Sourced and curated.

Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist bothers to buy a bottle of wine.

Andrea Dworkin

Sexual Economics · 1979

★ 6.1

Oppressed people are frequently very oppressive when first liberated. And why wouldn't they be? They know best two positions. Somebody's foot on their neck or their foot on somebody's neck.

Florynce Kennedy

1970

★ 6.0

This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons hitherto brought forward in explanation of this fact has seemed adequate.

The Second Sex · 1949

★ 5.5

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night-she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question-"Is this all?"

Betty Friedan

1963

★ 5.3

The power of money is a distinctly male power. Money speaks, but it speaks with a male voice. In the hands of women, money stays literal; count it out, it buys what it is worth or less. In the hands of men, money buys women, sex, status, dignity, esteem, recognition, loyalty, all manner of possibility.

Andrea Dworkin

Pornography: Men Possessing Women · 1981

★ 5.2

Perhaps patriarchy's greatest psychological weapon is simply its universality and longevity... Patriarchy has a still more tenacious or powerful hold through its successful habit of passing itself off as nature.

Kate Millett

Sexual Politics · 1970

★ 5.1

It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.

A Vindiction of the Rights of Woman · 1792

★ 4.7

Why are women…so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

A Room of One's Own · 1929

★ 4.7

When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the "division" of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.

The Second Sex · 1949

★ 4.5

If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.

Camille Paglia

Sexual Personae · 1990

★ 4.5

Pain is an event, an experience that must be recognized, named, and then used in some way in order for the experience to change, to be transformed into something else, strength or knowledge or action.

Audre Lorde

Sister Outsider · 1984

★ 4.4

To tell the truth, one is not born a genius: one becomes a genius.

The Second Sex · 1949

★ 4.0

I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman · 1792

★ 3.9

There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

A Room of One's Own · 1929

★ 3.8

The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

A Room of One's Own · 1929

★ 3.8

It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.

The Second Sex · 1949

★ 3.8

Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions, which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, they are insultingly supporting their own superiority.

A Vindiction of the Rights of Woman · 1792

★ 3.7

Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman · 1792

★ 3.7

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room.