c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
My conversations with people who are just beginning to understand and include transsexual and transgender people in their plans or programs lean heavily on this. For them, the very fact of a transsexual who is a real student at their school or client of their agency can be new and surprising. But for queers and transfolk, who have institutionalized an additional set of queerly normative genders, it can sometimes be difficult to hear that we, too, must expand. If butch daddies want to crochet, if twinkly ladyboys are sometimes tops in bed, if burly bears can do BDSM play as little girls, if femme fatales build bookcases in their spare time, these things, too, are not just good but great. They bring us, I believe, wonderful news: news that gendered options can continue to explode, that the chefs in the kitchen of gender are creating new and imaginative specials every day. That we, all of us, are the chefs. Hi. Have a whisk.
— S. Bear Bergman
I never knew words could be so sharp, until the wrong ones cut me
— Foz Meadows, Monstrous Little Voices: New Tales from Shakespeare's Fantasy World
I began to wonder if what makes men walk so lordlike and speak so masterfully is having the love of women. If that was it, Sarah and I would make lords of each other.
— Isabel Miller, Patience & Sarah
jThe notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick.
— Angela Carter
From the moment we take our first breath (and sometimes even before that, what with sonic imaging technology), the cry “It’s a boy” or “It’s a girl” ushers us into this world. As we grow into adulthood, everything about us grows and matures as we grow and mature. Everything except gender, that is. We’re supposed to believe that our gender stays exactly the same as the day we were born. Our genders never shift, we’re told. The genders we’re assigned at birth lock us onto a course through which we’ll be expected to become whole, well-rounded, creative, loving people—but only as men or as women. From where I stand, that’s like taking a field of racehorses, hobbling the front legs of half of them and the rear legs of the other half, and expecting them to run a decent race: it doesn’t work. Gender, this thing we’re all seemingly born with, is a major restraint to self-expression.That doesn’t make sense to me. Why should we be born with such a hobble? Does that make sense to you?
— Kate Bornstein, My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You, or Something Else Entirely
We make assumptions every day about other people's genders without ever seeing their birth certificates, their chromosomes, their genitals, their reproductive systems, their childhood socialization, or their legal sex. There is no such thing as a "real" gender - there is only the gender we experience ourselves as and the gender we perceive other to be.
— Julia Serano
Many people believe that gender identity...is rooted in biology...Many other people understand that gender is more like language than like biology; that is, while they understand us humans to have a biological capacity to use language, they point out we are not born with a hard-wired language "preinstalled" in our brains. Likewise, while we have a biological capacity to identify with and learn to "speak" from a particular location in a cultural gender system, we don't come into the world with a predetermined gender identity.
— Susan Stryker, Transgender History
We can’t remain silent on gender rights and personal freedoms.
— Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue
As has been long observed, men are people, but women are women.
— Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference
Women's deference is rooted not only in their social subordination but also in the substance of their moral concern. Sensitivity to the needs of others and the assumption of responsibility for taking care lead women to attend to voices other than their own and to include in their judgement other points of view.
— Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development
The two creatures were sexless. But he of Malacandra was masculine (not male); she of Perelandra was feminine (not female). Malacandra seemed to him to have the look of one standing armed, at the ramparts of his own remote archaic world, in ceaseless vigilance, his eyes ever roaming the earth-ward horizon whence his danger came long ago. "A sailor's look," Ransom once said to me; "you know... eyes that are impregnated with distance." But the eyes of Perelandra opened, as it were, inward, as if they were the curtained gateway to a world of waves and murmurings and wandering airs, of life that rocked in winds and splashed on mossy stones and descended as the dew and arose sunward in thin-spun delicacy of mist. On Mars the very forests are of stone; in Venus the lands swim. For now he thought of them no more as Malacandra and Perelandra. He called them by their Tellurian names. With deep wonder he thought to himself, "My eyes have seen Mars and Venus. I have seen Ares and Aphrodite.
— C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
I won't tolerate vanity in a man, though I will in a woman.
— Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove
Gender, not religion, is the opiate of the masses.
— Erving Goffman
A sociocultural environment is not some cunningly contrived thing only exists in social psychology labs. Don't look now, but you're in one right this moment.
— Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference
Here all guilt ceases, for it cannot cling to such flowers as these.
— Gilles Deleuze
I actually chafe at describing myself as masculine. For one thing, masculinity itself is such an expansive territory, encompassing boundaries of nationality, race, and class. Most importantly, individuals blaze their own trails across this landscape. And it’s hard for me to label the intricate matrix of my gender as simply masculine. To me, branding individual self-expression as simply feminine or masculine is like asking poets: Do you write in English or Spanish? The question leaves out the possibilities that the poetry is woven in Cantonese or Ladino, Swahili or Arabic. The question deals only with the system of language that the poet has been taught. It ignores the words each writer hauls up, hand over hand, from a common well. The music words make when finding themselves next to each other for the first time. The silences echoing in the space between ideas. The powerful winds of passion and belief that move the poet to write.
— Leslie Feinberg
We seem to assume that no one really wants to be a girl or a woman, and therefore some people, say female-bodied people, must be forced into these abject genders
— J. Jack Halberstam
I might go anywhere and do any magic I pleased if I were Peter, not Prunella.
— Zen Cho, Sorcerer to the Crown
There were things that Pumpkin Head—now not Pumpkin Head anymore—had to do to be a girl. He had to be careful how he dressed, and how he acted. He had to be careful how he talked, and he always had to be calm. He was very frightened of what would happen if he didn't stay calm. For his face was really just a wonderful plastic one. The real Pumpkin Head was still inside, locked in, waiting to come out.
— Al Sarrantonio, 13 Horrors of Halloween
As the Greeks saw it, to be a man was to be defined by your ability to exert power in a world articulated through transcendent forces ultimately beyond human control. The apparent futility of this perspective was outweighed by the nobility that came with the struggle.
— Thomas Van Nortwick, Imagining Men: Ideals of Masculinity in Ancient Greek Culture
Granddaddy had told me about the wasp that could opt to be male or female while in a larval stage. An interesting thought. I wondered why human children weren't given that option in their grub stage, say up through age five. With everything I had seen about the lives of boys and girls, I would definitely choose to be a boy grub.
— Jacqueline Kelly, The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate
The need to control others as a prerequisite for male agency presupposed self-control. That imperative, in turn, included both the physical and emotional dimensions of a man’s bodily self.
— Thomas Van Nortwick, Imagining Men: Ideals of Masculinity in Ancient Greek Culture
But whence came this curious difference between them? He found that he could point to no single feature wherein the difference resided, yet it was impossible to ignore. One could try - Ransom has tried a hundred times - to put it into words. He has said that Malacandra was like rhythm and Perelandra like melody. He has said that Malacandra affected him like a quantitative, Perelandra like an accentual, metre. He thinks that the first held in his hand something like a spear, but the hands of the other were open, with the palms towards him. But I don't know that any of these attempts has helped me much. At all events what Ransom saw at that moment was the real meaning of gender.
— C.S. Lewis
One Saturday morning walking to the farmers' market with my lover she tells me she needs to look like a man on the street. She hates binding her breasts. Hates having breasts, hates not passing. I press her. I ask her, but what do you feel like when you're naked in bed with me? Do you like your body then? She is quiet. Later she tells me she had a dream. Her mother brought home a bottle of medicine from the hospital for her. The doctor says she has to take it. The medicine is testosterone.On Shabbat I remember to pray for enough space inside of me to hold all the darkness of the night and all the sunlight of the day. I pray for enough space for transformations as miraculous as the shift from day to night.Later when that lover has changed his name and an ex-boyfriend has come out to me as a lesbian I go to visit my best friend's sister-turned-brother-turned-sister-again and she tells me about the blessing of having many names and using them all at once.
— M.J. Kaufman
It wasn't that dwarfs weren't interested in sex. They saw the vital need for fresh dwarfs to leave their goods to and continue the mining work after they had gone. It was simply that they also saw no point in distinguishing between the sexes anywhere but in private. There was no such thing as a Dwarfish female pronoun or, once the children were on solids, any such thing as women's work.
— Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant
You're free to wear whatever you want, you know 
— Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant
If I hadn't trained Lula Ann properly she wouldn't have known to always cross the street and avoid white boys.
— Toni Morrison, God Help the Child
I've always said women make the best agents. Deceit comes naturally to them. It's hardly surprising: If you were born with a little hole half the population could stick its dick into whenever if felt like it you'd learn deceit too. Biology is destiny. You can't blame women.
— Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf
our contemporary ideas about manliness, reflected in action movies and westerns, generally prohibit so-called real men from displaying high emotion, with the exception of anger. John Wayne doesn’t cry. By contrast, Achilles, the epitome of manliness in Homer’s Iliad, weeps openly and at length over the loss of his friend Patroclus.
— Thomas Van Nortwick, Imagining Men: Ideals of Masculinity in Ancient Greek Culture
To grow up, a man must stand apart not only from his mother but from his fellows. Human achievement, according to this perspective, is always to be measured in difference, who is the fastest, the most handsome, the richest. The quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon highlights this way of looking at human achievement. Not only do the two men compete for the most honor, symbolized by possessions, but they see their contest as a zero-sum game. That is, they—and all the other warriors—assume that there is a finite amount of honor available, so that if one man gets more, then someone else gets less.Achilles, with his semidivine nature and abundant physical gifts, would seem to be an example of a man fully equipped for success in this system. And yet, Achilles does not prosper in the world of the poem. As he pursues honor and status among his fellows, he becomes more and more isolated, the price of distinction in a competitive society.
— Thomas Van Nortwick, Imagining Men: Ideals of Masculinity in Ancient Greek Culture
But I knew the first question Mom asked Gail was, Is its a boy or a girl? Because, for some reason, that is the first thing everybody wants to know the minute you’re born. Should we label it with pink or blue? Wouldn’t want anyone to mistake the gender of a infant! Why is that so important? Its a baby! And why does it have to be a simple answer? One or the other? Not all of us fit so neatly into the category we get saddled with on Day One when the doctor glances down and makes a quick assessment of the available equipment.
— Ellen Wittlinger
The sins of my sex... A woman who is ugly is pitiable, but a man who is ugly is forgiven.
— Michelle Franklin
So you’re positive the killer is a man.”“Yes, I think my gender can take responsibility for this one. Women don’t cut out other women’s hearts.”“We can.
— Chris Bohjalian, The Light in the Ruins
because women were also believed to be closer to the raw forces of nature than were males, controlling their power was, for the adult male, part of the larger project of creating human civilization itself.
— Thomas Van Nortwick, Imagining Men: Ideals of Masculinity in Ancient Greek Culture
women had to be controlled and kept from going wild because of their inherent susceptibility to lust; thus men had to exercise aidos, “shame,” and sophrosyne, “soundness of mind,” to keep women from transgressing the bounds of propriety.
— Thomas Van Nortwick, Imagining Men: Ideals of Masculinity in Ancient Greek Culture
I personally believe that gender equality underlines every other equality, and certainly the issue of sexuality. For instance, if we didn’t distinguish between gender, in terms of giving different genders disparate values and attributes, what problem would we have with two men loving each other?
— Abigail Tarttelin
Unsettling because it reveals some possible branch of evolution in which sex organs will no longer exist. The bots won’t need them, and perhaps without them, the entire concept of gender will disappear.
— Judd Trichter, Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
The Concept of Gender Does Not Exist....All There Is, Is What Is
— Andrea Bird (founder of The X & Y Foundation of NC, Inc)
This medical view of an ideal male who was insulated from pathogens was inextricably bound up with a parallel discourse about the maintenance of strong ego boundaries, a psychic investment in one’s bodily peripheries that effected a gradual closing (and, one might say, a closing off) of the male body, at once from the outer world of dangerous stimuli and from the inner world of threatening passions. Without a doubt, as Norbert Elias has shown, in the western world both men and women experienced a shift in their sense of personal boundaries during the early modern era where, amid changing social circumstances, rising thresholds of repugnance and shame were manifested among the upper-classes as a growing aversion to their own bodily functions and to the bodies of others. The changes wrought by new developments in table manners and etiquette were extended by the introduction of hygienic practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that endeavored to maximise the order and cleanliness of the social body while futher compartmentalising the bourgeois self as a discrete bodily unit.
— Christopher Forth
Why mayn't they do what men do?' the Hero cried impetuously. 'I hate that contemptible narrow-mindedness. It's that that makes the ruin and horrors I see. Why mayn't they do what men do? I like the women who are brave enough not to be hypocrites. By Heaven! if these women are bad, I like them better than a set of hypocritical creatures who are all show, and deceive you in the end.
— George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
It's an arbitrary thing if you're born with an XX or XY chromosome, but it can determine your experience of the world. It's about whether you are physically intimidating vs. being physically intimidated. It determines whether you are the one to take an active role in sex and society.
— Abigail Tarttelin
Until the sixteenth century, men—priests, academics, judges, merchants, princes, and many others—wore skirts, or robes. For men, the skirt was a 'sign of leisure and a symbol of dignity,' writes Quentin Bell. This is still true for men in high positions. After all, can you imagine the Pope, or Professor Dumbledore, wearing trousers? Have you ever seen a depiction of God wearing pants?
— Tim Gunn, Tim Gunn's Fashion Bible: The Fascinating History of Everything in Your Closet
Gender Quotes are social disease.
— nugas
The scope of the transgender empire may be reaching its peak, as transcriticism is increasing at a fast pace both within activist feminism and from wives and regretters. There is an increasing groundswell of criticism of the concept and practice of transgenderism from a newly invigorated radical feminist movement. Moreover, the idea of transgenderism has become so vague and general that the category is in danger of being exploded.
— Sheila Jeffreys
The finest people marry the two sexes in their own person.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson
the hope is that laying out what we understand about essential differences in the minds of men and women may lead to grater acceptance and respect of difference.
— Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism
--As I must therefore conclude that you are not serious in your rejection of me, I shall choose to attribute it to your wish of increasing my love by suspense, according to the usual practice of elegant females." --"I do assure you, sir, that I have no pretensions whatever to that kind of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man. I would rather be paid the compliment of being believed sincere.
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Male domination, and the low and stigmatised status of women, cause teenage girls to engage in punishment of their bodies through eating disorders and self-mutilation. There is increasing evidence that woman-hating Western cultures are toxic to girls and very harmful to their mental health. It is, perhaps, not surprising, therefore, that there seem to be some girls baling out and seeking to upgrade their status.
— Sheila Jeffreys, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism
All surgery and no makeup make Jack a dull girl.
— Brian Spellman
Masculinity is part of a binary and requires its opposite, since, in the absence of femininity, masculinity would have no meaning.
— Sheila Jeffreys, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism
The world is changing, I said. It is no longer a world just for boys and men.Our women are respected here, said the father. We would never let them tramp the world as American women do. There is always someone to look after the Olinka woman. A father. An uncle. A brother or nephew. Do not be offended, Sister Nettie, but our people pity women such as you who are cast out, we know not from where, into a world unknown to you, where you must struggle all alone, for yourself.So I am an object of pity and contempt, I thought, to men and women alike.Furthermore, said Tashi’s father, we are not simpletons. We understand that there are places in the world where women live differently from the way our women do, but we do not approve of this different way for our children.But life is changing, even in Olinka, I said. We are here.He spat on the ground. What are you? Three grownups and two children. In the rainy season some of you will probably die. You people do not last long in our climate. If you do not die, you will be weakened by illness. Oh, yes. We have seen it all before. You Christians come here, try hard to change us, get sick and go back to England, or wherever you come from. Only the trader on the coast remains, and even he is not the same white man, year in and year out. We know because we send him women.Tashi is very intelligent, I said. She could be a teacher. A nurse. She could help the people in the village.There is no place here for a woman to do those things, he said.Then we should leave, I said. Sister Corrine and I.No, no, he said.Teach only the boys? I asked.Yes, he said, as if my question was agreement.There is a way that the men speak to women that reminds me too much of Pa. They listen just long enough to issue instructions. They don’t even look at women when women are speaking. They look at the ground and bend their heads toward the ground. The women also do not “look in a man’s face” as they say. To “look in a man’s face” is a brazen thing to do. They look instead at his feet or his knees.
— Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Has any non-dipshit man ever used the word "ladies" not followed by the word "room"?
— Penn Jillette, God, No! Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales
When I tell other Christians of my time with the goddess, I think they expect me to characterize it as a period in my life when I was misguided, and that I have now thankfully come back to both Jesus and my senses. But it's not like that. I can't imagine that the God of the universe is limited to our ideas of God. I can't imagine that God doesn't reveal God’s self in countless ways outside of the symbol system of Christianity. In a way, I need a God who is bigger and more nimble and mysterious than what I could understand and contrive. Otherwise it can feel like I am worshipping nothing more than my own ability to understand the divine.
— Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
Nature is gendered, but not sexist.
— Janine Burke, Nest: The Art of Birds
As she began to speak she stood and started to wrap herself, expertly, creating a binding in minutes that held without a wrinkle until the show ended. Peggy made a connection between binding her breasts and wrapping her hands in boxing wraps; this was what one did before battle, to protect one's self (and it is the Self, absolutely, that binding protects for many butches).
— S. Bear Bergman, Butch Is a Noun
You do not see deviantly gendered people walking around with Nalgene bottles, getting our sixty-four recommended ounces as we go through our days. I am sure that somewhere there is an argument to be made that the trans community as a whole is a little cranky because we could all use a nice big glass of water.
— S. Bear Bergman, Butch Is a Noun
Men may or may not be better drivers than women, but they seem to die more often trying to prove that they are.
— Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do
He was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life. But he really looked like a girl. She was the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen in my life.
— Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy
Turnstall's view of what men could and couldn't do was sometimes odd. Our old parter Goodwin and I agreed that there was no manly or unwomanly, only what you chose to do.
— Tamora Pierce (Author), Mastiff
Girls, here's the truth about the Ban Bossy campaign: It's being spearheaded by a privileged group of elite feminists who have a very vested interest in stoking victim politics and exacerbating the gender divide. They actually encourage dependency and groupthink while paying lip service to empowerment and self-determination. They traffic in bogus wage disparity statistics, whitewashing the fact that what's actually left of that dwindling pay gap is due to the deliberate, voluntary choices women in the workforce make.
— Michelle Malkin
This condition in which women live is created out of, and defended by, a system of ideas represented by the world's religions, by psychoanalysis, by pornography, by sexology, by science and medicine and the social sciences.
— Sheila Jeffreys, Unpacking Queer Politics
We were there too, the other geeks and weird kids whose lives were hellish at school, who escaped into books and computers, who stayed up all night scanning obscure forums, looking for transcendence, dreaming of elsewhere. We were there too, but you didn’t see us, because we were girls. And the costs of being the geek were the same for us, right down to the sexual frustration, the yearning, the being laughed at, the loneliness. […] We had to fight the same battles you did, only harder, because we were women and we also had to fight sexism, some of it from you, and when we went looking for other weird kids to join our gang, we were told we weren’t ‘real geeks’ because we were girls.
— Laurie Penny, Cybersexism: Sex, Gender and Power on the Internet
Writing from the perspective of women survivors of violence, Moore is at his most appealing; though his writing about sex and brutality can verge on the exploitative, he sometimes reveals an unexpected sympathy with dominated women.
— Zoë Brigley, Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore: Critical Essays on the Graphic Novels
I'm self-taught. I didn't just become a man, it was a decision.
— Aiden Shaw, Sordid Truths: Selling My Innocence for a Taste of Stardom
It reached a point where the paranoia was getting to me. Everywhere I looked, it seemed like people were hanging out, wanting to date, hooking up, wanting to hook up—it was relationships, relationships, relationships everywhere. Guys checking out girls, girls checking out guys. Dudes checking out dudes, chicks checking out chicks. Fuck! That’s what being a teenager was all about.
— Jess C. Scott, Bedmates
Bodies are not only biological phenomena but also complex social creations onto which meanings have been variously composed and imposed according to time and space.
— Katrina Karkazis, Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience
Boys don’t cry—or at least that’s what everybody’s supposed to believe.
— Jess C. Scott, Bedmates
And in most queer communities, regardless of one's sex or identity, people who are more masculine in gender expression are almost always viewed as more valid and attractive than their feminine counterparts.
— Julia Serano, Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive
Men may be the head of the house, but the women are the neck, and they can turn the head any way they want.
— Debra Ollivier, What French Women Know  About Love, Sex and Other Matters of the Heart and Mind
Gender roles suck," says Swift Fox.Then you should stop playing them, thinks Toby.
— Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam
The human in what it is objectively ever since its beginning is two, two who are different. Each part of what constitutes the unity of the human species corresponds to a proper being and a proper Being, to an identity of one's own. In order to carry out the destiny of humanity, the man-human and the woman-human each have to fulfill what they are and at the same time realize the unity that they constitute.
— Luce Irigaray, Way of Love
...and the women spread their ntsaroz and sit on one side, the men on the other, like they are two different rivers that are not supposed to meet.
— NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names
I had yet to learn that when it came to gender, I was both and neither.
— David Levithan, Every Day
...but he is a man, hence cannot see how tiresome it is to have explained at length what one has already fully understood.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
Men recorded their experiences and called it history; men looked about the world and called their observations science; men wondered about the existence of God and the problem of evil and called their speculations theology; men did handiwork and called it art; men made up stories, wrote them down and called them literature; men thought about such topics as truth, beauty, justice, and the nature of existence and called their opinions philosophy.
— Linda Tschirhart Sanford, Women And Self Esteem: Understanding And Improving The Way We Think And Feel About Ourselves
It’s ridiculous – a girl steps out, goes dancing, gets her hair cut, decides to spend the summer in Italy and it’s a scandal. A chap does it and no one bats an eyelid.
— Sara Sheridan, London Calling
It seemed to me that boys had a lot more fun. It was a relief. I didn't look at myself from the outside. I just lived inside my skin, looking out.
— Nancy Horan, Under the Wide and Starry Sky
People always think it's unprofessional if your appearance doesn't match your biological sex. What does my gender have to do with my skills?
— Marcel Weyers
The fact that most perpetrators of organised abuse are men, and that their most intensive and sadistic abuses are visited upon girls and women, has gone largely unnoticed, as have the patterns of gendered inequity that characterise the families and institutional settings in which organised abuse takes place. Organised abuse survivors share a number of challenges in common with other survivors of abuse and trauma, including health and justice systems that have been slow to recognise and respond to violence against children and women. However, this connection is rarely made in the literature on organised abuse, with some authors hinting darkly at the nefarious influence of abusive groups. Fraser (1997: xiv) provides a note of caution here, explaining that whilst it is relatively easy to ‘comment on the naïveté of those grappling with this issue ... it is very difficult to actually face a new and urgent phenomenon and deal with it, but not fully understand it, while managing distressed and confused patients and their families’.
— Michael Salter, Organised  Sexual Abuse
Music Has No Religion Nor Gender" See Its a ___W___A___V____E___ and You Can Modify It !!! So What Are You Up To.. ?
— Sundeep Lal
Music Has No Religion Nor Gender. See Its a ___W___A___V____E___ and You Can Modify It !!! So What You Are Up To.. ?
— Sundeep Lal
Pink is female - but why? Are girls any more pink than boys? Are boys any more blue than girls? It's something that has been sold to us, mostly so other things can be sold to us.
— David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing
How come when girls play with gender it's a sign of strength and when boys play with gender it's a sign of weakness?
— Lori Duron, Raising My Rainbow: Adventures in Raising a Fabulous, Gender Creative Son
I understood at those times what I was leaving behind: the solidarity of a shared biology. Women know what it means to have a body. They understand its difficulties and frailties, its glories and pleasures. Men think their bodies are theirs alone. They tend them in private, even in public.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
Now it is easy to perceive that the moral part of love is a factitious sentiment, engendered by society, and cried up by the women with great care and address in order to establish their empire, and secure command to that sex which ought to obey.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
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
In ethics of life, the gender that are much discussed, are favourites.
— sol michael
Possibility is not a luxury
—  it is as crucial as bread.
It's easy to fictionalize an issue when you're not aware of the many ways in which you are privileged by it.
— Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation
Instead of saying that all gender is this or all gender is that, let's recognize that the word gender has scores of meaning built into it. It's an amalgamation of bodies, identities, and life experiences, subconscious urges, sensations, and behaviors, some of which develop organically, and others which are shaped by language and culture. Instead of saying that gender is any one single thing, let's start describing it as a holistic experience.
— Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation
Even though you're not my type, gender wise, you're certainly my type, person-wise.
— David Levithan, Every Day
If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.
— Paul Fussell
Let's stop pretending that we have all the answers, because when it comes to gender, none of us is fucking omniscient.
— Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation
To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider... To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to all men who act and become women, to all the people who want to be mothers. To my mother. - Dedication, Todo Sobre Mi Madre
— Pedro Almodóvar
All dwarfs have beards and wear up to twelve layers of clothing. Gender is more or less optional.
— Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
No. Have it here where it is quiet." "You and your quiet", said Brett. "What is it men feel about quiet?" "We like it," said the count. Like you like your noise, my dear.
— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. Can you?""Yes, I am fond of history.""I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all -- it is very tiresome.
— Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
It's the story of the City of Women; of how it came to be, how it flourished, and how it was destroyed by a reckless and irrevocable act of mercy.
— Louise Carey, The Steel Seraglio
While railing against the manufactured prerequisites of womanhood or manhood, we need to avoid manufacturing our own prerequisites. The non-operative journey and the objection to it illustrate just one area in which we need to open our thinking to other journeys while expecting that others respect our own. - Mercedes Allen
— Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation
Of course, men often 'use their economic superiority to gain sexual advantages,' but women often use their sexual superiority to gain economic advantages. So who is the extortionist?
— David P. Bryden
Love Knows NO GENDER.
— Cy_squared
The hardest part has been learning how to take myself seriously when the entire world is constantly telling me that femininity is always inferior to masculinity
— Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity
JP shouted, "TELL THEM WHAT YOU JUST DID TO EACH OTHER!""Um," I said."We kissed," the Duke said."That's kinda gay," Keun said."I AM A GIRL.""Yeah, I know, but so is Tobin," Keun said.
— John Green, Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances
Grammar is politics by other means.
— Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
Sorry," I said to the Duke."Eh, it's not your fault. It's Carla's fault. You were turning the wheel. Carla just wasn't listening. I knew I shouldn't have loved her. She's like all the others, Tobin; as soon as I confess my love, she abandons me."I laughed. "I never abandoned you," I said patting on her back."Yeah, well, (a.) I never confessed my love to you, and (b.) I'm not even female to you.
— John Green, Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances
I surrender to it, and by surrendering, I control it.
— Robert Jordan, The Shadow Rising
We can't ignore right-wing demagogues who insist that the word of the doctor who proclaims a child's sex at birth somehow holds more sway over the reality of the body than the word of the person who inhabits it. - Gwendolyn Ann Smith
— Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation
Safe gender is being who and what we want to be when we want to be that, with no threat of censure or violence.Safe gender is going as far in any direction as we wish, With no threat to our health, or anyone else’s.Safe gender is not being pressured into passing, not Having to lie, not having to hide.Sane gender is asking questions about gender - talkingTo people who do gender, and opening up about ourGender histories and our gender desires.Sane gender is probably very, very funny.Consensual gender is respecting each others’ definitionOf gender, and respecting the wishes of some to be alone,And respecting the intentions of others to be inclusive inTheir own time.Consensual gender is non-violent in that it doesn’t forceIts way in on anyone.Consensual gender opens its arms and welcomes all People as gender outcasts - whoever is willing to admit it.
— Kate Bornstein
When we talk about my gender as though it were a performance, we let the audience - with all their expectations, prejudices, and presumptions - completely off the hook. - Scott Turner Schofield
— Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation
But as I peeked at my brother's inert body....I was aware only of what a strange thing it was to be male. Society discriminated against women, no question. But what about the discrimination of being sent war? Which sex was really thought to be expendable.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
Once I accepted my own transexuality, then it became obvious to me that the question "Why do transsexuals exist?" is not a matter of pure curiosity, but rather an act of nonacceptance, as it invariably occurs in the absence of asking the reciprocal question: "Why do cissexuals exist?" The unceasing search to uncover the cause of transexuality is designed to keep transsexual gender identities in a perpetually questionable state, thereby ensuring that cissexual gender identities continue to be unquestionable.
— Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity
We have enough proof that, at least my generation does, that patriarchy and matriarchy are gender-less roles.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
…I am certain of this one truth: men can achieve closeness without intimacy, while women can achieve intimacy without closeness.For example, Bobbie knows every intimate detail of her dental hygienist’s private life. She doesn’t have a close relationship with her, but she knows more about the woman who cleans her teeth twice a year than I do about most of the guys I play basketball with every week. And still I feel a closeness with every one of them. Maybe it’s because I don’t know too much.
— Alan Eisenstock
Men have worked as essentially shop keepers and store clerks for a lot longer than they have worked on assembly lines. There have been waiters forever. Lawyers are the world's second oldest profession. Teaching was a male-only profession for centuries. The idea that men are and ought to be unreflective, grunting, two-fisted louts is a class thing, not a gender thing, and it is imposed upon working class men by a system that needs them to be beasts of burden.
— Lance Mannion
Drag queen is a gender like no other, and with practice I'd learned to rise to it.
— Kate Bornstein, A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The True Story of a Nice Jewish Boy Who Joins the Church of Scientology and Leaves Twelve Years Later to Become the Lovely Lady She is Today
The silence lingers and we soak it up like a good steam. Men like silence. We believe in it. We crave it. To us, silence is equal to peace and synonymous with quiet. Thus the common gender-specific phrase uttered by men in homes throughout the world, usually in the evening and on weekends: “Can I please get some peace and quiet, please?
— Alan Eisenstock
...And Brick and I say in unison, “As long as I’m here.”This is a guy thing.You never want to acknowledge that you and another guy had exactly the same thought in exactly the same words and that you spoke them aloud . . .at exactly the same time. If you’re out on a date and this happens, this is a good thing. It’s evidence that you and your date think alike, you’re in sync, possibly even soul mates, and with some luck, you might get laid. When this occurs with two guys, it’s simply freaky and should go by as if it never happened.
— Alan Eisenstock
sex separation in the classroom leads to a bullshit socio-economic situation perpetuated by people with good intentions.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
There is a resemblance between men and women, not a contrast. When a man begins to recognize his feeling, the two unite. When men accept the sensitive side of themselves, they come alive.
— Anaïs Nin, In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays
We speak of the masculine and the feminine, but they are the wrong labels. It is really more a matter of poetry versus intellectualization.
— Anaïs Nin, In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues.
— Elizabeth  Taylor
It's easy to run to others. It's so hard to stand on one's own record. You can fake virtue for an audience. You can't fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running. It's easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It's simple to seek substitutes for competence--such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.
— Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
I'd rather make a show 100 people need to see, than a show that 1000 people want to see.
— Joss Whedon
We do not place especial value on the possession of a virtue until we notice its total absence in our opponent.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder. 
— George Washington
The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend.
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue.
— François de La Rochefoucauld, Reflections or Sentences and Moral Maxims
Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one’s consciousness can permit the faking of existence.
— Ayn Rand, The Journals of Ayn Rand
To be able under all circumstances to practice five things constitutes perfect virtue; these five things are gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness and kindness.
— Confucius
Degrees of ability vary, but the basic principle remains the same: the degree of a man's independence, initiative and personal love for his work determines his talent as a worker and his worth as a man. Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn't done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity. There is no standard of personal dignity except independence.
— Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
Your stockings prove your virtues.Be certain they are clean and free of tears.
— Emilie Autumn
He cannot "tempt" to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles.
— C.S. Lewis
I can't count the men who have tried to seduce me away from my virtue by teaching me how to defend it.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
The charm of your society, my Sparrow, lies in not knowing what you will say next – though one rapidly learns to expect the worst!
— Georgette Heyer, Sylvester
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered...it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.
— G.K. Chesterton
This is pity,” he thought, and then he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue.
— Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
He never complained. He seemed to have no instinct for the making much of oneself that complaining requires.
— Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
Few are those who wish to be endowed with virtue rather than to seem so.
— Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Amicitia
To be proud of virtue, is to poison yourself with the Antidote.
— Benjamin Franklin
Yes, I laugh at all mankind, and the imposition that they dare to practice when they talk of hearts. I laugh at human passions and human cares, vice and virtue, religion and impiety; they are all the result of petty localities, and artificial situation. One physical want, one severe and abrupt lesson from the colorless and shriveled lip of necessity, is worth all the logic of the empty wretches who have presumed to prate it, from Zeno down to Burgersdicius. It silences in a second all the feeble sophistry of conventional life, and ascetical passion.
— Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer
Pacifism is a virtue indisguishable from cowardice.
— Brent Weeks, The Blinding Knife
Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.
— Edsger W. Dijkstra
Courage is not a virtue or value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundations that underlies and gives reality to all other virtue and personal values. (p. 13)
— Rollo May, The Courage to Create
Every good quality runs into a defect; economy borders on avarice, the generous are not far from the prodigal, the brave man is close to the bully; he who is very pious is slightly sanctimonious; there are just as many vices to virtue as there are holes in the mantle of Diogenes.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
She’s wonderful. Tell her I’ve never seen such beautiful hands. I wonder what she sees in you.”Waddington, smiling, translated the question.“She says I’m good.”“As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue,” Kitty mocked.
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil
It was a pleasure to deal with a man of high ideals, who scorned everything mean and base, and who possessed those robust and hardy qualities of body and mind, for the lack of which no merely negative virtue can ever atone.
— Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders
A good action is never lost
—  it is a treasure laid up and guarded for the doer’s need.
[On the virtuous man] "He combines the highest, lowest and middle chords in complete harmony within himself.
— Plato
I prefer a loose woman to a selfish one and a wanton to a fool.
— W. Somerset Maugham
A city is not adorned by external things, but by the virtue of those who dwell in it.
— Epictetus, Enchiridion and Selections from the Discourses
Part of the problem about authenticity is that virtues aren't the only things that are habit forming: the more someone behaves in a way that is damaging to self or to others, the more "natural" it will both seem and actually be. Spontaneity, left to itself, can begin by excusing bad behavior and end by congratulating vice.
— N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters
When virtue has slept it will arise more vigorous.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, A Nietzsche Reader
They said there was no rest for the wicked. In fact, there was rest neither for the virtuous nor the wicked, nor for guys like Billy, who were uncommitted regarding the whole idea of virtue versus wickedness and who were just trying to do their jobs.
— Dean Koontz, Dark Rivers of the Heart
If you asked twenty good men to-day what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love - You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point.
— C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory