Quotes about woman
page 31

“Were the destiny of woman thus exactly marked out, did she invariably retain the shelter of a parent’s or guardian’s roof till she married, did marriage give her a sure home and a protector, were she never liable to be made a widow, or, if so, sure of finding immediate protection from a brother or new husband, so that she might never be forced to stand alone one moment, and were her mind given for this world only, with no faculties capable of eternal growth and infinite improvement, we would still demand of her a far wider and more generous culture than is proposed by those who so anxiously define her sphere.”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

Article, The New York Daily Tribune (30 September 1845); quoted in Brilliant Bylines (1986) by Barbara Belford.

Marriage, World, Home, Parent

“The price for misreading and misinterpreting a woman has become extremely high; divorce battles, custody fights, poisonous interactions, accusations of abuse, incest, harassment, and even rape alongside the everyday unhappiness lead to a need to escape through self-destructive behaviors and addictions. It is "crunch time" for men today. Their personal isolation and dependency on women is greater than ever, while women's anger, withdrawal from relationships with men, and defensive sense of being victimized also are at a peak.”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

Introduction, p. 1
What Men Still Don't Know About Women, Relationships, and Love (2007)

Women, Men, Behavior, Sense

“When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity— that was a quality God's image carried with it.”

Graham Greene book The Power and the Glory

The Power and the Glory (1940)

God, Feeling

“Who o'er the herd would wish to reign,
Fantastic, fickle, fierce, and vain!
Vain as the leaf upon the stream,
And fickle as a changeful dream;
Fantastic as a woman's mood,
And fierce as Frenzy's fever'd blood.
Thou many-headed monster thing,
Oh who would wish to be thy king!”

Walter Scott (1771–1832) Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet

Canto V, stanza 30. The Lady of the Lake http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3011 (1810)

Dreams, Mood, Change

“(Woman to psychic) Which do you think is the more impossible dream: the perfect man or the perfect handbag?”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 52

Dreams, Thinking, Perfection

“His appearance gives no clue to what his profession might be, and yet he doesn't look like a man without a profession either. Consider what he's like: He always knows what to do. He knows how to gaze into a woman's eyes. He can put his mind to any question at any time. He can box. He is gifted, strong-willed, open-minded, fearless, tenacious, dashing, circumspect — why quibble, suppose we grant him all those qualities — yet he has none of them! They have made him what he is, they have set his course for him, and yet they don't belong to him. When he is angry, something in him laughs. When he is sad, he is up to something. When something moves him, he turns against it. He'll always see a good side to every bad action. What he thinks of anything will always depend on some possible context — nothing is, to him, what it is: everything is subject to change, in flux, part of a whole, of an infinite number of wholes presumably adding up to a super-whole that, however, he knows nothing about. So every answer he gives is only a partial answer, every feeling an opinion, and he never cares what something is, only 'how' it is — some extraneous seasoning that somehow goes along with it, that's what interests him.”

Robert Musil book The Man Without Qualities

The Man Without Qualities (1930–1942)

Sadness, Feeling, Question, Thinking

“I believe in loyalty. When a woman reaches a certain age she likes, she should stick with it.”

Eva Gabor (1919–1995) Hungarian actress and businesswoman

As quoted in Funny Ladies : The Best Humor from America's Funniest Women (2001) by Bill Adler, p. 18

Age, Loyalty

“If you convey to a woman that something ought to be done, there is always a dreadful danger that she will suddenly do it.”

G. K. Chesterton book The Secret of Father Brown

The Secret of Father Brown (1927) The Song of the Flying Fish
The Father Brown Mystery Series (1910 - 1927)

“From a woman’s perspective, sharing parent time feels like what a man might experience if his ex-wife came to his office and shared his career. He might claim the sharing is not in the best interests of the employer. But what he really would be caring about is the affront should his ex-wife do as good as he at his own job. While the fear is understandable, the difference is that his career is his, their children are theirs.”

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

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 191.

Children, Fear, Feeling, Understanding

“You cannot imagine the pleasure you are giving me. This woman and this infant [of an old picture, made in his early years] are my own family. The baby was in its cradle one fine summer day; the mother had fallen asleep beside it. In one hour I did the sketch from nature. It used to hang over my bed, and it cheered my awakening every day for years. Then arrived a morning when we were more in want of necessaries than usual. A dealer came along and offered me a hundred and fifty francs.... he insisted on taking that one in particular. As ill luck would have it, my rent was due next day. I was not in a position to be too particular. He gave me a bank note of one hundred francs, and ten hundred-sous pieces. I made him out a receipt, and he never perceived that he was carrying off a bit of my heart. Ah!, it was hard.”

Narcisse Virgilio Díaz (1807–1876) French painter

Quote of Diaz, late 1860's, recorded by Albert Wolff, in Notes upon certain masters of the XIX century, - printed not published MDCCCLXXXVI (1886), The Art Age Press, 400 N.Y. (written after the exhibition 'Cent Chefs-d'Oeuvres: the Choiche of the French Private Galleries', Petit, Paris / Baschet, New York, 1883, p. 45-46
Albert Wolff, the interviewer, owned this little panel, painted by a young Diaz. It was fifteen centimeters big, and presented a baby lying in a cradle with the mother, guarding it. Wolff returned it to the old Diaz
Quotes of Diaz

Pleasure, Family, Imagination, Nature

“I support a woman's right to choose up until viability of the fetus. As Governor of New Mexico, I would have signed a bill banning late-term abortion. I've always favored parental notification, I've always favored counseling, and I've always favored the notion that public funds should not be used for abortion.”

Gary Johnson (1953) American politician, businessman, and 29th Governor of New Mexico

Statement at FOX News Debate
YouTube
2011-05-05
http://youtu.be/QRPrZxHUqsA
2012-02-24
2011

Support, Parent

“The exquisite smell of the south, clean but funky, like a big woman.”

Thomas Wolfe book Look Homeward, Angel

69
Look Homeward, Angel (1929)

“Thea: Didja make your quota, Lois?
Lois: Yup. Kissed a woman from every state in the union. Rhode Island was a drag queen, though. Do you think that counts?”

Alison Bechdel book Dykes to Watch Out For

#161, "Afterglow" (1993), collected in Spawn of DTWOF (1993).
Dykes to Watch Out For

Kiss, Thinking

“When a man has been the lover of a woman as that man had been hers, with the vibrating communion of a voluptuousness unbroken for two years, that woman maintains a sort of physiological, quasi-animal instinct. A gesture, the accent of a word, a sigh, a blush, a pallor, are signs for her that her intuition interprets with infallible certainty. How and why is that instinct accompanied by absolute oblivion of former caresses? It is a particular case of that insoluble and melancholy problem of the birth and death of love.”

Paul Bourget (1852–1935) French writer

Source: Cosmopolis (1892), Ch. 5 "Countess Steno"

Love, Death, Lovers, Birth

“The fact is that men need women more than women need men; and so, aware of this fact, man has sought to keep woman dependent upon him economically as the only method open to him of making himself necessary to her. Since in the beginning woman would not become his willing slave, he has wrought through the centuries a society in which woman must serve him if she is to survive.”

Elizabeth Gould Davis book The First Sex

The First Sex, ch. 22 - Woman in the Aquarian Age (1971).

Women, Men, Dependency

“Bowie's a real man, and I'm a real woman — just like Catherine Deneuve.”

Iggy Pop (1947) American rock singer-songwriter, musician, and actor

An earlier quote mentioned in the article.
Rolling Stone interview (2003)

“She remembered home as a place where there were always too many children, a cross man and work piling up around a sick woman.”

Willa Cather book My Ántonia

Book III, Ch. 4
My Antonia (1918)

Children, Home

“If you're a woman who doesn't know how to write, you're going to cry every night. But if you do, no problem.”

Molly Shannon (1964) American actress

Interview on Cranky Critic http://www.crankycritic.com/qa/mollyshannon.html

Problem, Cry, Night

“[H]e was now a cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his experiment, and, at length, converting man and woman to be his puppets, and pulling the wires that moved them to such degrees of crime as were demanded by his study.
Thus Ethan Brand became a fiend. He began to be so from the moment that his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement with his intellect.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

p, 125
"Ethan Brand" (1850)

Nature, Study

“These days, it seemed that the only thing he was certain about was the knowledge that he wouldn't trade his years with Gabby for anything. Without her, his life had little meaning. He was a small-town husband with a small-town occupation and his cares were no different from anyone else's. He'd been neither a leader nor a follower, nor had he been someone who would be remembered long after he passed away. He was the most ordinary of men with only one exception: He'd fallen in love with a woman named Gabby, his love deepening in the years they'd been married. But fate had conspired to ruin all that, and now he spent long periods of his days wondering whether it was humanly possible to fix things between them.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Travis Parker, Chapter 15, p. 199
2000s, The Choice (2007)

Love, Life, Men, Fate

“Most women would like to dress imaginatively, but they glare at any woman who does.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

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

Women, Imagination

“And like every woman who has ever preached repentance to unregenerate youth, she dwelt on the sin of an empty life, which always seems so much more scandalous in the country, where people rise early to see if a new strawberry has happened during the night.”

Saki (1870–1916) British writer

"Reginald's Choir Treat"
Reginald (1904)

Life, People, Youth, Night

“Can desire grow out of admiration, or are the two quite distinct species? What would it be like to lie side by side, naked, breast to breast, with a woman one principally admires?”

J.M. Coetzee book Slow Man

Slow Man (2004)

Lie

“When I arrived at the place of the execution, the gunmen fired into a pit the size of several rooms. They fired from small submachine guns. As I arrived, I saw a Jewish woman and a small child in her arms in the pit. I wanted to pull out the child, but then a bullet smashed the skull of the child. My driver wiped brain particles from my leather coat.”

Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer

CBC report (2000)

“You have no right to be jealous of a woman who wants to be more of a woman by watching a man dressed up as a woman.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

8 1/2 Women

“For a woman to be complete, she has to be a blend of Paro and Chandramukhi [the two women who love Devdas. I feel that I am that woman.”

Rekha (1954) Indian film actress

Quoted in Rekha: The divine diva, 17 May 2003, 7 December 2013, Rediff.com http://www.rediff.com/entertai/2003/may/17dinesh.htm,

Love, Women, Feeling

“Love makes a woman beautiful –
but beauty does not have such power, beauty cannot make a woman worthy of love.”

Walther von der Vogelweide (1170–1230) Middle High German lyric poet

Liebe machet schoene wîp:
desn mac diu schoene niht getuon, sin machet niemer lieben lîp.
"Herzeliebez vrowelîn", line 17; translation from Frederick Goldin German and Italian Lyrics of the Middle Ages (New York: Anchor, 1973) p. 121.

Love, Beauty

“a woman can
drop
out of your
life and
forget you
real fast.
a woman
can't go anywhere
but UP
after
leaving you,
honey.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

"pulled down shade"
The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992)

Life, Forgetting

“I've learned so much from being a mom about the kind of person I want to be, the kind of woman I want to be. Motherhood has taught me mindfulness. If you just parent on instinct, you'll screw your kid up for life. You have to be so mindful.”

Gwyneth Paltrow (1972) American actress, singer, and food writer

Interview with Gwyneth Paltrow, Good Housekeeping http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/family/celebrity-interviews/gwyneth-paltrow-interview-country-strong (2010)

Life, Moms, Parent, Learning

“She walked over to my desk and pulled a page out of the typewriter. I didn't know what was happening. I still said nothing, but I could smell liquor on her breath, and then the very peculiar but distinctive odor of decay, sweetish and cloying, the odor of oldness, the odor of this woman in the process of growing old.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

“Woman to Devil) I want to refinance my soul. (Devil) You’re going to take a bath on points. (p.78”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Sylvia cartoon strip

Soul

“Forget Schwarzenegger and the movies. This is pure pulp fiction from the 1930s, before political corrections and focus groups dictated the direction of our art. Swords spin, entrails spill, and woman swoon.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

~ Men's Health magazine
About

Men, Health, Art, Forgetting

“You can lose a woman when you have won her.”

Max Frisch book Montauk

Montauk (1975)

“Even after the part with the Ten Commandments, we still have God's self-appointed prophet ordering his army of barbaric thieves to pillage villages, killing every man, woman and child, but ironically some predominantly atheist countries in the modern world have finally achieved that sort of peaceful society [purported to be the product of a land governed under Mosaic law], with high education [and] very low crime, and the greatest threat to that comes from religious fundamentalists.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, The Damn Commandments https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u3z69YpLx0 (January 7, 2015)

God, World, Education, Peace

“She was the most intelligent woman of her day and she refused to get married in nine languages.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part V: Merrie England, Elizabeth

Intelligence

“I wonder how it is with you, Harold? If I don't have a woman for three days, I get terrible headaches.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1961
Source: Conversation with Harold Macmillan, in Bermuda (1961) as recounted by Richard Reeves in his book President Kennedy: Profile of Power (1994)

“If you conclude, as I do, that the only hope of a permanent peace and happiness for humanity on this planet is an increased expression of love, and that women are the primary carriers of this great force, one of the problems we face is to provide women with more opportunity for using their love powers. The last six thousand years have demonstrated quite conclusively, I believe, that woman under the domination of man can increase but meagerly the world's total love supply. Our obvious goal, than must be to devise social mechanisms whereby man is brought under the love domination of woman.”

William Moulton Marston (1893–1947) American psychologist, lawyer, inventor and comic book writer

Women: Servants for Civilization (1941), p. 44, as quoted in The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times, edited by Joseph J. Darowski, p. 9; in the essay "William Marston's Feminist Agenda", by Michelle R. Finn.

Love, Women, Happiness, World

“In Massachusetts, where properly qualified "persons" were allowed to practice law, the Supreme Court decided that a woman was not a "person," and a special act of the legislature had to be passed before Miss Lelia Robinson could be admitted to the bar. But today women are lawyers.”

Lucy Stone (1818–1893) American abolitionist and suffragist

The Progress of Fifty Years (1893)

Women, Law, Personality

“The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters. This whole notion was advanced by Mary McCarthy and many others years ago, that the main function of the novel was to carry out a kind of moral criticism of life. But the writer has no business making moral judgments or trying to set himself up as a one-man or one-woman magistrate's court. I think it's far better, as Burroughs did and I've tried to do in my small way, to tell the truth.”

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer

"J.G. Ballard on William S. Burrough's Naked Truth" by Richard Kadrey in Salon (2 September 1997) http://web.archive.org/web/20000511215816/http://www.salon.com/sept97/wsb2970902.html

Life, Truth, Way, Business

“(On her role in The Locket) My character was the greatest challenge I ever had – a destructive young woman who's a kleptomaniac. The form of the film – flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks – was criticised by some reviewers of the time as too confusing. Today, though, its style is highly regarded by film historians... Many movie fans seem to remember me best from the Dr. Kildare series but, first and foremost, I remember The Locket.”

Laraine Day (1920–2007) American actress

The Independent, Obituaries, Laraine Day, November 13, 2007.

Time

“Don’t ever wear artistic jewellry; it wrecks a woman’s reputation.”

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

Aunt Alicia
Gigi (1945)

“Grief that is dazed and speechless is out of fashion: the modern woman mourns her husband loudly and tells you the whole story of his death, which distresses her so much that she forgets not the slightest detail about it.”

Jean de La Bruyère book Les Caractères

Les douleurs muettes et stupides sont hors d'usage: on pleure, on récite, on répète, on est si touchée de la mort de son mari, qu'on n'en oublie pas la moindre circonstance.
Aphorism 79
Les Caractères (1688), Des Femmes

Death, Fashion, Forgetting

“It is the conscious man or woman who finds the secret of happiness and contentment; and that, surely, is the ultimate success.”

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

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Happiness, Secret, Success

“There is no authority in the Bible for a woman to have a place of supremacy in the church. When she takes it she steps out of her right place. She goes against the plain teaching of The Bible when she takes the place of the authoritative teacher in the church.”

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

Cults, Sects and Questions (c. 1979)

Teachers

“She dhresses herself to keep him with her, but it's no use – afther a month or two, th'wondher of a woman wears off.”

Sean O`Casey The Plough and the Stars

Mrs. Grogan, Act 1
The Plough and the Stars (1926)

“If you still want to paint the Old Testament God as being mean and the New Testament God as being nice, please realize that the God of the New Testament proclaimed the death sentence on every man, on every woman, and on every child of the human race.”

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

Nothing Created Everything: The Scientific Impossibility of Atheistic Evolution (2009)

Death, God, Painting

“The devil came to Eve in Genesis chapter three, ‘The serpent said unto the woman, ‘Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” First sentence out of the devil's mouth was a question to make Eve doubt God's word. He always does that by the way. He’s always going to make you try to doubt God's word. The second thing he said to the woman was, ‘Ye shall not surely die:’ Now he’s calling God a liar. The third thing he said to the woman was, ‘Hey, if you eat off that tree, ye shall be as gods.’ And right there is where the whole idea of Evolution got started. It didn’t start with Charley Darwin. It started with Satan in the Garden of Eden. He wants you to think you can become like gods. Yes boys and girls, we are evolving. We started off like an amoeba and we’re getting bigger and better and stronger and smarter and in some day we’re going to sail around the universe and discover new life forms like Star Trek.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Age of the Earth

Life, God, Way, Girl

“No woman could ever hurt me, because I don't permit myself to wish for something from people. So they can't disappoint me.”

Vincent Gallo (1961) American film director, writer, model, actor and musician

GIOIA Magazine Interview

People, Disappointment, Hurt

“There's a cockeyed yellow poodle to the north of Conga Pooch;
There's a little hot cross bun that's turning green;
There's a double-jointed woman doing tricks in Chu-Chin-Chow,
And you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.”

Billy Bennett (1887–1942) British comedian

"The Green Tie on the Little Yellow Dog", line 37

“Imagine!, the two most important Sahabah in Islam, racing to help an old blind woman, at night and at the edge of the city!.”

Mohammed Alkobaisi (1970) Iraqi Islamic scholar

Understanding Islam, "Morals and Ethics" http://vod.dmi.ae/media/96716/Ep_03_Morals_and_Ethics Dubai Media

Imagination, Help, Night

“Raw sex is the last thing you are going to encounter in a Jane Austen woman.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

8 1/2 Women

Sex

“[Choir of] Men: There is no beast, no rush of fire, like woman so untamed. She calmly goes her way where even panthers would be shamed.
[Choir of] Women: And yet you are fool enough, it seems, to dare to war with me, when for your faithful ally you might win me easily.”

Aristophanés Lysistrata

tr. Lindsay 1925, Perseus http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Aristoph.+Lys.+1014 Lysistrata, line 1014-1017 Lysistrata (411 BC)

Women, Men, War, Faith

“Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Act II
1910s, Pygmalion (1912)

Life, Women

“I slept with a woman on the ship, and afterwards I was thinking, "Am I gaaaay? Am I straaaaight?" And then I realized: I'm just slutty. Where's my parade?”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Tours and CDs, I'm The One That I Want Tour

Thinking

“The really clever thing, in affairs of this sort, is not to win a woman already desired by everyone, but to discover such a prize while she is still unknown.”

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

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“Children were meant to be gifts. The physical manifestation of love between a man and a woman. And for that love all manner of sacrifice could be borne.”

Steven Erikson book Memories of Ice

Memories of Ice (2001)

Love, Children

“If a woman reveals herself as more useful the lama could very well be reincarnated in this form.”

Tenzin Gyatso (1935) spiritual leader of Tibet

News conference in Italy, as quoted in "Dalai Lama says successor could be a woman" in Telegraph (07 Dec 2007) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1571850/Dalai-Lama-says-successor-could-be-a-woman.html

“Because I believe we are made the way God made man and woman and man and woman come together to have a union to produce children which keeps civilization going and provide the best environment for children to be raised. I think that is something society should value and should give privileged status over a group of people who want to have a relationship together.”

Rick Santorum (1958) American politician

on same-sex marriage
Santorum Draws Boos From College Crowd for Opposing Gay Marriage
Julianna
Goldman
2012-01-12
San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/01/10/bloomberg_articlesLXCV300D9L35.DTL#ixzz1jeLR1ECw
2012-01-16
http://web.archive.org/web/20120112222601/http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/01/10/bloomberg_articlesLXCV300D9L35.DTL#ixzz1jeLR1ECw
2012-01-12

God, Children, People, Way

“I can wait: waiting and patience mean nothing to the eternal. I gave the woman the greatest of gifts: curiosity. By that her seed has been saved from my wrath; for I also am curious; and I have waited always to see what they will do tomorrow.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Source: 1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)

Waiting, Patience

“A beauty is a woman you notice; a charmer is one who notices you.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

As quoted in The Stevenson Wit (1965) edited by Bill Adler

Beauty

“I'm a real woman with a real heart and I have to live with a beautiful body and a pretty face which is not nearly as easy as it sounds.”

Loni Anderson (1945) actress

Quoted in the New York Post November 4, 1980

Beauty, Heart

“We are in the process of seeing the fulfillment of Edgar Allan Poe's prophecy in which the painter, impassioned by his mistress-model and also by his art, "did not want to see that the colors he spread on his canvas were taken from the cheeks of the woman seated beside him. And when several weeks had passed, and very little remained to be done, nothing but a stroke on the mouth and a glaze over the eye, the mistress’s spirit still flickered like the flame at the base of a lamp. Then he put on the final touch, put the glaze in place, and for a moment the painter stood in ecstasy before the work he had finished. But a moment later, he was struck with panic, and shouting with a piercing voice: ‘It is truly Life itself,’ he suddenly turned around to look at his mistress. She was dead."”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

Nothing ever constrains us to face what is dying when we see it so alive in our images.
J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 208
The Humiliation of the Word (1981)

Life, Art, Color, Dead

“On stage and off, we care what happens to a beautiful woman, whether she can act well or not.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Beauty

“I was learning that, even for a woman with power, the path was dotted with land mines—she's so ambitious. she's so aggressive. she's ruthless. "Funny thing," I used to say, "a man has to be Joe McCarthy to be called ruthless... all a woman has to do is put you on hold."”

Marlo Thomas (1937) American actress, producer, and social activist

Growing Up Laughing: My Story and the Story of Funny http://books.google.com/books?id=pbVDuMYsLJQC&q=%22A+man+has+to+be+Joe+McCarthy+to+be+called+ruthless+All+a+woman+has+to+do+is+put+you+on+hold%22&pg=PT218#v=onepage (2010)

Learning

“Being an ugly woman is like being a man. You're gonna have to work. Yep.”

Daniel Tosh (1975) American stand-up comedian

Happy Thoughts (2011)

“I can tell a woman's age in half a minute — and I do!”

W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) English librettist of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

Princess Ida (1884)

Age

“It can take up to 100 chinchillas to make one coat and Jennifer Lopez has one made of 80 of them, all killed by electrocution or having their necks snapped. … Besides, wearing fur makes you look like an old woman!”

Natalie Imbruglia (1975) British-Australian singer and actor

Interview with Britain's Cosmopolitan magazine; as quoted in "Jennifer Lopez's coat massacre", FemaleFirst.co.uk (November 2005) http://www.femalefirst.co.uk/celebrity/Jennifer+Lopez-7304.html.

“I was talking to a friend about it recently and I told him that the thing about making that film that upset me most was how cruel Lars is to the woman he is working with. Not that I can't take it, because I'm pretty tough and completely capable of defending myself, but because my ideals of the ultimate creator were shattered. And my friend said "What did you expect? All major directors are "sexist", a maker is not necessarily an expert in human rights or female/male equality!
My answer was that you can take quite sexist film directors like Woody Allen or Stanley Kubrick and still they are the one that provide the soul to their movies. In Lars von Trier's case it is not so and he knows it. He needs a female to provide his work soul. And he envies them and hates them for it. So he has to destroy them during the filming. And hide the evidence. What saves him as an artist, though, is that he is so painfully honest that even though he will manage to cover up his crime in the "real" world (he is a genius to set things up that everybody thinks it is just his female-actress-at-the-moment imagination, that she is just hysterical or pre-menstrual), his films become a documentation of this "soul-robbery.”

Björk (1965) Icelandic singer-songwriter

Breaking the Waves is the clearest example of that. bjork." From the www.bjork.com http://www.bjork.com 4um, posted by Björk in response to a question about her conflict with director Lars von Trier during the production of Dancer in the Dark. Other quotes

Hate, World, Soul, Imagination

“[Oblomov:] "Picture a thief or a fallen woman or a cheated fool, if you like, but do not forget the rest of mankind. What about humanity, pray? Writers like yourself try to write only with the head. What? Do you suppose the intellect can work separately from the heart? Why, the intellect needs love to fertilize it. Rather, stretch out your hand to the fallen and raise him, weep over him if he is lost beyond recall, but in no case make sport of him, for he is one to whom there should be extended only compassion. See in him yourself, and act accordingly. That done, I will read you, and bow my head before you."”

Ivan Goncharov book Oblomov

[...] "Give me man, and man alone" said Oblomov. "And, having given me him, do you try to love him."
"Oblomov", Part I Chapter II by I. Goncharov, translated by C. J. Hogarth

Love, Fools, Sport, Reading

“Hosting the Oscars is like making love to a beautiful woman — it's something I only get to do when Billy Crystal's out of town.”

Steve Martin (1945) American actor, comedian, musician, author, playwright, and producer

Hosting the 2001 Academy Awards

Love, Making love, Beauty

“Wedding: the point at which a man stops toasting a woman and begins roasting her.”

Helen Rowland (1875–1950) American journalist

Syncopations
A Guide to Men (1922)

Wedding, Wedding

“We are all fools sometimes, child, yet a wise woman learns to limit how often.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Lelaine Akashi to Nynaeve al'Meara
(15 October 1994)

Fools, Learning

“A woman is not complimentary to a man, but she embodies his lack (which is why Lacan can say that a beautiful woman is a perfect incarnation of man's castration).”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

194
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Beauty, Perfection

“Pooh! Pooh! Nonsense!' was the reply, 'that's all very well in theory, but it doesn't work so. The returning of slaves amounts to nothing in fact. All that is obsolete. And why make all this row? Can't you hush? We've nothing to do with slavery, we tell you. We can't touch it; and if you persist in this agitation about a mere form and theory, why, you're a set of pestilent fanatics and traitors; and if you get your noisy heads broken, you get just what you deserve'. And they quoted in the faces of the abolitionists the words of Governor Edward Everett, who was not an authority with them, in that fatal inaugural address, 'The patriotism of all classes of citizens must be invited to abstain from a discussion which, by exasperating the master, can have no other effect than to render more oppressive the condition of the slave'. It was as if some kindly Pharisee had said to Christ, 'Don't try to cast out that evil spirit; it may rend the body on departing'. Was it not as if some timid citizen had said, 'Don't say hard things of intemperance lest the dram-shops, to spite us, should give away the rum'? And so the battle raged. The abolitionists dashed against slavery with passionate eloquence like a hail of hissing fire. They lashed its supporters with the scorpion whip of their invective. Ambition, reputation, ortune, ease, life itself they threw upon the consuming altar of their cause. Not since those earlier fanatics of freedom, Patrick Henry and James Otis, has the master chord of human nature, the love of liberty, been struck with such resounding power. It seemed in vain, so slowly their numbers increased, so totally were they outlawed from social and political and ecclesiastical recognition. The merchants of Boston mobbed an editor for virtually repeating the Declaration of Independence. The city of New York looked on and smiled while the present United States marshal insulted a woman as noble and womanly and humane as Florence Nightingale. In other free States men were flying for their lives; were mobbed, seized, imprisoned, maimed, murdered; but still as, in the bitter days of Puritan persecution in Scotland, the undaunted voices of the Covenanters were heard singing the solemn songs of God that echoed and re-echoed from peak to peak of the barren mountains, until the great dumb wilderness was vocal with praise — so in little towns and great cities were heard the uncompromising voices of these men sternly intoning the majestic words of the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence, which echoed from solitary heart to heart until the whole land rang with the litany of liberty.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Love, Life, Men, God

“"I underestimated you, woman."… "The cry of men down the ages."”

David Gemmell book The King Beyond the Gate

Source: Drenai series, The King Beyond the Gate, Ch. 15

Men, Age, Cry

“Witch, n. (1) An ugly and repulsive old woman, in a wicked league with the devil. (2) A beautiful and attractive young woman, in wickedness a league beyond the devil.”

Ambrose Bierce book The Devil's Dictionary

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

Beauty

“This was Marianne, the revolutionary heroine, the French equivalent of Uncle Sam. This being France, instead of a bearded old uncle who looks as if he should be advertising fried chicken, they have a seminaked woman.”

Stephen Clarke book A Year in the Merde

On Marianne, the symbol of France:
A Year in the Merde (2005)

“Because of the effects of sin, mistakes have added up in the genes of humans so that today, deformities could result from close relatives marrying. Adam and Eve's children would have had relatively few mistakes in the genes compared to today. So, provided it was one man for one woman for life - there would not have been a problem at all for Cain to marry his sister!”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

Did Adam have a Bellybutton?: And other tough questions about the Bible (2000)

Life, Children, Problem, Sister

“This past summer I realized that I am not the sort of woman to stand alone in life. Apart from the eternal worries about money, it is precisely the freedom I have had which was able to lure me away from myself. I would so much like to get to the point where I can create something that is me. It is up to the future to determine for us whether I'm acting bravely or not. The main thing now is peace and quiet for my work, and I have that most of all when I am at Otto Modersohn's side.”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

In a letter to her friend Clara Rilke-Westhoff, 17 November 1906; as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 206
1906 + 1907

Life, Money, Peace, Freedom

“Sex is too easy for women to get, and too hard for men. I mean, honestly, for a man to walk into someplace and have every woman ready to take him home, he'd have to rule the world. A woman would have to do her hair.”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

The Golden Goose Special (1997)

Women, Men, World, Sex

“In recent times it just seems that women have been relegated to either romantic roles or fluff pieces. So the appeal, for me, is to make a picture about a real woman.”

Clint Eastwood (1930) actor and director from the United States

Maher, Kevin, " Clint Eastwood the bashful legend: somebody stop me http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article5137911.ece," Times Online, (2008-11-13).

Women, Time

“For a mother the project of raising a boy is the most fulfilling project she can hope for. She can watch him, as a child, play the games she was not allowed to play; she can invest in him her ideas, aspirations, ambitions, and values — or whatever she has left of them; she can watch her son, who came from her flesh and whose life was sustained by her work and devotion, embody her in the world. So while the project of raising a boy is fraught with ambivalence and leads inevitably to bitterness, it is the only project that allows a woman to be — to be through her son, to live through her son.”

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

Speech, first delivered at Queens College, City University of New York (March 12, 1975). "The Sexual Politics of Fear and Courage", ch. 5, Our Blood (1976).

Life, World, Hope, Game

“People more readily credit men with leadership ability and more readily accept men as leaders. What is assertive in a man can appear abrasive in a woman, and female leaders risk appearing too feminine or not feminine enough.”

Barbara Kellerman (1939) American academic

Source: Women and leadership, 2007, p. 7

Men, People, Appearance

“The old “double standard” gave men a sexual liberty denied to women. Marxist feminists reduced the historical cult of woman’s virginity to her property value, her worth on the male marriage market. I would argue instead that there was and is a biological basis to the double standard. The first medical reports on the disease killing male homosexuals [i. e., AIDS] indicated men most at risk were those with a thousand partners over their lifetime. Incredulity. Who could such people be? Why, it turns out, everyone one knew. Serious, kind, literate men, not bums or thugs.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 27

Women, Men, Marriage, People

“If … we meet a man of acknowledged mental superiority, whether generally or in his special department, it is our social duty by intelligent questioning, by an anxiety to learn from him, to force him to condescend to our ignorance, or join in our fun, till his broader sympathies are awakened, and he plays with us as if we were children. Indeed this very metaphor points out one of the very remarkable instances of social equality asserted by an inferior—I mean the outspoken freedom of the child—which possesses a peculiar charm, and often thaws the dignity or dissipates the reserve of the great man and woman whose superiority is a perpetual obstacle to them in ordinary society.”

John Pentland Mahaffy (1839–1919) Irish classicist and polymathic scholar

Conversation (1896), p. 104 http://books.google.com/books?id=1yEVAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA104

Children, Intelligence, Question, Freedom

“Of all violent passions, the least unbecoming to a woman is love.”

François de La Rochefoucauld book Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims

De toutes les passions violentes, celle qui sied le moins mal aux femmes, c'est l'amour.
Maxim 466.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

Love, Passion

“As [Phoenix] drew near her room, she heard a woman's voice saying, "It will be easier for us when that monster of yours dies."
"There will be another one, and she will be the same," answered Chia Lien's voice.
"You can make Patience your wife," the woman said. "She will be easier to manage."
"She won't even let me touch Patience," Chia Lien said. "And Patience doesn't dare complain, though she doesn't like her vigilance either. I wonder what I have done to deserve such a wife."
Phoenix shook with rage. Thinking that Patience must have complained behind her back, she turned to her and slapped her face. She then burst into the room, seized Pao-er's wife and struck her repeatedly. Fearing that Chia Lien would bolt from the room, she planted herself at the door while she denounced the woman. "Prostitute!" she cried, "you seduce your mistress's husband and then plot to murder her! And you," she turned to Patience, "you prostitutes are all in conspiracy against me, though you pretend to be on my side." She struck Patience again.
Patience was outraged. She cried, "You two—is it not enough for you to do this shameful thing without dragging me in?" She also made for Pao-er's wife.
Chia Lien, who had until now stood helplessly watching Phoenix beat Pao-er's wife, took the opportunity to hide his own embarrassment by beating Patience. "Who are you to raise your hand against her?" he said to the maid.
Patience retreated and said, weeping, "But why did you drag me into it?"
Phoenix's anger mounted when she saw that Patience was afraid of Chia Lien and commanded her to ignore him and beat Pao-er's wife. The maid, outraged and helpless, ran out of the room, crying and threatening to kill herself.
Phoenix now threw herself at Chia Lien, crying that he might as well kill her then and there since he wanted to get rid of her. Chia Lien grew desperate. He seized a sword from the wall and said he would gladly oblige if she insisted.
Yu-shih and others arrived on the scene. "What is the matter now?"”

Wang Chi-chen (1899–2001)

she asked. "Everything was going well a moment ago."
Emboldened by the presence of the newcomers, Chia Lien became more menacing. Phoenix, on the other hand, quieted herself and left the scene to seek the protection of the Matriarch. She threw herself sobbing into the Matriarch's arms and said, "Save me, Lao Tai-tai. Lien Er-yeh wants to kill me."
Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (1958), pp. 198–199

Fear, Thinking, Rage, Cry

“Here I am quite alone amongst the Oaks and solitudes of Helmingham Park. I have taken quiet possession of the parsonage finding it quite empty. A woman comes up from the farm house (where I eat) and makes the bed; and I am left at liberty to wander were I please during the day. There are abundance of fine trees of all sort; through the place upon the whole affords good objects [rather] than fine scenery, but I can badly judge yet what I may have to shew You. I have made one of two… drawing that may be useful. I shall not come home yet.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Quote from Constable's letter to John Dunthorne on his drawing: 'Helmingham Dell,' 1800, as quoted in Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams, Constable (Tate Gallery Publications, London, 1993), p. 391
1800s - 1810s

Home, Solitude, Tree, Drawing

“Competition with women is almost always a net loss of honor for a man. Men don't consider competition between men and women to be "apples to apples." I don't think women do either… What does a man have to gain? He shows no courage by entering the ring with a woman. He is expected to win. If he does, his victory is shallow and unsavory. He gains no honor in beating a woman- the idea is offensive even to a modern man's vestigial sense of chivalry.”

Jack Donovan (1974) American activist, editor and writer

Pg 75
A Sky Without Eagles (2014)

Women, Men, Idea, Courage