Quotes about woman
page 30

“In brief, when a man fails as a wallet, we put him in prison; when a woman fails as a mother, we offer her social services. We’re taking a criminal approach to men, a social services approach to women.”

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

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 179.

Women, Men

“Anyone seen Kaka's wife? Funnily enough, she's a complete sort. She's the sort of woman who, if she looked you in the eye in a bar and asked you where the fag machine was, you'd start giggling and snort.”

Ben Dirs journalist

Quotes of the Week, 2007-05-09, BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/solpda/ifs_sport/hi/newsid_6635000/6635253.stm, Football Commentary

“Down through the ceiling comes a fire siren and people screaming that we're supposed to ignore. The gunshots and tires squeeling, sounds wee have to pretend are okay. They don't mean anything. It's just television. An explosion vibrates down from the upstairs. A woman begs someone not to rape her. It's not real. It's just a movie. We're the culture that cried wolf.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Lullaby

Source: Lullaby (2002), Chapter 17

People, Wolf

“Women, he held, had never been treated with elementary justice. To worship them was no less unfair than to hold them in contempt. The honest man, in our day, should regard a woman without the least bias of sexual prejudice; should view her simply as a fellow-being, who, according to circumstances, might or not be on his own plane. Away with all empty show and form, those relics of barbarism known as chivalry! He wished to discontinue even the habit of hat-doffing in female presence. Was not civility preserved between man and man without such idle form? Why not, then, between man and woman? Unable, as yet, to go the entire length of his principles in every-day life, he endeavoured, at all events, to cultivate in his intercourse with women a frankness of speech, a directness of bearing, beyond the usual. He shook hands as with one of his own sex, spine uncrooked; he greeted them with level voice, not as one who addresses a thing afraid of sound. To a girl or matron whom he liked, he said, in tone if not in phrase, "Let us be comrades." In his opinion this tended notably to the purifying of the social atmosphere. It was the introduction of simple honesty into relations commonly marked — and corrupted — by every form of disingenuousness. Moreover, it was the great first step to that reconstruction of society at large which every thinker saw to be imperative and imminent.
But Constance Bride knew nothing of this, and in her ignorance could not but misinterpret the young man's demeanor. She felt it to be brusque; she imagined it to imply a purposed oblivion of things in the past.”

George Gissing (1857–1903) English novelist

Source: Our Friend the Charlatan (1901), Ch. II

Life, Women, Justice, Sex

“I was just falling in love right, left and centre with these gorgeous young artists who came in the gallery. They’d see this fat old stripper, this nutter who runs a butcher’s shop that she thinks is an art gallery, and who thinks she’s some artist but hasn’t even been to art school… They probably thought, "Christ, who is this woman who’s texting me 20 times a day?"”

Stella Vine (1969) English artist

Catherine Deveney, "Stripped bare", http://living.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=288312004 The Scotsman, (2004-03-14) On her life running the Rosy Wilde gallery after her mother's death in 2003.

Love, School, Art, Thinking

“Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Source: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 6

Truth

“The man and woman firmly shook hands. The solution to the overpopulation problem might rest in such handshakes.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

Problem

“A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”

Irina Dunn (1948) Australian writer, documentary maker and Nuclear Disarmament Party politician

Parodying 'A man needs God like a fish needs a bicycle.' http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/414150.html

Fish

“What any woman saw in some particular man was beyond the comprehension of the average intelligent male. It just was so. A woman who could be intelligent about everything else in the world could be a complete fool when it came to some particular man.”

Agatha Christie book After the Funeral

After the Funeral (1953)

World, Fools, Intelligence

“Now take a person in this congregation who has knowledge with regard to being saved in the kingdom of our God and our Father and being exalted, one who knows and understands the principles of eternal life, and sees the beauty and excellency of the eternities before him compared with the vain and foolish things of the world, and suppose that he is taken in a gross fault, that he has committed a sin he knows will deprive him of the exaltation he desires, and that he cannot attain to it without the shedding of his blood, and also knows that by having his blood shed he will atone for that sin, and be saved and exalted with the Gods, is there a man or woman in this house but would say, 'shed my blood that I might be saved and exalted with the Gods?' All mankind love themselves, and let these principles be known by an individual and he would be glad to have his blood shed. That would be loving themselves, even unto an eternal exaltation. Will you love your brothers or sisters likewise, when they have committed a sin that cannot be atoned for without the shedding of their blood? Will you love that man or woman well enough to shed their blood?… I have known a great many men who have left this Church for whom there is no chance whatever for exaltation, but if their blood had been spilled, it would have been better for them. The wickedness and ignorance of the nations forbid this principle's being in full force, but the time will come when the law of God will be in full force.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Journal of Discourses, 4:219 (February. 8, 1857)
Brigham Young describes the doctrine of Blood Atonement
1850s

Love, Life, Men, God

“I fill this cup to one made up
Of loveliness alone,
A woman, of her gentle sex
The seeming paragon;
To whom the better elements
And kindly stars have given
A form so fair, that, like the air,
'Tis less of earth than heaven.”

Edward Coote Pinkney (1802–1828) American poet, lawyer, sailor, professor, and editor

A Health, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Sex, Star

“Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Samuel Marchbanks' Almanack (1967)

Dogs, Madness

“Amazon society, as mythology, history, and universal male nightmare, represents a culture in which women reign culturally supreme because of their gender. Amazon societies are also important because women were trained to be warriors—military and, presumably, in other ways as well. ...

In Amazon societies, women were mothers and their society's only warriors; mothers and their society's only hunters; mothers and their society's only political and religious leaders. No division of labor based on sex seems to have existed in such societies. Although Amazon leaders existed and queens were elected, the societies seem to have been … ones in which any woman could aspire to and achieve full human expression.

In Amazon society, only men, when they were allowed to remain, were, in widely differing degrees, powerless and oppressed.”

Phyllis Chesler (1940) Psychotherapist, college professor, and author

Women and Madness (2005), pp. 335–336 (emphases in original), and see Women and Madness (1972), pp. 284–285 (similar text).
Women and Madness (1972, 2005)

Women, Men, Sex, Way

“…If there's one thing I've learned in this life, it's that you never say no to an old gypsy woman with a blind eye and leprous fingernails.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/drag-me-to-hell-2009 of Drag Me to Hell (7 June 2009) Reviews, Three star reviews

Life, Learning

“If doctors were asked to diagnose that woman's case, not one spine specialist in the world would say "Satan has bound her". Doctors would call it arthritis of the spine, or vertebrae out of place, or some other medical term, and they would be right as far as medical terms are concerned. But if you get to the real source of the trouble you will discover that source is Satan.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

Source: More Than Just Comfort: An Answer to Cancer (c. 1979)

World

“Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the lord.”

John Cheever book The Wapshot Chronicle

The Wapshot Chronicle (1957)

Love, World

“At a state level, it's up to them. I don't want it to be a federal thing. I personally still think it's wrong. People don't understand the dictionary— it's called queer. Queer means strange and unusual. It's not like a slur, like you would call a white person a honky or something like that. You know, God is pretty explicit in what we're supposed to do — what man and woman are for. Now, at the same time, we're supposed to love everybody and accept people, and preach against the sins. I've had some friends that are actually homosexual. And, I mean, they know where I stand, and they know that I wouldn't have them anywhere near my children. But at the same time, they're people, and they're going to do their thing.”

Joe the Plumber (1973) American conservative activist and commentator

On same-sex marriages, in "Q & A: 'Joe the Plumber'" interview by Sarah Pulliam, in Christianity Today (May 2009) Web-only article http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/mayweb-only/118-13.0.html.

Love, God, Children, People

“In post offices throughout the United States, Selective Service posters [reading "A Man's Gotta Do What A Man's Gotta Do] remind men that only they must register for the draft. If the Post Office had a poster saying "A Jew's Gotta Do What A Jew's Gotta Do…" or if "A Woman's Gotta Do…"”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

were written across the body of a pregnant woman...
Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part 1: The Myth of Male Power, p. 28.

Men, Reading

“That he heard the Prophet saying, "It is not permissible for a man to be alone with a woman, and no lady should travel except with a Muhram (i. e. her husband or a person whom she cannot marry in any case for ever; e. g. her father, brother, etc.)." Then a man got up and said, "O Allah's Apostle! I have enlisted in the army for such-and-such Ghazwa and my wife is proceeding for Hajj."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Allah's Apostle said, "Go, and perform the Hajj with your wife." Narrated Ibn Abbas Volume 4, Book 52, Number 250 http://web.archive.org/web/20110924235556/http://www.cmje.org/religious-texts/hadith/bukhari/052-sbt.php#004.052.250 Sunni Hadith

Travel, Personality

“A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness.”

Stendhal (1783–1842) French writer

Source: De L'Amour (On Love) (1822), Ch. 60

Happiness

“O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?
O fat white woman whom nobody loves,
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
When the grass is soft as the breast of doves
And shivering-sweet to the touch?
O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?”

Frances Cornford (1886–1960) English poet

"To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train", from Poems (Hampstead: Priory Press, 1910) p. 20.

Love, Grass

“It has been said that on screen I personified the American woman.”

Joan Crawford (1904–1977) American actress

Interview, New York Times (1972)

“France will be led by a woman, either me or Mrs. Merkel.”

Marine Le Pen (1968) French lawyer and politician

Source: French presidential debate (3 May 2017), quoted in "Le Pen: France Will Be Led By A Woman — Either Me Or Merkel", The Daily Caller http://dailycaller.com/2017/05/03/le-pen-france-will-be-led-by-a-woman-either-me-or-merkel/.

“Woman is […] — finally screwing and your groin and buttocks and thighs ache like hell and you're all wet and maybe bloody and it wasn't like a Hollywood movie at all but jesus at least you're not a virgin any more but is this what it's all about?—And meanwhile he's asking, "Did you come?"”

Robin Morgan (1941) American feminist writer

"Barbarous Rituals", in Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist, p 110.

Hell

“A weeping woman is a bucket with no bottom.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Lini
(15 September 1992)

“A sensible human once said, "If people knew how much ill-feeling unselfishness occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit"; and again, "She's the sort of woman who lives for others—you can always tell the others by their hunted expression."”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Screwtape Letters

Letter XXVI
The Screwtape Letters (1942)

People, Feeling

“All of these battered husbands are still with their wives. When a woman stays with a man who batters, we provide shelters to encourage her to escape. If she decides not to escape, we say she is a victim of “Battered Woman Syndrome."”

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

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

“And I decided that if motherhood turned a "young American beauty" into that unhappy woman, then motherhood wasn't for me, either. That youthful, emotional decision (ill-formed and made for the wrong reasons) kept me from too much early sexual experimentation, and probably turned me into a bit of a tease. I'd "neck" but only go so far, because... well, I because I was going to be a writer, "free and unhampered."”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

At the very least. I wasn't going to get pregnant in my teens.
Source: The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto (1981), p. 44

Youth, Beauty, Decision

“By the 1970s, the American woman was being called ‘liberated’ or ‘superwoman’ while the American man was being called ‘baby killer’ if he fought in Vietnam, ‘traitor’ if he protested, or ‘apathetic’ if he did neither. Even men who came home paraplegics were literally spit on.”

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. 155.

Men, Home, Baby

“In these days he promoted a bramin, by name Seeva Dew Bhut, to the office of prime minister, who embracing the Mahomedan faith, became such a persecutor of Hindoos that he induced Sikundur to issue orders proscribing the residence of any other than Mahomedans in Kashmeer; and he required that no man should wear the mark on his forehead, or any woman be permitted to burn with her husband’s corpse. Lastly, he insisted on all golden and silver images being broken and melted down, and the metal coined into money. Many of the bramins, rather than abandon their religion or their country, poisoned themselves; some emigrated from their native homes, while a few escaped the evil of banishment by becoming Mahomedans. After the emigration of the bramins, Sikundur ordered all the temples in Kashmeer to be thrown down; among which was one dedicated to Maha Dew, in the district of Punjhuzara, which they were unable to destroy, in consequence of its foundation being below the surface of the neighbouring water. But the temple dedicated to Jug Dew was levelled with the ground; and on digging into its foundation the earth emitted volumes of fire and smoke which the infidels declared to be the emblem of the wrath of the Deity; but Sikundur, who witnessed the phenomenon, did not desist till the building was entirely razed to the ground, and its foundations dug up….. “In another place in Kashmeer was a temple built by Raja Bulnat, the destruction of which was attended with a remarkable incident. After it had been levelled, and the people were employed in digging the foundation, a copper-plate was discovered, on which was the following inscription:- ‘Raja Bulnat, having built this temple, was desirous of ascertaining from his astrologers how long it would last, and was informed by them, that after eleven hundred years, a king named Sikundur would destroy it, as well as the other temples in Kashmeer’…Having broken all the images in Kashmeer, he acquired the title of the Iconoclast, ‘Destroyer of Idols’…”

Firishta (1560–1620) Indian historian

Sultãn Sikandar Butshikan of Kashmir (AD 1389-1413)Kashmir
Tãrîkh-i-Firishta

Money, People, Faith, Religion

“She never had public favor; it was a bit like the Hillary Clinton thing. She did all the right things for her country, but she wasn't ultimately revered. So she had a conversation with her confidant-adviser. She asked him, when have they ever looked up to or idolized a woman? Only one, he told her, the Virgin Mary. So she said, Then I will become like the Virgin Mary, and she did. She created a facade for herself; she stopped having lovers; she became like a virgin. She became sexless, and painted her face in a white alabaster way, and turned herself into an icon that was untouchable and sexless, and then she had everybody's respect.”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

Madonna Interview : Aperture Magazine (Summer 1999), Aperture http://allaboutmadonna.com/madonna-library/madonna-interview-aperture-magazine-summer-1999, About Queen of England, Elizabeth I.

Way, Confidence, Lovers, Painting

“Such fools they were in Battle School, to let so few girls in. It left the boys completely helpless against a woman when they returned to Earth.”

Orson Scott Card Ender's Game hexalogy

Virlomi.
Ender's Game series, Shadow of the Giant (2005)

School, Fools, Girl, Boy

“I know it wasn't the dinner wine that had me against the wall in a fit of remorse. It was the thought of my mother being so lonesome she had to sit on a street bench, so lonesome she missed the company of a homeless shopping bag woman. Even in the bad days in Limerick she always had an open hand and an open door and why couldn't I be like that to her?”

Frank McCourt book 'Tis

§48
'Tis (2000)

Wine

“(The Woman Who Does Everything Better Than You) …it's a worse shock to lose one of your five homes than it is to lose your only home. I'm sure psychologists will back me up on this.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 87

Home

“When a woman responds to mistreatment by protesting "I'm a human being!" or "I want to be treated with respect, not like some animal," what is she suggesting about the acceptable ways of treating other animals? Perhaps because comparisons between women and nonhuman animals so often entail sexism, many women are anxious to distance themselves from other animals. Feminists, especially, recognize that negative "animal" imagery has advanced women's oppression. However, if our treatment and view of other animals became caring, respectful, and just, nonhuman-animal metaphors would quickly lose all power to demean. Few women have confronted how closely they mirror patriarchal oppressors when they too participate in other species' denigration. Women who avoid acknowledging that they are animals closely resemble men who prefer to ignore that women are human.”

Joan Dunayer American activist

" Sexist Words, Speciesist Roots https://books.google.it/books?id=iJSuTkFlpyIC&pg=PA11", in Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, edited by Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 19.

Women, Men, Way, Animals

“He wondered why he stayed with her. Just pure laziness, he guessed. He didn't want to go through the emotional turmoil of leaving her. In spite of himself he'd worry about her and it was too much trouble. He'd need another woman right away and that took a lot of talking and arguing and persuading. It was different just to lay a girl but he would need a woman around, and that was the difference. You got used to one and it was less trouble. […]
But there was another reason too. She loved him. She really did. And he knew it. And you can't leave a thing like that. It's a structure and it has an architecture, and you can't leave it without tearing off a piece of yourself. So if you want to remain whole you stay no matter how much you may dislike staying. Juan was not a man who fooled himself very much.”

John Steinbeck book The Wayward Bus

Source: The Wayward Bus (1947), Ch. 8

Love, Fools, Girl, Tear

“How can you have confidence in a woman who will not risk entrusting her whole life to you, day and night?”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

Life, Confidence, Night

“Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman; they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love.”

Honoré de Balzac book A Woman of Thirty

Il y a beaucoup d'hommes dont le cœur est puissamment ému par la seule apparence de la souffrance chez une femme: pour eux la douleur semble être une promesse de constance ou d'amour.
Source: A Woman of Thirty (1842), Ch. I: Early Mistakes.

Love, Men, Pain, Suffering

“A woman is a foreign land.”

Coventry Patmore (1823–1896) English poet

Book II. Canto IX, II The Foreign Land.
The Angel In The House (1854)

“That woman I once was,
in a black agate necklace,
I do not wish to meet again
till the Day of Judgement.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Poem without a Hero (1963)

“Oh, moment of sweet peril, perilous sweet! When woman joins herself to man.”

Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton (1831–1891) English statesman and poet

The Wanderer, Prologue, Stanza 1, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“So, they'd prefer me to do a nude, would they? Fine I'll do them a nude... I'll redo it [his painted copy of Giorgioni's 'Woman with musicians'], with a transparent atmosphere, like those women over there [women bathing in the river, Summer of 1862]. Then I suppose they'll really tear me to pieces. They'll tell me I'm just copying the Italians now, rather than the Spanish. Ah, well, they can say what they like.”

Edouard Manet (1832–1883) French painter

the painting Manet means here became his most famous one: 'Déjeuner sur l'herbe'
Manet's quote to his friend Antonin Proust in 1862, from Manet, Francoise Cachin, Barrie & Jenkins, London 1991, p. 16
1850 - 1875

Women, Tear, Summer, Painting

“Love is the whole history of a woman's life; it is an episode in a man's.”

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël (1766–1817) Swiss author

L'amour est l'histoire de la vie des femmes; c'est un épisode dans celle des hommes.
A Treatise on the Influence of the Passions (De l'influence des passions, 1796), Section 1, ch. 4

Love, Life, History

“I think the woman was born in Far Madding in a thunderstorm. She probably told the thunder to be quiet. It probably did.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Basel Gill, referring to Lini
(9 November 2000)

Thinking, Madness

“All the genres of philosophy, science, high art, athletics and politics were invented by men. But by the Promethean law of conflict and capture, woman has a right to seize what she will and vie with man on her own terms.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 9

Men, Law, Art, Science

“The sex-energy is the greatest power of the mind and the body. This is the supreme strength in the human body, embodying all powers and assuming all forms. The mind and the body receive their strength and life from this sex-energy. Instead of allowing this Shakti or energy to become the gross seminal fluid, it is to be conserved, it is to be converted into a form of subtle energy called “Ojas” and thus made a source of spiritual life instead of the cause of physical death. With the extinction of sexual desires, the mind is released of its most powerful bond. Sex-energy moves towards two main directions, viz., one is downward and the other is upward. It takes the downward course in the form of gross sexual enjoyment; but when one tries to observe Brahmacharya (celibacy) in thought, word and deed, it takes the upward course. When the sex-energy always takes the downward course in a person, such a person becomes weak mentally and physically. From such a man or woman we cannot expect anything great and original. Sexual life dissipates the powers of the mind and the body.”

Swami Narayanananda (1902–1988) Indian guru

The Mysteries of Man, Mind and Mind-Functions (1951), p. 483f (2001 edition)

Life, Death, Sex, Personality

“Because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters and all our sons and daughters now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

2010s, 2016 Democratic National Convention (2016)

Daughters

“One ought not to be unkind to a woman merely on account of her plainness, any more than one had a right to take liberties with her merely because she was handsome.”

Murasaki Shikibu book The Tale of Genji

Source: Tale of Genji, The Tale of Genji, trans. Arthur Waley, Ch. 36: Kashiwagi

“Of all the paths lead to a woman's love
Pity's the straightest.”

John Fletcher (1579–1625) English Jacobean playwright

The Knight of Malta (1647), Act I, sc. i.

Love

“Starring Laurence Fishburne, Hugo Weaving, The Slightly Mannish Woman and A Big Keanu-Reeves Shaped Piece Of Wood! (On the Matrix Reloaded, 24 June 2003)”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

Fully Ramblomatic

Star

“She was tall beyond the ordinary height of woman, but stately in her grace as the ideal of a queen and the reality of a swan. Her arms and feet were bare, but for the gems which encircled them. A white robe swept around her in folds gathered at the waist by a golden girdle inscribed with signs and characters. Her hair was singularly thick, and of that purple blackness seen on the grape and the neck of the raven — black, with a sort of azure bloom upon it. It was fastened in large folds, which went several times round the head, and these were adorned with jewels and precious stones, like a midnight lighted with stars. Her complexion was a pale pure olive, perfectly colourless, but delicate as that of a child. Her mouth was the only spot where the rose held dominion, and lips of richer crimson never opened to the morning.”

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

The Monthly Magazine

Star, Reality, Light, Time

“Tasmania is famous for its shape, which is the same shape as the pubic hair region on a woman's body, which I personally don't identify with. Mine's more like a map of the former Soviet Union. Not to scale.”

Hannah Gadsby (1978) Australian comedian

Personality

“I wonder if my shrink (sorry, psychiatrist) was a woman not a man I'd be in a better or worse state?”

Fay Weldon (1931) English author, essayist and playwright

The Heart of the Country (1987)

“There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago? When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?”

Michael Crichton (1942–2008) American author, screenwriter, film producer

Environmentalism as a Religion (2003)

Death, Children, Age, Disease

“The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.”

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

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Commitment often means that a woman achieves her primary fantasy, while a man gives his up. In exchange for forfeiting his primary fantasy, what does he hope to fulfill? His primary need: intimacy.”

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

Source: Why Men Are the Way They Are (1988), p. 150.

Hope

“A Jewish woman in exile in the 1930s is an antihero.”

Núria Añó (1973) Catalan writer novelist

“We can say that the United States runs the world like the Taliban ran Afghanistan. Cuba is dealt with like a woman caught outside not wearing her burkha. Horrific sanctions are imposed on Iraq in the manner of banning music, dancing, and kite-flying in Kabul. Jean-Bertrand Aristide is banished from Haiti like the religious police whipping a man whose beard is not the right length.”

William Blum (1933–2018) American author and historian

Introduction to Freeing the World to Death

World, Music, Dance, Flying

“I met a girl who works at the Double Tree front desk, she gave me her phone number. It's zero. I tried to call her from here and some other woman answered. I said "You sound older!"”

Mitch Hedberg (1968–2005) American stand-up comedian

Mitch All Together (2003)

Girl, Tree

“I think that people imagine protocol and etiquette as some kind of great dragon that hovers behind the pageantries of the palace to pounce on you and eat you up if you aren't behaving as you should. But in fact etiquette is saying how to do when you meet people, saying good night to your parents before going to bed, opening a door to a woman, getting up if an older person wants to sit down on the bus and it's all full, that is etiquette, or protocol, if you wish. At the everyday level, all the time, all of us. It's a way of knowing what you've got to do so that you have your mind free to do other things and think of other things.”

Margrethe II of Denmark (1940) Queen of Denmark

Television documentary 'Queen Margrethe of Denmark', BBC & Jørgen Bonfils, 31:30, 28 April 1974.
Protocol

People, Way, Imagination, Thinking

“There's Jamie Murray in the crowd - I assume that's his woman, otherwise her actual boyfriend might be extremely irate.”

Ben Dirs journalist

Live - Murray v Wawrinka, 2009-06-29, 2009-06-29, BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/tennis/8122619.stm, Tennis Commentary

“To a clergyman lying under a vow of chastity any act of sex is immoral, but his abhorrence of it naturally increases in proportion as it looks safe and is correspondingly tempting. As a prudent man, he is not much disturbed by incitations which carry their obvious and certain penalties; what shakes him is the enticement bare of any probable secular retribution. Ergo, the worst and damndest indulgence is that which goes unwhipped. So he teaches that it is no sin for a woman to bear a child to a drunken and worthless husband, even though she may believe with sound reason that it will be diseased and miserable all its life, but if she resorts to any mechanical or chemical device, however harmless, to prevent its birth, she is doomed by his penology to roast in Hell forever, along with the assassin of orphans and the scoundrel who forgets his Easter duty.”

H.L. Mencken book Treatise on the Gods

Treatise on the Gods (1930; 2nd Edition 1946)
1930s

Life, Disease, Penalty, Sex

“I was tired of painting. So many collectors bought paintings and locked them in bank vaults. The stained-glass windows allowed me to make public art…. One day a woman stopped me in the street to talk to me about Champ-de-Mars metro station. "Whether it's sunny, rainy, or snowing, I love your stained-glass windows at Champ-de-Mars. Those big dancing shapes always warm my heart." That woman was neither a collector nor an art critic, but she understood the meaning I meant to give that work.”

Marcelle Ferron (1924–2001) Canadian artist

Original in French: J'étais dégoûtée de la peinture. Bon nombre de collectionneurs achetaient des tableaux pour les enfermer dans des voûtes de banques. Les verrières m'ont permis de faire de l'art public.... Un jour, une femme m'a abordée dans la rue pour me parler de la station de métro Champ-de-Mars. « Qu'il fasse beau, qu'il pleuve ou qu'il neige, j'adore vos verrières du Champ-de-Mars. Ces grandes formes qui dansent me font chaud au coeur. » Cette femme n'étaient ni une collectionneuse ni une critique d'art, mais elle avait compris le sens que j'avais voulu donner à cette oeuvre.
L'esquisse d'une mémoire, 1996

Love, Art, Heart, Dance

“Q: I have read that you also, at least sometimes, had a chain around your neck, and you were tied to a tree?
A: M-hm. Most of the time, I would say.
Q: Were you tortured?
A: There are things that I don't want to talk about.
Q: Were there any other women among the hostages?
A: There were more women among the hostages, but the last four years of my captivity I was the only woman on the camp, so it was very difficult.”

Íngrid Betancourt (1961) Colombian-French politician

Reference http://svtplay.se/v/1416302/rakt_pa_med_kg_bergstrom/1_av_10?cb,a1364145,1,f,103521/pb,a1364142,1,f,103521/pl,v,,1430389/sb,p103521,1,f,-1 Interview with KG Bergström for Sveriges Television

Women, Tree, Time, Reading

“The signal failure of the academic Marxists is in their obliviousness to the transformation of modern labor. In the age of mass media, power has shifted its meaning and loci. Capitalism, whatever its problems, remains the most efficient economic mechanism yet to bring the highest quality of life to the greatest number. Because I have studied the past, I know that, in America and under capitalism, I am the freest woman in history. Union blue-collar jobs now routinely pay higher salaries than are earned by most teachers. Physical labor, as a concrete skill occupation, is free of the soul-destroying office politics suffers by the Marxists' demonized managerial class, who take their jobs home with them and are in a continual funk of anxiety and neurosis. … Unharried weekend leisure time is the center of working-class American life in ways the academic Marxists, resentfully marking papers and endlessly pressed for time, simply don't see.</b”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, pp. 247

Life, Age, Way, Home

“By that time it was already clear that the next prime minster was going to be Golda Meir, a woman whom I frankly detested – a mutual sentiment, I might add. I knew her as an opinionated, obstinate person, primitive in her outlook, rigid in her attitudes, with a genius for reaching and exploiting the deepest fears and prejudices of the Jewish masses. I was certain that with her as prime minister, all peace efforts would come to a total standstill.”

Uri Avnery (1923–2018) Israeli writer

My Friend, the Enemy (1986) – page 80

Fear, Peace, Effort, Time

“Fifty years ago the legal injustice imposed upon women was appalling. Wives, widows and mothers seemed to have been hunted out by the law on purpose to see in how many ways they could be wronged and made helpless. A wife by her marriage lost all right to any personal property she might have. The income of her land went to her husband, so that she was made absolutely penniless. If a woman earned a dollar by scrubbing, her husband had a right to take the dollar and go and get drunk with it and beat her afterwards. It was his dollar. If a woman wrote a book the copyright of the same belonged to her husband and not to her. The law counted out in many states how many cups and saucers, spoons and knives and chairs a widow might have when her husband died. I have seen many a widow who took the cups she had bought before she was married and bought them again after her husband died, so as to have them legally. The law gave no right to a married woman to any legal existence at all. Her legal existence was suspended during marriage. She could neither sue nor be sued. If she had a child born alive the law gave her husband the use of all her real estate as long as he should live, and called it by the pleasant name of "the estate by courtesy."”

Lucy Stone (1818–1893) American abolitionist and suffragist

When the husband died the law gave the widow the use of one-third of the real estate belonging to him, and it was called the "widow's encumbrance."
The Progress of Fifty Years (1893)

Women, Marriage, Books, Law

“The measure of woman’s distaste for any part of her life lies not in the loudness of her lamentations (these are only an attempt to buy a martyr’s crown at a reduced price) but in her persistent pursuit of that occupation of which she never ceases to complain.”

Quentin Crisp book The Naked Civil Servant

Source: The Naked Civil Servant (1968), Ch. 15

Life, Parting

“The high tenet of this philosophy (Liberalism) is that Liberty is an endowment from the Creator of every individual man and woman upon which no power, whether economic or political, can encroach, and that not even the government may deny. And herein it challenges all other philosophies of society and government; for all others, both before and since, insist that the individual has no such unalienable rights, that he is but the servant of the state. Liberalism holds that man is master of the state, not the servant; that the sole purpose of government is to nurture and assure these liberties. All others insist that Liberty is not a God-given right; that the state is the master of the man.”

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

Page 4
The Challenge to Liberty (1934)

God

“How strange a thing is a love of woman, that is so small in the beginning and in its ends so great! (…) For when the Invisible conceived the order of universe He set this seed of woman's love within its plan, that by its most unequal growth is doomed to bring about equality of law. For now it lifts the low to heights untold, and now it brings the noble to the level of the dust. And thus, while Woman, this great surprise of Nature, is, Good and Evil can never grow apart.”

H. Rider Haggard book Cleopatra

Cleopatra (1889)

Love, Law, Nature, Universe

“A woman always exaggerates her beauty and its influence when they are past; and it was a perpetual grief to think what her pretty face might have done for her.”

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

The Monthly Magazine

Beauty, Thinking, Past

“Eleanor Roosevelt, fine, precise, hand-worked like ivory. Her voice was almost attractive … One had the impression of a lady who was finally becoming a woman, which is to say that she was just a little bitchy about it all; nice bitchy, charming, it had a touch of art to it, but it made one wonder if she were not now satisfying the last passion of them all, which was to become physically attractive, for she was better-looking than she had ever been.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

Art, Passion

“I am late with the new Doris Lessing [The Golden Notebook]. I make no apology: it has taken me a long time to read (568 pages of close print) and at the end of it all I feel cheated. This talented writer has attempted an experiment which has failed, essayed a scale which is beyond her…. This is a book of revolt – political, social, sexual. Anna [the heroine] became a Communist in South Africa, seeing in Communism a "moral energy" not to be found in other creeds or in the long-entrenched privileged class. Anna is also concerned with being a "free woman" – rebelling against traditional male dominance – and with achieving maximal erotic fulfilment…. There is no doubt about the great moral virtues here – intelligence, honesty, integrity – but it is the aesthetic virtues that seem to be lacking. The characters do not really interest us: when we have dialogue it is strangely unnatural … Mrs Lessing’s old singleness of vision, her strength as a writer, is not to be found here. [Review in the English provincial newspaper the Yorkshire Post, 1962]”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

People, Joseph Conrad, Doris Lessing

Books, Feeling, Intelligence, Communication

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

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Playboy interview (May 1995)

Women, Men, People, Cars

“My mother, a woman, told me this, and I’ll tell you, mijo, that you will learn who you are and who you aren’t in the next four or five years, because not to learn who you are and who you aren’t in the next few years, my mother said, is to be missing the most important part of your whole life.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

Life, Learning, Parting

“Those who are most sensitive about "politically incorrect" terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any "oppressed" group but come from privileged strata of society.”

Theodore Kaczynski book Industrial Society and Its Future

"Feelings of Inferiority", item 12
Industrial Society and Its Future (1995)

Personality

“A man who will not die to save a woman is no man.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Shienaran saying
(15 November 1990)

“I do not approve of you, Thomas, and I do not approve of your woman, but nor can I approve of a Church that uses pain to bring the love of God to a sinful world. Evil begets evil, it spreads like a weed, but good works are tender shoots that need husbandry.”

Bernard Cornwell The Grail Quest

Abbott Planchard, p. 212
The Grail Quest, Heretic (2003)

Love, God, Pain, World

“I do believe that man is a rope between animal and superman. But the superman I'm thinking of isn't Nietzsche's. The real superhuman, man or woman, is the person who's rid himself of all prejudices, neuroses, and psychoses, who realizes his full potential as a human being, who acts naturally on the basis of gentleness, compassion, and love, who thinks for himself and refuses to follow the herd. That's the genuine dyed-in-the-wool superman.”

Philip José Farmer (1918–2009) American science fiction writer

Source: The Riverworld series, The Dark Design (1977), Ch. 31

Love, Nature, Thinking, Animals

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

Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) English writer

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

Women, Men, Dogs

“Just as, out of habit, one consults a run-down clock as though it were still going, so too one may look at the face of a beautiful woman as though she were still in love.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Maxim 246, trans. Stopp
Maxims and Reflections (1833)

Love, Beauty

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

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

Fern Britton Meets John Barrowman BBC 2012

Love, Women, Men, Marriage

“I know what is love. Love is man and woman in bed.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

Love

““Why can nothing be simple?”
Geloë shifted on her stool. The wise woman’s voice was surprisingly sympathetic. “Because nothing is simple, Prince Josua.””

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, To Green Angel Tower (1993), Part 1, Chapter 20, “Travelers and Messengers” (p. 635).

“I believe I'm the best person for the job. Obviously I'm a woman, but I've never sought election on the basis of being a woman. I've always sought election as the best person for the job.”

Helen Clark (1950) 37th Prime Minister of New Zealand

Quoted in " 'I have the skills for the job' - Helen Clark on bid for top UN job https://www.radiolive.co.nz/WATCH-I-have-the-skills-for-the-job---Helen-Clark-on-bid-for-top-UN-job/tabid/504/articleID/117913/Default.aspx" (5 April 2016)

Personality

“I heard Allah's Apostle saying, "The reward of deeds depends upon the intentions and every person will get the reward according to what he has intended. So whoever emigrated for worldly benefits or for a woman to marry, his emigration was for what he emigrated for."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Narrated by 'Umar bin Al-Khattab: Sahih Al-Bukhari: Volume 1, Book 1, Number 1
Sunni Hadith

Dependency, Personality

“(Man in bar) The kind of woman I want just isn't around anymore. (Sylvia) Perhaps if you wait for a full moon.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 24

Waiting

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

Sarah Grimké (1792–1873) American abolitionist

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

Life, Women, Happiness, Art

“The influence of a woman's first love is felt on her whole after-existence: never can she dream such dream again. For a woman there is no second-love—youth, hope, belief, are all given to her first attachment; if unrequited, the heart becomes its own Prometheus, creative, ideal, but with the vulture preying upon it for ever.—If deceived, the whole poetry of life is gone; the very essence of poetry is belief, and how can she, whose sweet eager credulity has once learnt the bitter truth—that its reliance was in vain, how can she ever believe again?”

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

The Monthly Magazine

Love, Life, Truth, Youth

“Gay marriage… I'm a traditionalist. I'm older than most people in the audience. I kind of like tradition, and it's always been a man and a woman. I'm thinking, 'I don't quite get it.”

Bruce Jenner (1949) American reality television personality and retired Olympic decathlete champion

On The Ellen Degeneres Show http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2016/02/19/caitlyn-jenner-have-gotten-more-flack-for-being-republican-than-have-for-being/.

Marriage, People, Thinking

“Christ has lifted woman to a new place in the world. And just in proportion as Christianity has sway, will she rise to a higher dignity in human life. What she has now, and what she shall have, of privilege and true honor, she owes to that gospel which took those qualities peculiarly and which had been counted weak and unworthy, and gave them a Divine glory in Christ.”

Herrick Johnson (1832–1913) American clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 618.

Life, World, Christ

“Well, it's the only picture I ever wanted to own ['Three Bathers' of Cézanne ]. It's a Cézanne and the joy of my life. I saw it about a year ago in an exhibition and I was stunned by it. I didn’t sleep for two or three nights trying to decide whether to... To me it is marvelous. Monumental... It's not perfect, it’s a sketch. But then I don't like absolute perfection. I believe one should make a struggle towards something one can't do rather than do the thing that comes easily. Perhaps another reason is why I fell for it is that the type of woman he portrays is the same kind as I like. Each of the figures I could turn in into a piece of sculpture, very simple. Not young girls but that wide, broad, mature woman. Matronly.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

1955 - 1970

Life, Girl, Sleep, Joy

“People ask me what the "T" stands for in my name. If you're a man, the "T" stands for tough. If you're a woman or child, it stands for tender!”

Mr. T (1952) American actor and retired professional wrestler

Attributed

People

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

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

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

Women, Men, Family, Home

“I think that every woman who has any margin of time or money to spare should adopt some one public interest, some philanthropic undertaking, or some social agitation of reform, and give to that cause whatever time and work she may be able to afford; thus completing her life by adding to her private duties the noble effort to advance God's Kingdom beyond the bounds of her home.”

Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904) Irish writer, social reformer, anti-vivisection activist and leading suffragette

Lecture VI, p. 158
The Duties of Women (1881)

Life, Money, God, Home

“I know lots of people like Albert. I might be like him myself. He was a hopeless romantic, he lived on anticipation. He was always yearning for the next thing. He was always envisioning some wonderful life with somebody else, while grimly enduring life with the woman he was with. If I think about it, I would say that that was kind of the key to his psychology, that he had the lure of the perfect situation, the perfect person. Of course if you're Einstein, you want everything that you want your way and then you want to be left alone. So you want love, and you want affection, you want a good meal, but then you don't want any interference outside of that, so you don't want any obligations interfering with your life, with your work. Which is a difficult stance to maintain in an adult relationship; it doesn't work. Everything has to be a give and take.
Einstein always felt Paradise was just around the corner, but as soon as he got there, it started looking a little shabby and something better appeared. I've known a lot of people like Albert in my time, I have felt lots of shocks of recognition. I feel like I got to know Albert as a person in the course of this, and I have more respect for him as a physicist than I did when I started, I have more a sense of what he accomplished and how hard it really was to be Einstein than I did before. It's a great relief to be able to think of him as a real person. If he was around I'd love to buy him a beer ….. but I don't know if I'd introduce him to my sister.”

Dennis Overbye (1944) American writer

On Albert Einstein, in Sex and Physics : A Talk with Dennis Overbye (2001) http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/overbye/overbye_print.html

Love, Life, People, Way

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

Simone de Beauvoir book The Second Sex

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

Women, Reality, Appearance

“In recent days we witness attempts to break this coexistence apart. Today, for example, I have heard of an attempt to move a woman from her seat on a bus. I oppose this unequivocally. I believe we must not allow margins groups to break our common denominator and we must keep our public spaces open and safe for all of our citizens. We must find the uniting and mediating ground rather than the things that divide and separate us.”

Benjamín Netanyahu (1949) Israeli prime minister

"Israel's 'Rosa Parks' refuses to take back seat" on CNN.com (19 December 2011) http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/19/world/meast/israel-rosa-parks/index.html. 2010s, 2011

“From woman comes the new life on earth and woman is the source of all prosperity here and hereafter.”

Sarvajna Kannada poet, pragmatist and philosopher

Flowers of Wisdom

Life

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

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

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

Women, World, Girl

Quotes about woman page 30

Quotes about woman
page 30