Quotes about woman
page 35

Sandra Fluke photo

“One woman told us doctors believe she has endometriosis, but it can’t be proven without surgery, so the insurance hasn’t been willing to cover her medication.”

Sandra Fluke (1981) American women's rights activist and lawyer

U.S. Congressional testimony (February 23, 2012)

George Gordon Byron photo

“What say you to such a supper with such a woman?”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Note to a Letter on Bowles's Strictures, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Peter Greenaway photo
William Moulton Marston photo

“Give men an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to and they'll be proud to become her willing slaves.”

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

Are Comics Fascist?, as quoted in The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times, edited by Joeph J Darowski, p.7 in the essay "William Marston's Feminist Agenda" by Michelle R. Finn, p.14.

Rush Limbaugh photo

“I prefer to call the most obnoxious feminists what they really are: feminazis. Tom Hazlett, a good friend who is an esteemed and highly regarded professor of economics at the University of California at Davis, coined the term to describe any female who is intolerant of any point of view that challenges militant feminism. I often use it to describe women who are obsessed with perpetuating a modern-day holocaust: abortion. There are 1.5 million abortions a year, and some feminists almost seem to celebrate that figure. There are not many of them, but they deserve to be called feminazis.A feminazi is a woman to whom the most important thing in life is seeing to it that as many abortions as possible are performed. Their unspoken reasoning is quite simple. Abortion is the single greatest avenue for militant women to exercise their quest for power and advance their belief that men aren't necessary. They don't need men in order to be happy. They certainly don't want males to be able to exercise any control over them. Abortion is the ultimate symbol of women's emancipation from the power and influence of men. With men being precluded from the ultimate decision-making process regarding the future of life in the womb, they are reduced to their proper, inferior role. Nothing matters but me, says the feminazi. My concerns prevail over all else. The fetus doesn't matter, it's an unviable tissue mass.”

Rush Limbaugh (1951) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, author, and television personality

[The Way Things Ought to Be, Pocket Books, October 1992, 193, 978-0671751456, 92028659, 26397008, 1724938M]

Anna Sui photo
John Crowley photo

“Seeing a woman's child is like seeing a woman naked, in the way it changes how her face looks to you, how her face becomes less the whole story.”

John Crowley (1942) American writer

Bk. 2, Ch. 3
Little, Big: or, The Fairies' Parliament (1981)

Arundhati Roy photo

“He is Karna, whom the world has abandoned. Karna Alone. Condemned goods. A prince raised in poverty. Born to die unfairly, unarmed and alone at the hands of his brother. Majestic in his complete despair. Praying on the banks of the Ganga. Stoned out of his skull.
Then Kunti appeared. She too was a man, but a man grown soft and womanly, a man with breasts, from doing female parts for years. Her movements were fluid. Full of women. Kunti, too, was stoned. High on the same shared joints. She had come to tell Karna a story.
Karna inclined his beautiful head and listened.
Red-eyed, Kunti danced for him. She told him of a young woman who had been granted a boon. A secret mantra that she could use to choose a lover from among the gods. Of how, with the imprudence of youth, the woman decided to test it to see if it really worked. How she stood alone in an empty field, turned her face to the heavens and recited the mantra. The words had scarcely left her foolish lips, Kunti said, when Surya, the God of Day, appeared before her. The young woman, bewitched by the beauty of the shimmering young god, gave herself to him. Nine months later she bore him a son. The baby was born sheathed in light, with gold earrings in his ears and a gold breastplate on his chest, engraved with the emblem of the sun.
The young mother loved her first-born son deeply, Kunti said, but she was unmarried and couldn't keep him. She put him in a reed basket and cast him away in a river. The child was found downriver by Adhirata, a charioteer. And named Karna.
Karna looked up to Kunti. Who was she? Who was my mother? Tell me where she is. Take me to her.
Kunti bowed her head. She's here, she said. Standing before you.
Karna's elation and anger at the revelation. His dance of confusion and despair. Where were you, he asked her, when I needed you the most? Did you ever hold me in your arms? Did you feed me? Did you ever look for me? Did you wonder where I might be?
In reply Kunti took the regal face in her hands, green the face, red the eyes, and kissed him on his brow. Karna shuddered in delight. A warrior reduced to infancy. The ecstasy of that kiss. He dispatched it to the ends of his body. To his toes. His fingertips. His lovely mother's kiss. Did you know how much I missed you? Rahel could see it coursing through his veins, as clearly as an egg travelling down an ostrich's neck.
A travelling kiss whose journey was cut short by dismay when Karna realised that his mother had revealed herself to him only to secure the safety of her five other, more beloved sons - the Pandavas - poised on the brink of their epic battle with their one hundred cousins. It is them that Kunti sought to protect by announcing to Karna that she was his mother. She had a promise to extract.
She invoked the Love Laws.”

pages 232-233.
The God of Small Things (1997)

Peter Greenaway photo
Dante Gabriel Rossetti photo
Jean Paul Sartre photo
Rebecca West photo
John Gay photo
John Calvin photo

“The Hindus of this region had been victims of Muslim high-handedness for a long time, particularly in respect of their women. Murshid Qulî Khãn, the faujdãr of Mathura who died in 1638, was notorious for seizing “all their most beautiful women” and forcing them into his harem. “On the birthday of Krishna,” narrates Ma’sîr-ul-Umara, “a vast gathering of Hindu men and women takes place at Govardhan on the Jumna opposite Mathura. The Khan, painting his forehead and wearing dhoti like a Hindu, used to walk up and down in the crowd. Whenever he saw a woman whose beauty filled even the moon with envy, he snatched her away like a wolf pouncing upon a flock, and placing her in the boat which his men kept ready on the bank, he sped to Agra. The Hindu [for shame] never divulged what had happened to his daughter.” Another notorious faujdãr of Mathura was Abdu’n Nabî Khãn. He plundered the people unscrupulously and amassed great wealth. But his worst offence was the pulling down of the foremost Hindu temple in the heart of Mathura and building a Jãmi‘ Masjid on its site. This he did in AD 1660-61. Soon after, in 1665, Aurangzeb imposed a pilgrim tax on the Hindus. In 1668, he prohibited celebration of all Hindu festivals, particularly Holi and Diwali. The Jats who rightly regarded themselves as the defenders of Hindu hounour were no longer in a mood to take it lying. (Jadunath Sarkar, History of Aurangzeb, Vol. III, Calcutta, 1972 )”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume II (1993)

Pauline Kael photo
Louis C.K. photo
Margaret Thatcher photo
Henry Miller photo
John Cheever photo
Camille Paglia photo
Max Frisch photo
Walter Scott photo

“Woman's faith and woman's trust,
Write the characters in dust.”

The Betrothed, Chap. xx.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Paul of Tarsus photo
Erich Fromm photo
Miep Gies photo

“I myself am just an ordinary woman. I simply had no choice.”

Miep Gies (1909–2010) Dutch citizen who hid Anne Frank

Jewish Virtual Library http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Miep_Gies.html

André Maurois photo
Camille Paglia photo

“Woman's flirtatious arts of self-concealment mean man's approach must take the form of rape.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 276

Marianne von Werefkin photo
Florence Nightingale photo
James Branch Cabell photo
Camille Paglia photo

“Sappho and Emily Dickinson are the only woman geniuses in poetic history.”

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, p. 203

Luis Buñuel photo
James Martin (priest) photo
Mike Tyson photo
Robert Jordan photo
Berthe Morisot photo

“I do not think any man would ever treat a woman as his equal, and it is all I ask because I know my worth.”

Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) painter from France

from a long unpublished notebook of Berthe Morisot, 1890; as cited in Berthe Morisot, Jean-Dominique Rey; translation in English, Flammarion, S.A. (ISBN: 978-2-08-020345-8), Paris, 2010, 2016, p. 14
1881 - 1895

Guillaume Apollinaire photo

“Farewell, false love, I took you for
The woman that I lost last year
Forever as I think:
I loved her but I will not see
Her any more in Germany.
O Milky Way, sister in whiteness
To Canaan's rivers and the bright
Bodies of lovers drowned,
Can we follow toilsomely
Your path to other nebulae?”

Adieu faux amour confondu
Avec la femme qui s'éloigne
Avec celle que j'ai perdue
L'année dernière en Allemagne
Et que je ne reverrai plus
Voie lactée ô sœur lumineuse
Des blancs ruisseaux de Chanaan
Et des corps blancs des amoureuses
Nageurs morts suivrons-nous d’ahan
Ton cours vers d'autres nébuleuses
"La Chanson du Mal-Aimé" (Song of the Poorly Loved), line 56; translation by William Meredith, from Francis Steegmuller Apollinaire: Poet Among the Painters (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973) p. 95.
Alcools (1912)

Richard Stallman photo

“Andrew Holland was prosecuted in the UK for possessing "extreme pornography", a term which appears to mean porn that judges and prosecutors consider shocking. He had received a video showing a tiger having sex with a woman, or at least apparently so.
He was found innocent because the video he received was a joke. I am glad he was not punished, but this law is nonetheless a threat to other people. If Mr Holland had had a serious video depicting a tiger having sex with a woman, he still would not deserve to go to prison. … I've read that male dolphins try to have sex with humans, and female apes solicit sex from humans. What is wrong with giving them what they want, if that's what turns you on, or even just to gratify them?
But this law is not concerned with protecting animals, since it does not care whether the animal really had sex, or really existed at all. It only panders to the prejudice of censors.
A parrot once had sex with me. I did not recognize the act as sex until it was explained to me afterward, but being stroked on the hand by his soft belly feathers was so pleasurable that I yearn for another chance. I have a photo of that act; should I go to prison for it?
Perhaps I am spared because this photo isn't "disgusting", but "disgusting" is a subjective matter; we must not imprison people merely because someone feels disgusted. I find the sight of wounds disgusting; fortunately surgeons do not. Maybe there is someone who considers it disgusting for a parrot to have sex with a human. Or for a dolphin or tiger to have sex with a human. So what? Others feel that all sex is disgusting. There are prejudiced people that want to ban all depiction of sex, and force all women to cover their faces. This law and the laws they want are the same in spirit.
Threatening people with death or injury is a very bad thing, but violence is no less bad for being nonsexual. Is it worse to shoot someone while stroking that person's genitals than to shoot someone from a few feet away? If I were going to be the victim, and I were invited to choose one or the other, I would choose whichever one gave me the best chance to escape.
Images of violence can be painful to see, but they are no better for being nonsexual. I saw images of gruesome bodily harm in the movie Pulp Fiction. I do not want to see anything like that again, sex or no sex. That is no reason to censor these works, and would still not be a reason even if most people reacted to them as I do.
Since the law doesn't care whether a real human was really threatened with harm, it is not really concerned about our safety from violence, any more than it is concerned with avoiding suffering for corpses or animals. It is only prejudice, taking a form that can ruin people's lives.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

"Extreme Pornography Law in the UK" (2010) http://stallman.org/articles/extreme.html
2010s

Muhammad photo
Kate Bush photo
John Knox photo
Jerry Sadowitz photo

“How do you give a woman an orgasm? Who cares!”

Jerry Sadowitz (1961) Scottish comedian

The Pall-Bearer's Revue (1992)

John Heywood photo

“A woman hath nyne lyues like a cat.”

John Heywood (1497–1580) English writer known for plays, poems and a collection of proverbs

A woman has nine lives like a cat.
Part II, chapter 4.
Proverbs (1546)
Variant: A woman hath nyne lyues like a cat.

Taylor Caldwell photo
Anita Pallenberg photo
Robert Jordan photo

“Even a queen stubs her toe, but a wise woman watches the path.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Lini
(15 October 1993)

Wilkie Collins photo
Donald J. Trump photo

“He's a good guy, and he's not going to hurt anybody.. . . He treated his wife well and. . . he will treat Marla well.
Actresses, people that you write about just call to see if they can go out with him and things.
I mean, he's living with Marla and he's got three other girlfriends.
He does things for himself. When he makes a decision, that will be a very lucky woman.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Speaking about himself under the pseudonym of John Miller in a 1991 interview with a People reporter https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/05/13/transcript-the-full-text-of-john-miller-interview-about-donald-trump-with-people-reporter/?tid=a_inl, Donald Trump masqueraded as publicist to brag about himself https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/05/13/transcript-the-full-text-of-john-miller-interview-about-donald-trump-with-people-reporter/?tid=a_inl, Washington Post
1990s

Teri Garr photo

“I don't want to say I'm envious of any other woman's body. It's a bad myth to perpetuate. Women have enough trouble liking themselves.”

Teri Garr (1944) American film and television actress

Quoted in " Funny Ladies: The Best Humor from America's Funniest Women http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KOVGUVYj2XUC&pg=PA37&lpg=PA37&dq=%22I+don't+want+to+say+I'm+envious+of+any+other+woman's+body.%22&source=bl&ots=QGbxO9aW4k&sig=WBhGgo5wavMXkC5ElTw-2zwe1SM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Tf36TuPDEs-j8gO5tq3WAQ&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22I%20don't%20want%20to%20say%20I'm%20envious%20of%20any%20other%20woman's%20body.%22&f=false" (2001), p. 37.

“It is generally assumed that men are damaged in their capacity for closeness and intimacy. If intimacy is defined as a loving closeness with another person, then it is usually true that the early conditioning of men to be performers and competitors in the impersonal competitive world limits their intimacy capacity. Women are assumed to have a greater capacity for intimacy than men because they express caring emotions and allow themselves to be dependent and close in relationships more easily. Yet, a closer look will provide a different perspective.

True intimacy is love and closeness based on knowledge of the inner reality and inner experience of the other. However, in romantic relationships, closeness ends or is put into crisis when men describe honestly their inner experiences to women. Women assail the relationship behavior of men and men acknowledge what they are told. Rarely is the opposite true. Men accept the reality of women more than women accept the reality of men.

The fact that a woman's priority is placed on personal needs bears no relationship to a genuine capacity for intimacy. To be loved and known, and to be fully comfortable expressing one's personal self, are two major components of intimacy. There are few men who have received that from a woman. The opposite holds true. A woman's love for a man is contingent on his participating in her romantic fantasy of what he and the relationship should be. Few men risk challenging or undermining that fantasy. Instead, they play by the rules of romance even when it feels uncomfortable, knowing that being loved by her is fragile and easily broken once he reveals his resistances and unromantic feelings.”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

Why Women Are Also Incapable of Intimacy, pp. 120–121
What Men Still Don't Know About Women, Relationships, and Love (2007)

Bob Seger photo
Conrad Aiken photo
Adrienne Rich photo

“No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.”

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) American poet, essayist and feminist

Blood, Bread and Poetry (1986), ch. 1

Georges Bernanos photo
Matilda Joslyn Gage photo
Max Beerbohm photo

“Of all the objects of hatred, a woman once loved is the most hateful.”

Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) English writer

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

John Fante photo
Neil Kinnock photo

“Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.”

Neil Kinnock (1942) British politician

Speech at the Welsh Labour Party conference, Llandudno (15 May 1987)
This speech was extensively quoted in a Labour Party election broadcast during the 1987 general election. It was also famously used without attribution by U.S. Senator Joe Biden, although Biden had used and properly attributed the speech many times before.

Abd al-Karim Qasim photo
Bell Hooks photo
Lois McMaster Bujold photo

“From fried witchetty grubs to gold-plated turnips, when you're a writer you never know what's going to appear on your plate next. It keeps a woman alert, it does.”

Lois McMaster Bujold (1949) Science Fiction and fantasy author from the USA

"Publishing, Writing, and Authoring", p. 75
The Vorkosigan Companion (2008)

Sam Manekshaw photo

“Give me a man or a woman with common sense and who is not an idiot and I assure you can make a leader out of him or her.”

Sam Manekshaw (1914–2008) First Field marshal of the Indian Army

During a lecture on leadership quoted in [Field Marshal KM Kariappa Memorial Lectures, 1995-2000, http://books.google.com/books?id=Eux31FCNj8MC&pg=PA21, 2001, Lancer Publishers, 978-81-7062-119-5, 21–]

Clive Staples Lewis photo
Sören Kierkegaard photo
Audre Lorde photo
Ed Bradley photo

“Aretha Franklin was tough. She turned out to be good, but she was, you know, she was -- she's a very -- she's a very wonderful, but in some ways, shy woman. You don't think about that when you see how she emotes and performs.”

Ed Bradley (1941–2006) News correspondent

[Larry King, Interview with Ed Bradley, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0402/08/lkl.00.html, February 8, 2004, Larry King Live, CNN]

Bill Maher photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Doris Lessing photo
Ursula K. Le Guin photo
David Cross photo
Ignatius Sancho photo

“A woman telling her true age is like a buyer confiding his final price to an Armenian rug dealer.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

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

Gloria Estefan photo
John Vanbrugh photo
Margaret Fuller photo
Camille Paglia photo
Jason Mewes photo
Dejan Stojanovic photo

“To risk life to save a smile on a face of a woman or a child is the secret of chivalry.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

Simplicity http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/21390/Simplicity
From the poems written in English

Marie-Louise von Franz photo

“Just as the mother influence is formative with a man's anima, the father has a determining influence on the animus of a daughter. The father imbues his daughter's mind with the specific coloring conferred by those indisputable views mentioned above, which in reality are so often missing in the daughter. For this reason the animus is also sometimes represented as a demon of death. A gypsy tale, for example, tells of a woman living alone who takes in an unknown handsome wanderer and lives with him in spite of the fact that a fearful dream has warned her that he is the king of the dead. Again and again she presses him to say who he is. At first he refuses to tell her, because he knows that she will then die, but she persists in her demand. Then suddenly he tells her he is death. The young woman is so frightened that she dies. Looked at from the point of view of mythology, the unknown wanderer here is clearly a pagan father and god figure, who manifests as the leader of the dead (like Hades, who carried off Persephone). He embodies a form of the animus that lures a woman away from all human relationships and especially holds her back from love with a real man. A dreamy web of thoughts, remote from life and full of wishes and judgments about how things "ought to be," prevents all contact with life. The animus appears in many myths, not only as death, but also as a bandit and murderer, for example, as the knight Bluebeard, who murdered all his wives.”

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

Source: Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche (1994), The Animus, a Woman's Inner Man, p. 319 - 320

Kunti photo
Camille Paglia photo

“In every premenstrual woman struggling to govern her temper, sky-cult wars again with earth-cult.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 12

Toni Morrison photo
Henry James photo
Warren Farrell photo
Joyce Kilmer photo

“When you say of the making of ballads and songs that it is woman's work
You forget all the fighting poets that have been in every land.”

Joyce Kilmer (1886–1918) American poet, editor, literary critic, soldier

Main Street and Other Poems (1917), The Proud Poet

Johannes Brahms photo
Kathy Griffin photo

“You'll have to excuse my friend, Ryan. That's the first time he's ever touched a woman.”

Kathy Griffin (1960) American actress and comedian

Is... Not Nicole Kidman (2005)

Marie-Louise von Franz photo
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos photo

“Man enjoys the happiness he feels, woman the happiness she gives. This difference, so essential and yet so seldom noticed, has a marked difference on the whole of their respective behaviour. A man's pleasure is to satisfy desires, a woman's is chiefly to arouse them.”

L’homme jouit du bonheur qu’il ressent, et la femme de celui qu’elle procure. Cette différence, si essentielle et si peu remarquée, influe pourtant, d'une manière bien sensible, sur la totalité de leur conduite respective. Le plaisir de l’un est de satisfaire des désirs, celui de l’autre est surtout de les faire naître.
Letter 130: Madame de Rosemonde to Madame la Présidente Tourvel. Trans. Richard Aldington (1924). http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Liaisons_dangereuses_-_Lettre_130
Les liaisons dangereuses (1782)

Charles Darwin photo