c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I do not wish my anger and pain and fear about cancer to fossilize into yet another silence, nor to rob me of whatever strength can lie at the core of this experience, openly acknowledged and examined ... imposed silence about any area of our lives is a tool for separation and powerlessness.
— Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals
Most American women, particularly white women, have not decolonized their thinking either in relation to the racism, sexism, and class elitism they hold towards less powerful groups of women in this society or the masses of women globally.
— bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
-You dressed me like a woman-I did-It was insulting-Only if you think a woman is lesser than man.-Aren't they?-A woman saved your life
— Lissa Maxwell
Just got called a slag by two guys sitting outside the University of York library. A slag for books?
— Laura Bates, Everyday Sexism
Yes, for the love of God young women, come along – learn your limits. Or, rather, know society’s limits. How dare you think you have the right to go out wearing whatever you like – how foolish and ignorant of you to expect not to be assaulted, you brazen hussies! What do you think this is? A free country?
— Laura Bates, Everyday Sexism
The fact is that men encounter more complicity in their woman companions than the oppressor usually finds in the oppressed; and in bad faith they use it as a pretext to declare that woman wanted the destiny they imposed on her. We have seen that in reality her whole education conspires to bar her from paths of revolt and adventure; all of society - beginning with her respected parents - lies to her in extolling the high value of love, devotion, and the gift of self and in concealing the fact that neither lover, husband nor children will be disposed to bear the burdensome responsibility of it. She cheerfully accepts these lies because they invite her to take the easy slope: and that is the worst of the crimes committed against her; from her childhood and throughout her life, she is spoiled, she is corrupted by the fact that this resignation, tempting to any existent anxious about her freedom, is mean to be her vocation; if one encourages a child to be lazy by entertaining him all day, without giving him the occasion to study, without showing him its value, no one will say when he reaches the age of man that he chose to be incapable and ignorant; this is how the woman is raised, without ever being taught the necessity of assuming her own existence; she readily lets herself count on the protection, love, help and guidance of others; she lets herself be fascinated by the hope of being able to realise her being without doing anything. She is wrong to yield to this temptation; but the man is ill advised to reproach her for it since it is he himself who tempted her.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
How could women ever have had genius when all possibility of accomplishing a work of genius - or just a work - was refused them?
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Tired of cold callers asking to speak to the 'man in the house', now I put them on to my 6-year old son... he sings them 'Sexy and I Know It'.
— Laura Bates, Everyday Sexism
Possibilities for women have become so open-ended that they threaten to destabilize the institutions on which a male-dominated culture has depended, and a collective panic reaction on the part of both sexes has forced a demand for counter images.The Beauty Myth
— Naomi Wolf
The patrists poison themselves. The matrists tend to decay, which is merely another kind of poison.
— Theodore Sturgeon, Venus Plus X
How could van Gogh have been born woman? A woman would not have been sent on mission to Boringe, she would not have felt men's misery as her own crime, she would not have sought redemption; so she would never have painted van Gogh's sunflowers. And this without taking into account that the painter's kind of life - the solitude in Arles, going to cafés, whorehouses, everything that feed into van Gogh's art by feeding his sensibility - would have been prohibited to her. A woman could never have become Kafka: in her doubts and anxieties, she would never have recognised the anguish of Man driven from paradise.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
It must appear to every one (...) a matter of the greatest surprise, to observe the universal prevalence of prejudice and custom in the minds of the Men. (...) If this haughty sex would have us believe they have a natural superiority over us, why do not they prove their charter from Nature, by making use of reason to subdue themselves. (...) But it will be impossible for us, without forfeiting that reason, ever to acknowledge ourselves inferior to creatures, who make no other use of the sense they boast of (...) led away captive by prejudice, and sacrifying justice, truth and honour, to inconsiderate custom
— Lady Sophia Fermor, Woman Not Inferior to Man: Or, a Short and Modest Vindication of the Natural Right of the Fair-Sex to a Perfect Equality of Power, Dignity and Esteem with the Men
Women of all groups were measurably more likely than their male counterparts to vote for equality, health, and education, and against violence as a way of solving conflict. It wasn't about biology, but experience.
— Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road
The Men, who have taken care to engross the affairs of Religion, as well as others, to their own management, are no more guided in that than in any thing else by the dictates of reason. The religion they were bred up in, they blindly prefer to all others, without being able to give any stronger proof of it's being the best, than that it was the Faith of their fore-fathers. Upon the strength of this prejudice, they adhere to it as the only true one, and without ever examining into it, or comparing it with others; they condemn all beside it as erroneous. Is not this the case with most of the Men, our clergy not excepted? No country pleases a man so well as his own; nay, so far is he apt to carry prejudice, that he can seldom be induced to do justice to any other nation, even where truth is on it's side, if the honour and interest of his own is at stake: And this is a foible the very best Men are equally subject to. Nay, such is the imbecility of that sex, as well as ours, that even professions are a matter of prejudice.
— Lady Sophia Fermor, Woman Not Inferior to Man: Or, a Short and Modest Vindication of the Natural Right of the Fair-Sex to a Perfect Equality of Power, Dignity and Esteem with the Men
the many absurd notions the Men are led into by custom: Tho' there is none more absurd, than that of the great difference they make between their own sex and ours. Yet it must be own'd that there is not any vulgar error more antient or universal. For the learned and illiterate alike are prepossest with the opinion that Men are really superior to Women, and that the dependence we now are in, is the very state which nature pointed out for us.
— Lady Sophia Fermor, Woman Not Inferior to Man: Or, a Short and Modest Vindication of the Natural Right of the Fair-Sex to a Perfect Equality of Power, Dignity and Esteem with the Men
the Men, biased by custom, prejudice, and interest, have presumed boldly to pronounce sentence in their own favour, because possession empowered them to make violence take place of justice. And the Men of our times, without trial or examination, have taken the same liberty from the report of other Men. (...) If a Man could thus divest the partiality attach'd to this self, and put on for a minute a state of neutrality, he would be able to see, and forced to acknowledge, that prejudice and precipitance are the chief causes of setting less value upon Women than Men, and giving so much greater excellence and nobility to the latter than to the former. In a word, were the Men Philosophers in the strict sense of the term, they would be able to see that nature invincibly proves a perfect equality in our sex with their own.
— Lady Sophia Fermor, Woman Not Inferior to Man: Or, a Short and Modest Vindication of the Natural Right of the Fair-Sex to a Perfect Equality of Power, Dignity and Esteem with the Men
it appears that there is no other difference between Men and Us than what their tyrany has created, it will then appear how unjust they are in excluding us from that power and dignity we have a right to share with them; how ungenerous in denying us the equality of esteem, which is our due; and how little reason they have to triumph in the base possession of an authority, which unnatural violence, and lawless usurpation, put into their Hands. Then let them justify, if they can, the little meannesses, not to mention the grosser barbarities, which they daily practise towards that part of the creation
— Lady Sophia Fermor, Woman Not Inferior to Man: Or, a Short and Modest Vindication of the Natural Right of the Fair-Sex to a Perfect Equality of Power, Dignity and Esteem with the Men
Because while my daughter lives in a world that knows what happens to women is wrong, it has also accepted this wrongness as inevitable.
— Jessica Valenti, Sex Object
The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production.
— Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
What's 'suitable for kids' defines what sort of kids we as a society want. And right now, the girls society wants are the ones who can fit on a short list—while the list for boys is without borders or end.
— Jason Porath, Rejected Princesses: Tales of History's Boldest Heroines, Hellions, and Heretics
We are taught we can redeem them, she said to me once. We are taught it as soon as we can read. We can turn the beast into a prince, if only we love him enough.
— Louise Doughty, Apple Tree Yard
The pop culture cliché of the American High School movie, which adapted old archetypes, depicted a social world in which the worst sexists were always the all brawn no brains sports jock. But now that the online world has given us a glimpse into the inner lives of others, one of the surprising revelations is that it is the nerdish self-identifying nice guy who could never get the girl who has been exposed as the much more hate-filled, racist, misogynist who is insanely jealous of the happiness of others.
— Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right
Don't we teach our women to view all men according to the actions of a few?
— Tamora Pierce, The Will of the Empress
Arjun: ...the men are talking because you're beautiful.Sita: ...I would much rather they talk about me because I'm skilled.
— Michelle Moran, Rebel Queen
If we start preemptively cutting out parts of who we are because they’re ‘not feminist enough’, then we’ve failed before we’ve begun.
— C. N. Lester
On top of dealing with the emotional trauma associated with conscious and unconscious recalling, you must deal with the possibility of no one believing you or making you doubt your experiences. When women speak out about their abusers, they have to deal with the police and society not believing them
— Malebo Sephodi, Miss Behave
Now, in the academy, you cannot just say anything about male theory. You have to proceed with an immanent critique, that is to say, you have to expertly play the parts against the whole. You show, for example, how certain assumptions in the work actually defeat its stated purpose of human liberation, but once remedied, i.e. salvaged, the theory will work for women. An immanent critique can stay within the masculinist academic circle. In this position women become the technicians of male theory who have to reprogram the machine, turning it from a war machine against women into a gentler, kinder war machine, killing us softly. This is a very involving task and after years of playing this part it is understandable that there may be little desire to admit that the effort was virtually futile. An investment has been made, and the conformity is not wholly outer. What attitudes and feelings does this sexist context produce towards oppositional women who refuse this male material? Does a male-circled woman have the power and security to be generous? Having compromised her freedom, will she be less willing to compromise ours? Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of this arrangement, besides the ways it sets women against one another, is the fact that although the male academy values owning our freedom, it does not have to pay a lot for it. Masculine culture already controls gross amounts of female lives. Still, it seems to want more, but always at the same low price. The exploited are very affordable.
— Somer Brodribb
Self-love for me means accepting who I am and dealing with the perceived flaws that I live with. It is also accepting that sometimes I struggle with feelings of inadequacy and I do not think that I am enough. The point to all of this, is acknowledging this part about me. When I acknowledge it then it becomes easy for me to seek self-love through managing the moments when I don’t feel like I love myself. I am constantly working towards finding ways that enable me to value myself.
— Malebo Sephodi
I was a young girl, a virgin, and therefore men denied me rationality just as they denied it to all those who were not exactly like themselves, in all their unreason.
— Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
I see nothing. I do not move. It is an empty time, animal time, vigilant, I am submerged, under the earth and under time. I listen. Perhaps the waiting is a form of prayer.
— Hélène Cixous, from an interview featured in the introduction of The Selected Plays of Hélène Cixous
My daughter has pointed out that there were not enough lovejobs to go around in this new world. In any event, I probably learned tolerance, maybe even literary affection for the person in the wrong historical moment, living such long, never to be mediate wars with other sufferers.
— Grace Paley, Just As I Thought
In this sense, we can render the false meaning of catharsis which occurs in pornography with a different meaning than the catharsis we associate with Aristotle's definition of tragedy. For in the tragedy, we weep, grieve and feel pity. We are brought to feeling, we experience both meaning and sensation at the same time, tremble in our bodies and our souls. Thus we weep over the death of Iphigenia, of Tristan and Iseult, of Madame Bovary. In experiencing these feelings, we have tapped a part of ourselves which had perhaps been quiet for some time. Which indeed, in this stillness, we were not certain was even there. Or had even forgotten. And thus, when we weep at this tragic playing out before our eyes of a drama which touches our hearts, a part of ourselves we had left in shadow comes back to us and is named and is lived. But pornographic catharsis moves from altogether different needs. For, we know, one does not weep over the death of Justine. One does not feel at all. Rather, one experiences only sensation and mastery. If there is a vulnerable part of oneself that would weep, this vulnerability is projected onto the body of a woman who is punished, and is destroyed there. And so we cease, in this projection, to recognize this vulnerability as a part of ourselves. Rather than reclaim a feeling, or own a part of ourselves once more, we disown ourselves. What pornography calls "catharsis" leads to denial and not to knowledge.
— Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence: Culture's Revenge against Nature
Lifting her lovely and longing face towards the inaudible chant of the sun, she drifted through her time, through space, through the concatenate cells of her unfolding self. Where to now, Abbzug? You're twenty-eight and a half years old, Abbzug. 
— Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang
Society is obsessed with women's bodies and I take my body back by doing whatever it is that I want to do with my body
— Malebo Sephodi, Miss Behave
How do I negotiate my way across life with a system that I find so violent yet it seems so normal to many others?
— Malebo Sephodi, Miss Behave
Asking men to cut away their “feminine” traits asks them to cut away half their humanity, just as asking women to suppress their “masculine” traits asks them to deny their full autonomy.What makes us human is not one or the other—the fist or the open palm—it’s our ability to embrace both, and choose the appropriate action for the situation we’re in. Because to deny one half—to burn down the world or refuse to defend the world from those who would burn it—is to deny our humanity and become something less than human.
— Kameron Hurley, The Geek Feminist Revolution
In nude protests, the very same body that is objectified and subjected to endless scrutiny and policing is used to reclaim power.
— Malebo Sephodi, Miss Behave
Ram wanted to marry a woman in front of whom he would be compelled to bow his head in admiration. P.210
— Amish Tripathi, Sita: Warrior of Mithila
That a woman claims not to be feminist does not diminish the necessity of feminism. If anything, it makes us see the extent of the problem, the successful reach of patriarchy.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions
You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.
— Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me
I like incidents of that sort, when forces that are usually so sneaky and hard to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an anaconda that's eaten a cow or an elephant turd on the carpet.
— Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me
Moving across levels of the particular and the abstract, trying to avoid a transcendent purchase on the objects of study, we set ourselves up for necessary failure in order to learn how to find our way into post-foundational possibilities.
— Patti Lather
I love my own kind—womankind.
— Qiu Miaojin
Suddenly, it occurred to me that my feelings towards the little man were distinctly maternal. Good God, I thought, how utterly revolting, and I turned my mind firmly to the problem at hand.
— Laurie R. King, A Letter of Mary
And, and to all the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams.
— Hillary Rodham Clinton
The assumption that women in hijab are less enlightened or empowered than those rocking daisy dukes is arrogant at best. Feminism should fight for all women to have he right to live as they choose, not for all women to live the same exact lives like we're all in some sort of Sims game.
— Luvvie Ajayi, I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual
...the Men Who Knew came out of the woodwork.
— Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me
Every woman knows what I'm talking about. It's the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men's unsupported overconfidence.
— Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me
...explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge.
— Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me
It's the way some med say, "I'm not the problem" or that they shifted the conversation from actual corpses and victims as well as perpetrators to protecting the comfort level of bystander males. An exasperated woman remarked to me, "What do they want--a cookie for not hitting, raping, or threatening women?
— Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me
It's the way some men say, 'I'm not the problem' or that they shifted the conversation from actual corpses and victims as well as perpetrators to protecting the comfort level of bystander males. An exasperated woman remarked to me, 'What do they want--a cookie for not hitting, raping, or threatening women?
— Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me
On reflection, looking at shows like this and considering my own experiences, what fascinated me was that we have so many stories like this that help us empathize with monstrous men. “Yes, these men are flawed, but they are not as evil as this man.” Even more chilling, they tend to be stories that paint women as roadblocks, aggressors, antagonists, complications—but only in the context of them being a bitch, a whore, a Madonna. The women are never people.Stories about monstrous men are not meant to teach us how to empathize with the women and children murdered, but with the men fighting over their bodies.As a woman menaced by monsters, I find this particularly interesting, this erasure of me from a narrative meant to, if not justify, then explain the brokenness of men. There are shows much better at this, of course, which don’t paint women out of the story—Mad Men is the first to come to mind, and Game of Thrones—but True Detective doubled down.The women terrorized by monsters in real life are active agents. They are monster-slayers, monster-pacifiers, monster-nurturers, monster-wranglers—and some of them are monsters, too. In truth, if we are telling a tale of those who fight monsters, it fascinates me that we are not telling more women’s stories, as we’ve spun so many narratives like True Detective that so blatantly illustrate the sexist masculinity trap that turns so many human men into the very things they despise.Where are the women who fight them? Who partner with them? Who overcome them? Who battle their own monsters to fight greater ones?Because I have and continue to be one of those women, navigating a horror show world of monsters and madmen. We are women who write books and win awards and fight battles and carve out extraordinary lives from ruin and ash. We are not background scenery, our voices silenced, our motives and methods constrained to sex.I cannot fault the show’s men for forgetting that; they’ve created the world as they see it. But I can prod the show’s exceptional writers, because in erasing the narrative of those whose very existence is constantly threatened by these monsters, including trusted monsters whose natures vacillate wildly, they sided with the monsters.I’m not a bit player in a monster’s story. But with narratives like this perpetuated across our media, it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s how my obituary read: a catalogue of the men who sired me, and fucked me, and courted me.Stories that are not my own.Funny, isn’t it? The power of story.It’s why I picked up a pen.I slay monsters, too.
— Kameron Hurley, The Geek Feminist Revolution
I can think of only two movies with women killers we’re meant to sympathize with, and both because they’d been sexually assaulted—Thelma and Louise and Monster. And to be honest, I don’t imagine anyone would call the women in these films heroes. The popular comic book mercenary Red Sonja is, perhaps, a proper hero, but is, once again, motivated by a sexual assault. Male heroes are heroic because of what’s been done to women in their lives, often—the dead child, the dead wife. Women heroes are also heroic for what’s been done to women … to them.We build our heroes, too often, on terrible things done to women, instead of creating, simply, heroes who do things, who persevere in the face of overwhelming odds because it’s the right thing to do.
— Kameron Hurley, The Geek Feminist Revolution
I was limited by stories that came before mine.We are so often limited by our own expectations of stories, by the stories that came before, by the heroes who came before.… How is it we can bear to live with ourselves, as readers and storytellers, if we swallow those limitations without questioning them?
— Kameron Hurley, The Geek Feminist Revolution
This is central to the development of feminist abolitionist theories and practices: we have to learn how to think and act and struggle against that which is ideologically constituted as "normal".
— Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement
The process of trying to assimilate into an existing category in many ways runs counter to efforts to produce radical or revolutionary results.
— Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement
Feminists have accepted that choice is possible when it comes to a different, difficult subject: abortion. The feminist position (and I agree with it) is that women own their bodies and therefore each woman has the right to choose to get an abortion if she gets pregnant. This is called being "pro-choice". Feminists should be consistent on the subject of choice. If a woman has the right to choose to have an abortion, she should also have the right to choose to have sex for money. It's her body; it's her right.
— Chester Brown, Paying for It
What a loss it would be if feminism killed chivalry.
— Joyce Rachelle
In being everything for everyone, when am I anything for myself?
— Malebo Sephodi, Miss Behave
the human mind was no better than in its earliest period of savagery, only better informed
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
Men did care enough to struggle with our demands. And some cared enough to convert to feminist thinking and to change. But only a very, very few loved us – loved us all the way. And that meant respecting our sexual rights. To this day I believe that feminist debate about love and sexuality ended precisely because straight women did not want to face the reality that it was highly unlikely in patriarchal society that a majority of men would wholeheartedly embrace women’s right to say no in the bedroom. Since the vast majority of heterosexual women, even those involved in radical feminist movement, were not willing to say no when they did not want to perform sexually for the fear of upsetting or alienating their mate, no significant group of men ever had to rise to the occasion. While it became more acceptable to say no now and then, it was not acceptable to say no for any significant amount of time. An individual woman in a primary relationship with a man could not say no, because she feared there was always another woman in the background who could take her place, a woman who would never say no.
— bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love
To misbehave us to denounce the social norms that limit individuals based on who they are. That to make history is to upset patriarchy, a system that is intent on controlling and marginalising others.
— Malebo Sephodi, Miss Behave
Feminist narrative theory notes that for most of literary history there's been an imbalance between men's and women's stories. Male characters go out into a world of infinite possibilities. Female characters either get married or die. This makes enlightened female readers such as ourselves pissed off. But however much we deconstruct the narrative, however vigilantly we plow and apply the theory and read with our skeptical, over-educated eyes, still some lessons are hard to fully internalize, and the dream of happily-ever-after love, in real life and in literature, dies hardest of all.
— Laurie Frankel, The Atlas of Love
Not all men rape. Some molest and others observe!
— Abhishek Leela Pandey
Life's struggle is a partnership. We fight and win together, or we truly lose the vision of our powerful spirituality and awesome oneness.
— Maya Emmett, Killing Adam: The Emasculation of Humanity
If I were a woman I should march out with a flaming torch and a sword
—  I should emasculate right and left.
being the woman that i am will make a way out of no way..[these are the words of all women of color who assert who they are, who create sound out of silence, and who build worlds out of remnants. (282
— D. Soyini Madison, The Woman That I Am: The Literature and Culture of Contemporary Women of Color
Religion is the last cultural barrier to gender equity.
— Karen L. Garst, Women Beyond Belief: Discovering Life Without Religion
Life's lessons are designed that we would rise from 'The Fall' (or our failures) and be restored to our Divine nature.
— Maya Emmett, Killing Adam: The Emasculation of Humanity
Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated. Science, for me, gives a partial explanation of life ... I do not accept your definition of faith i.e. belief in life after death ... Your faith rests on the future of yourself and others as individuals, mine in the future and fate of our successors. It seems to me that yours is the more selfish ... [as to] the question of a creator. A creator of what? ... I see no reason to believe that a creator of protoplasm or primeval matter, if such there be, has any reason to be interested in our insignificant race in a tiny corner of the universe.
— Rosalind Franklin
We view men’s gifts as vital to the church. In contrast, we caution women to exercise their gifts discreetly to avoid causing problems or trespassing some invisible line — which changes location from church to church, sometimes even within the same denomination.
— Carolyn Custis James, Lost Women of the Bible: Finding Strength & Significance through Their Stories
Girls are better at this sort of labour, often called 'emotional labour', not because there's anything in the meat and matter of our living cells that makes us naturally better but because we're trained for it from birth. Trained to make other people feel good. Trained to serve the coffee, fill in the forms, organise the parties and wipe the table afterwards. Trained to be feisty, if we must, but not strong. To be bubbly, not funny. You must at no stage appear to have a body that functions in a normal human way, that pisses and shits and sweats and farts and falters. Decorate the prison of your body. Make yourself useful. Shut up and smile.
— Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution
If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role then we are lost indeed.
— Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch
Psychologists cannot fix the world so they fix women.
— Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch
society's been drugging its women for years
— Elizabeth Strout, Anything Is Possible
No woman could have been Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized.
— Andrea Dworkin, Right Wing Women
Romantic love as most people understand it in patriarchal culture makes one unaware, renders one powerless and out of control. Feminist thinkers called attention to the way this notion of love served the interests of patriarchal men and women. It supported the notion that one could do anything in the name of love: beat people, restrict their movements, even kill them and call it a "crime of passion," plead, "I love her so much i had to kill her.
— bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
Advancing the notion that there can be many "feminisms" has served the conservative and liberal political interests of women seeking status and privileged class power who were among the first group to use the term "power feminists." They also were the group that began to suggest that one could be feminist and anti-abortion. This another misguided notion. Granting women the civil right to have control over our bodies is a basic feminist principle. Whether an individual female should have an abortion is purely a matter of choice. It is not anti-feminist for us to choose not to have abortions. But it is a feminist principle that women should have the right to choose.
— bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
The only genuine hope of feminist liberation lies wth a vision of social change which challenges class elitism.
— bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
To be a woman is to be a fighter! A woman has to be strong and has to fight every moment of her life - against a society that believes in patriarchy, chauvinism and male privilege!
— Avijeet Das
The reason why women are abandoned has always been a puzzle to me, until I started realizing that it goes back to a hidden factor that they, themselves hide, and that's called irresponsibility. Feminism made them worse, because now they think that it is normal to be irresponsible, that a man must be the victim of the domestic abuse.
— Kent Lamarc
I didn’t wake up this morning worrying about what protest color I’d wear, or what the world would do without me because I didn’t wake up feeling like the victimhood narrative was a part of my story. Real women don’t have to remind the world every day that history once slighted them.
— Tomi Lahren
Lifestyle feminism ushered in a notion that there could be as many versions of feminism as there were women. Suddenly the politics was being slowly removed from feminism. And the assumption prevailed that no matter what a woman's politics, be she conservative or liberal, she too could fit feminism into her existing lifestyle.
— bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
Feminist politics is losing momentum because feminist movement has lost clear definitions. We have those definitions. Let's reclaim them. We can share the simple yet powerful message that feminism is a movement to end sexist oppression.
— bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
Feminist efforts to grant women social equality with men of their class neatly coincided with white supremacist capitalist patriarchal fears that white power would diminish if nonwhite people gained equal access to economic power and privilege. Supporting what in effect became white power reformist feminism enabled the mainstream white supremacist patriarchy to bolster its power while simultaneously undermining the radical politics of feminism.
— bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
When women with class power opportunistically use a feminist platform while undermining feminist politics that helps keep in place a patriarchal system that will ultimately re-subordinate them, they do not just betray feminism; they betray themselves.
— bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
Sexual promiscuity and sexual liberation were not one and the same.
— bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
Woman-identified women, whether straight, bisexual, or lesbian rarely make garnering male approval a priority in our lives. This is why we threaten the patriarchy. Lesbian women who have a patriarchal mindset are far less threatening to men than feminist women, gay or straight, who have turned their gaze and their desire from the patriarchy, away from sexist men.
— bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
There must be more than male benevolence as the basis for a woman's well-being.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions
Teach her to question men who can have empathy for women only if they see them as relational rather than as individual equal humans.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions
Make dressing a question of taste and attractiveness instead of a question of morality.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions
To slur “feminism” into “humanism” is to usurp women’s voices once again, to make the singular feminine into the so-called universal masculine.
— Gina Barreca
A world that does not love, respect and protect its Women is doomed to perish! Because Women are Mother Earth!
— Avijeet Das
we bwlive that feminism is a transformative philosophy that embraces the amelioration of life on earth for all life-forms, for all natural entities
— Carol J. Adams, Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations
many efforts on bahalf of of animals will qualitatively improve humans' living conditions as well, which is likely to be the case
— Carol J. Adams, Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations
Feminism...is not 'women as victims' but women refusing to be victims.
— Gloria Steinem, The Trouble With Rich Women
The vagina is obliterated from the imagery of femininity in the same way that the signs of independence and vigor in the rest of her body are suppressed.
— Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch
...it is the most militant, most radical intervention anyone can make to not only speak of love, but to engage in the practice of love. For love as the foundation of all social movements for self-determination is the only way we create a world that domination and dominator thinking cannot destroy. Anytime we do the work of love we are doing the work of ending domination.
— bell hooks, Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom
A woman of feeling does not easily give way. You may call it pride, or tenacity, call it what you will. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, their emotions are more primitive than ours. They hold to the thing they want, and never surrender. We have our wars and battles, Mr. Ashey. But women can fight too.
— Daphne du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel
She said, 'No, you learned that you have power - power and determination. I love you and I am proud of you. With those two things, you can go anywhere and everywhere.
— Maya Angelou, Mom & Me & Mom
There is not a woman born who desires to eat the bread of dependence, no matter whether it be from the hand of father, husband, or brother; for anyone who does so eat her bread places herself in the power of the person from whom she takes it.
— Susan B. Anthony
Never has it been inappropriate for a girl to wear a red dress.
— Caroline George, The Vestige
It wouldn’t be very ladylike to punch a guy in the balls, but it isn’t very manlike to harass a woman because she has different parts and a sweet face.
— Caroline George, The Vestige
WE SHOULD ALL BE HUMANISTS.So I had this conversation with a friend and I am of the view that, we need no tags to speak against violence of all sorts. We need no tags to love and protect ourselves. We need no tags to do the right thing. We need no tags to treat each other fairly.We need no tags to be our neighbours’ keeper.We need no tags to stand up for what is right.We need no tags to demand for justice.We need no tags to punish offenders.We need no tags to live in harmony.All we need is a defined standard of acceptable behaviour.All we need is to properly and promptly determine who has stepped out of the defined boundary.All we need is to mete out prescribed punishment to defaulters without fear or favour.There can be no different identities.We are all humans, male or female.We need nothing more than our humanity.WE SHOULD ALL BE HUMANISTS.
— Magnus Nwagu Amudi
The truth is I don't give a damn why anyone has an abortion. I believe unconditionally in the right of people with uteruses to decide what grow inside of their body and feeds on their blood and endangers their life and reroutes their future. There are no "good" abortions and "bad" abortions, there are only pregnant people who want them and pregnant people who don't, pregnant people who have access and support and pregnant people who face institutional roadblocks and lies.
— Lindy West, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman
Take control. You are a strong, independent woman.
— Bella Swan
It is "humanism" that should run in the veins of the thinking humanity, not a certain gender-oriented "ism". This entire book is a treatise on gender equality, and as such, it may be hailed as a work of feminism, but it is not - it is a work of humanism.
— Abhijit Naskar, The Bengal Tigress: A Treatise on Gender Equality
Besides(..), it's a poor woman whose ambition is only to be loved.
— Sarah Perry, The Essex Serpent
If we divide human attributes into "masculine" and "feminine" and strengthen only those attributes that "belong" to that sex, we cut off half of ourselves from ourselves as human beings, condemned forever to search for our other half. The world is in desperate need of multilayered human beings with the voices, stamina, and insight to break through our current calcified ways of doing things, (...) The patriarchal structures of honor, shame, violence, and might is right, do as much harm to Hamlet, Edgar, Lear, and Coriolanus as they do to Ophelia, Desdemona, Lady Macduff (...)(...) To have feelings, intuitive flights of understanding, a desire to have knowledge of what is happening below the surface, to serve. These are often called "feminine" attributes, and it is true that many women in the plays possess them. But they also belong to Kent, Ferdinand, Florizel, Camillo, as well as the women. So they are not "feminine" attributes: they are human attributes.
— Tina Packer, Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare's Plays
Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more priviledged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
We live in a world where it’s feasible that a tiny hobbit can save an entire world, but not a feminine woman. And god help her if she’s a woman of color, because that’s given as even more inconceivable.
— Ash Gray
Without even trying to be a teacher, Fredrika is teaching us,Showing us how to see things in new waysInstead of always thinkingThe same old thoughtsThat have been passed along by strangersDay after day, year after yearWithout any spirit of amazementOr wonder,
— Margarita Engle, The Firefly Letters
What the hell does this say about India? Appearances are more important than truths. Gossip is more potent than facts. Loyalty is all one way, from the woman to the man. And when society stacks up all the odds against a woman, she’d better not count on the man’s support. She has no way out other than to end her own life. And I’m in love with an Indian. I must be crazy.
— Shashi Tharoor, Riot
It is not female egotism to say that the future of mankind may very well be ours to determine. It is a fact.
— Shirley Chisholm
We have books and films where mice and hobbits and dwarves and children can save the world, and that's perfectly acceptable. But a 120lb woman save the galaxy? YOU GO TOO FAR, SIR.
— Ash Gray
Thanks for nothing, regular human mom. Footnote: nothing except for the unconditional love and support and meticulous care to make sure I faced the world fully informed about my body and reproductive health.
— Lindy West, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman
Don’t tell me my writing is misogynistic or anti-feminist just because I or my heroines like to be controlled in the bedroom and find great satisfaction and freedom with it. That is the most anti-feminist statement I have ever heard. Feminism is all about letting women be who THEY want to be. Not how YOU want them to be...I am both a feminist AND a submissive in my sexual fantasies and reality. You are the one who is anti-feminist who tells me I can’t be.
— R.B. O'Brien
Even women deeply committed to the emancipatory promises of modernity were alarmed by the "inappropriateness" of unrelated men and omen socializing in the streets. In the women's press, articles exhorted young men to treat women respectfully in public. Other articles encouraged women to act as their own police and to be more observant of their hijab and public modesty.From the beginning, then, women's entry on the streets was subject to the regulatory harassment of men. The modernist heterosocializing promise that invited women to leave their homosocial spaces and become educated companionate partners for modernist men was underwritten by policing of women's public presence through men's street actions. Men at once desired heterosociality of the modern and yet would not surrender the privileged masculinity of the streets. Women's public presence was also underwritten by disciplinary approbation of modernizing women themselves whose emancipatory drive would be jeopardized by unruly public conduct.
— Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity
A unified Iran is constituted not only politically but also affectively. Liberty and constitutional rule bring "Affection among us." The affective sentiment- that of bonding among differing brothers-produces political bonds of national unity and was associatively linked with other desires. Perhaps foremost was the desire to care for and defend the mother, in particular her bodily integrity. The same words were commonly used to discuss territory and the female body. Laura Mulvey calls these words keys "that could turn either way between the psychoanalytic and the social" (1980, 180). They are not "just words" that open up to either domain; they mediate between these domains, taking power of desire from one to the other. More appropriately, they should be considered cultural nodes of psyhosocial condensation. Tajavuz, literally meaning transgression, expresses both rape and the invasion of territory. Another effective expression, as already noted, was Khak-i pak-i vatan, the pure soil of the homeland. The word used for "pure," pak, is saturated with connotations of sexual purity. Linked to the idea of the purity of a female vatan was the metaphoric notion of the "skirt of chastity" (daman-i 'iffat) and its purity-whether it was stained or not. It was the duty of Iranian men to protect that skirt. The weak and sometimes dying figure of motherland pleaded t her dishonorable sons to arise and cut the hands of foreigners from her skirt. Expressing hope for the success of the new constitutional regime by recalling and wishing away the horrors of previous years, an article in Sur-o Israfil addressed Iran in the following terms: "O Iran! O our Mother! You who have given us milk from the blood of your veins for many long years, and who have fed us with the tissues of your own body! Will we ever live to see your unworthy children entrust your skirt of chastity to the hands of foreigners? Will our eyes ever see foreigners tear away the veil of your chastity?
— Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity
Connie’s man could be a bit sulky, and Hilda’s a bit jeering. But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don’t have them they hate you because you won’t; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are discontented children, and can’t be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman do what she may.
— D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover
She had to fight against developing too combative a personality or becoming altogether a misanthrope. She suddenly caught herself. "Misanthrope" is someone who dislikes everybody, not just men.And they certainly had a word for someone who hates women: "misogynist." But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word.
— Carl Sagan, Contact
Men define intelligence, men define usefulness, men tell us what is beautiful, men even tell us what is womanly
— Sally Kempton
Men weren’t really the enemy — they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.
— Betty Friedan
Like racism, misogyny can never be adequately addressed by its victims alone.
— Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me
God, what a depressing day that was and what an irony that Britain’s first female prime minister had to be Margaret Thatcher. She was the woman who asked, ‘What has feminism ever done for me?’ Well, dear, if you need to ask that question then you’re obviously not very bright
— Jo Brand, Look Back in Hunger
Love is described like GOD.
— Sara Pascoe
There is more difference within the sexes than between them.
— Ivy Compton-Burnett, Mother and Son
It's the problem with having a logical mind and giving women the same credit for ability as men, he mused as he dismounted. You can't contrive reasons to keep them safe.
— Raymond E. Feist, Prince of the Blood
To me, 'sexual freedom' means freedom from having to have sex.
— Lily Tomlin
I'm just a person trapped inside a woman's body.
— Elayne Boosler