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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Mary Wollstonecraft7 quotes
It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world. — Mary Wollstonecraft · 1792I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves. — Mary Wollstonecraft · 1792Women 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. — Mary Wollstonecraft · 1792Taught 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. — Mary Wollstonecraft · 1792How can a rational being be ennobled by any thing that is not obtained by its own exertions? — Mary Wollstonecraft · 1792Till society is very differently constituted, parents, I fear, will still insist on being obeyed, because they will be obeyed, because they will be obeyed, and constantly endeavor to settle that power on a Divine right which will not bear the investigation of reason. — Mary Wollstonecraft · 1792All 7 quotes →Virginia Woolf7 quotes
Why are women…so much more interesting to men than men are to women? — Virginia Woolf · 1929There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind. — Virginia Woolf · 1929The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. — Virginia Woolf · 1929This 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. — Virginia Woolf · 1929It is the masculine values that prevail... 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. — Virginia Woolf · 1929The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself. — Virginia Woolf · 1929All 7 quotes →Simone de Beauvoir4 quotes
This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons hitherto brought forward in explanation of this fact has seemed adequate. — Simone de Beauvoir · 1949When 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. — Simone de Beauvoir · 1949To tell the truth, one is not born a genius: one becomes a genius. — Simone de Beauvoir · 1949It 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. — Simone de Beauvoir · 1949Andrea Dworkin3 quotes
Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist bothers to buy a bottle of wine. — Andrea Dworkin · 1979The 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 · 1981Women do not believe that men believe what pornography says about women. But they do. From the worst to the best of them, they do. — Andrea Dworkin · 1981Alice Rossi2 quotes
The single most impressive fact about the attempt by American women to obtain the right to vote is how long it took. — Alice Rossi · 1973Without the means to prevent, and to control the timing of, conception, economic and political rights have limited meaning and women. If women cannot plan their pregnancies, they can plan little else in their lives. — Alice Rossi · 1973Betty Friedan2 quotes
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 · 1963It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself. — Betty Friedan · 1963Camille Paglia2 quotes
If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts. — Camille Paglia · 1990There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper. — Camille Paglia · 1990Audre Lorde1 quote
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 · 1984Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie1 quote
I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 2014Erica Jong1 quote
Coupling doesn't always have to do with sex... Two people holding each other up like flying buttresses. Two people depending on each other and babying each other and defending each other against the world outside. Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world. — Erica Jong · 1973Florynce Kennedy1 quote
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 · 1970Germaine Greer1 quote
Revolution is the festival of the oppressed. — Germaine Greer · 1970H.L. Mencken1 quote
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. — H.L. Mencken · 1918Janet Radcliffe Richards1 quote
Men may have had their own very good reasons for bringing women up in servitude, but the soul of a servant is not an attractive thing, and one of the most infuriating aspects of women's constricted upbringing is that it has made them less attractive, even in the eyes of their constrictors, than they should have been. Man has twisted and pruned women out of all recognition and then not liked the results. — Janet Radcliffe Richards · 1980Kate Millett1 quote
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 · 1970Mary Astell1 quote
Fetters of gold are still fetters, and the softest lining can never make them so easy as liberty. — Mary Astell · 1696Mary Daly1 quote
If God is male, then the male is God. — Mary Daly · 1973Robin Morgan1 quote
Pornography is the theory, and rape the practice. — Robin Morgan · 1977Valerie Solanas1 quote
The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples. — Valerie Solanas · 1967