Quote collection
355 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy it implies, then the "division" of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form."
"Obviously, everything has always been defined by the dominant ideology. But the dominant ideology has been able to accept women's literature as well as men's literature. I would say that women have been hindered from creating for a variety of reasons, as Virginia Woolf so admirably explained in A Room of One's Own. When they have created, on the whole they have been recognized. In literature it hasn't been nearly as oppressive as in, say, painting, where even the existence of so many women painters has always been denied."
"The word love has by no means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one cause of the serious misunderstandings that divide them."
"This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate."
"The Sahara was a spectacle as alive as the sea. The tints of the dunes changed according to the time of day and the angle of the light: golden as apricots from far off, when we drove close to them they turned to freshly made butter; behind us they grew pink; from sand to rock, the materials of which the desert was made varied as much as its tints."
"Between women love is contemplative; caresses are intended less to gain possession of the other than gradually to re-create the self through her; separateness is abolished, there is no struggle, no victory, no defeat; in exact reciprocity each is at once subject and object, sovereign and slave; duality become mutuality."
"Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself."
"The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman's concrete situation."
"One can not start by saying that our earthly destiny has or has not importance, for it depends upon us to give it importance."
"She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust."
"Men create their own gods and thus have some slight understanding that they are self-fabricated. Women are much more susceptible, because they are completely oppressed by men; they take men at their word and believe in the gods that men have made up. The situation of women, their culture, makes them kneel more often before the gods that have been created by men than men themselves do, who know what they've done. To this extent, women will be more fanatical, whether it is for fascism or for totalitarianism."
"At the moment of their emancipation, women have a need to write their own histories."
"I admire Freud a great deal as a person and thinker. Despite everything, I find his work very, very rich, but I think that for women he has been absolutely disastrous. And even more so, everyone who came after him."
"The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels."
"Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself."
"Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know it's exigencies."
"Patience is one of those feminine qualities which have their origin in our oppression but should be preserved after our liberation."
"One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible."
"Many things would be changed for Americans if they would only admit that there is ill-luck in this world and that misfortune is not a priori a crime."
"But women do not say 'We', except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say 'women', and women use the same word in referring to themselves."