step they must both take toward human emancipation.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

"Morality and Birth Control", February-March, 1918, pp. 11,14.
Birth Control Review, 1918-32

Birth , Freedom

“I am in this same river. I can't much help it. I admit it: I'm racist. The other night I saw a group (or maybe a pack?) or white teenagers standing in a vacant lot, clustered around a 4x4, and I crossed the street to avoid them; had they been black, I probably would have taken another street entirely. And I'm misogynistic. I admit that, too. I'm a shitty cook, and a worse house cleaner, probably in great measure because I've internalized the notion that these are woman's work. Of course, I never admit that's why I don't do them: I always say I just don't much enjoy those activities (which is true enough; and it's true enough also that many women don't enjoy them either), and in any case, I've got better things to do, like write books and teach classes where I feel morally superior to pimps. And naturally I value money over life. Why else would I own a computer with a hard drive put together in Thailand by women dying of job-induced cancer? Why else would I own shirts made in a sweatshop in Bangladesh, and shoes put together in Mexico? The truth is that, although many of my best friends are people of color (as the cliche goes), and other of my best friends are women, I am part of this river: I benefit from the exploitation of others, and I do not much want to sacrifice this privilege. I am, after all, civilized, and have gained a taste for "comforts and elegancies" which can be gained only through the coercion of slavery. The truth is that like most others who benefit from this deep and broad river, I would probably rather die (and maybe even kill, or better, have someone kill for me) than trade places with the men, women, and children who made my computer, my shirt, my shoes.”

Derrick Jensen book The Culture of Make Believe

Source: The Culture of Make Believe (2003), p. 69

Life , Women , Men , Money

“A witty woman is a devil at intrigue.”

Molière (1622–1673) French playwright and actor

Une femme d'esprit est un diable en intrigue.
L'École des Femmes (1662), Act III, sc. iii

“Success for a woman means absolute surrender, in whatever direction. Whether she paints a picture, or loves a man, there is no division of labor possible in her economy. To the attainment of any end worth living for, a symmetrical sacrifice of her nature is compulsory upon her.”

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911) American author, intellectual and feminist

The Study of Avis (1877)

Love , Nature , Success , Painting

“The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist,.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Ain't I a Woman (1981)

Women

“Cursed be he who e'er has put his trust
Or who henceforth shall trust in woman's heart;
False are they all, and to mankind a curse;
The plain are bad enough, the fair are worse.”

Francesco Berni (1497–1535) Italian poet

Sia maladetto chi si fidò mai,
O vuol fidarsi di donna che sia;
Che false sono e maladette tutte;
E più anche le belle che le brutte.
XXII, 49
Rifacimento of Orlando Innamorato

Heart , Falseness