c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Do you think working dads sit around at work worrying about how they can get back home in time to play with the kids, help with their homework, feed them, bathe them and put them to bed so that the child feels loved and won’t turn into a junkie, pole dancing, anorexic? No—of course not! And you know why? Because the moms already have that covered. These women are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. They have advice coming at them from everywhere, their friends, mothers, sisters, mothers-in-law, blogs, websites, magazines and books. Everyone thinks they know how it’s done and they keep heaping more pain and aggravation on the moms of the world.
— Radhika Vaz, Unladylike: A Memoir
What is the male equivalent of Bimbo?
— Valerie Harper, Today I Am a Ma'am: and Other Musings On Life, Beauty, and Growing Older
You may have learned from your mother or any other hunted woman. Smiling at devils is a useful learned thing. Swallowing discomfort down in spades. Holding it tight in your belly. Ageing on the inside only. Keeping it forever sexy.
— Yrsa Daley-Ward
So remember, this is definitely a screwed-if-you-do, screwed-if-you-don't situation. You just remember to say, "Screw them.
— Jessica Valenti, Full Frontal Feminism
Flo especially took me in hand. When I felt I had to prove the existence of discrimination with statistics, for instance, she pulled me aside. 'If you're lying in the ditch with a truck on your ankle,' she said patiently, 'you don't send someone to the library to find out how much the truck weighs. You get it off!
— Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road
Kasta looked from one of them to the other, the two of them shaking hands, understanding each other's concern. She didn't see where Giddon came off feeling insulted. She didn't see how Giddon had any place in it at all. Who were they, to take her fight away from her and turn it into some sort of understanding between themselves? She would knock his nose from his face. She would thump them both, and she would apologise to neither.
— Kristin Cashore, Graceling
At times I am flabbergasted that my memory is considered false and my alcoholic father's memory is considered rational and sane. Am I not believed because I am a woman? If Peter Freyd were a man who lived in my neighborhood during my childhood instead of my father, would he and his wife be so believable? If not, what is it about his status as my father that makes him more credible?
— Jennifer J. Freyd
Men in particular,” he went on, stating the loathsome truth, “are given a fair amount of leeway in the public eye.
— Lucy  Parker, Act Like It
In three weeks, the women's team had done more for soccer in the United States than any team had ever done. Yet, the United States Soccer Federation was unprepared and unwelcoming in its acerbic response to the women's success. With petty, resentful, chauvinistic behavior, the federation would bungle what should have been its greatest moment as a national governing body. Its leaders would criticize DiCicco instead of congratulating him, they would threaten to sue the women over an indoor victory tour and they would wait an unacceptably long period before entering into contract negotiations with the team. Then, at the end of the year, the federation would offer a deal that the women found insulting. Unwilling to trust that the federation was bargaining in good faith, the women would boycott a trip to a tournament in Australia. They would become champions of the world, embraced by the president, by the largest crowd ever to watch women play and by the largest television audience for soccer in this country, embraced by everyone, it seemed, but the officials who ran the sport with the vision of a student council. Increasingly, it appeared, the only amateurs left in sports were the people running the federations that governed them.
— Jere Longman, The Girls of Summer: The U.S. Women's Soccer Team and How It Changed the World
She was wise enough to hold her tongue. As this is the only instance known of a Woman's ever having done so, it was judged worthy to be recorded here.
— Matthew      Lewis
The title is “I am not the sexist pig you are looking for”. He is merely attempting to state that he is not a sexist pig right? Until one understands the cultural reference to Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Then his insidious plan is revealed! Muahahaha! Just kidding. But it does resemble a striking similarity to a scene on Tatooine.The scene where Master Obi-wan “Ben” Kenobi uses the force and tells the Stormtroopers “these are the not the droids you are looking for” The odd thing in this scene is that they were the droids that the Empire was looking for. After the comments Mr. Harris made and the obvious lack of scientific credibility in his statements, the writers are betting he wished he had the force and mind trick.
— Idav Kelly, The Leprechaun Delusion
Don't tell me I'm "too tall" just because my height happens to threaten your rather fragile sense of masculinity. The fact that men cannot look down upon women who are taller than them is the very reason that many men find tall women so intimidating.
— Miya Yamanouchi, Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women
There, little girl, don't read,You're fond of your books, I know,But Brother might mopeIf he had no hopeOf getting ahead of you.It's dull for a boy who cannot lead.There, little girl, don't read.
— Alice Duer Miller, Are Women People? a Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times
Tom's contemptuous conception of a girl included the attribute of being unfit to walk in dirty places.
— George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
Hell of a sight. She let out a scream and just fell to pieces. Can't say I blame her. Like I said, this sort of thing is not for the female temperament." He directed that last sentiment at me, making eye contact for the first time."I dare say you're right, sir," I conceded, meeting his gaze. "Out of curiosity, though, is there someone whose temperament you do find suited to this sort of thing? I think I would be most unnerved to meet a man who found it pleasant.
— William Ritter, Jackaby
Sylvia rarely flattered the men in her life- she envied them. She was far more likely to compete with a man than a woman. In her journal she describes this jealousy of which she is painfully aware; "It is an envy born of the desire to be active and doing, not passive and listening." She craved the "double life" of men, who could enjoy career, sex, and family. "I can pretend to forget my envy," she writes, "no matter, it is there, insidious, malignant, latent.
— Elizabeth Winder, Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953
Black men are not so passive that they must have Black women speak for them. Even my fourteen-year-old son knows that. Black men themselves must examine and articulate their own desires and positions and stand by the conclusions thereof. No point is served by a Black male professional who merely whines at the absence of his viewpoint in Black women's work. Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.
— Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
He told me he was used to getting what he wanted.
— Celia Conrad, A Model Murder
The Ideal age for marriage in men is 35. The Ideal age for marriage in women is 18
— Aristotle
The reason we call ships "she" is that it costs so much to keep one in paint and powder.
— Chester W. Nimitz
She said my glasses made me look like a butch jock's locker room bitch.
— Nenia Campbell, Bound to Accept
[N]o language has ever had a word for a virgin man.
— Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage
It is my sincere opinion that our precious time on earth should not be spent attempting to justify unbelievable acts of cruelty, death, and disease as a part of 'God’s Plan' or the greater good — and clinging to ancient texts that preach ill-concealed bigotry and sexism. Instead, we should find ways to make this life happy and satisfying, without regard to the unknowable nature of an afterlife.
— David G. McAfee, Mom, Dad, I'm an Atheist: The Guide to Coming Out as a Non-Believer
When I started researching airline stewardesses, I found that the topic made for amusing cocktail party banter.“You’re writing a book about that? Wow, what fun!”Yes, it was fun, but it was also serious history. Pretty women do not fit into what we have come to think of as serious history. Real history covers topics like Lincoln, World War II, or, frankly, anything involving powerful white males.
— Victoria Vantoch, The Jet Sex: Airline Stewardesses and the Making of an American Icon
...they were no more than steaks served up to portly politicians who controlled the personnel departments of the TV stations. (Showgirls in Italy)
— Tobias Jones, Death of a Showgirl
Madame Thenardier was approaching her forties, which is equivalent to fifty in a woman...
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
As difficult an environment as the DA's Office could be, I saw no overarching conspiracy against women. The unequal treatment was usually more a matter of old habits dying hard.
— Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World
Brains are an asset, if you hide them.
— Mae West
I couldn't stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.
— Sylvia Plath
Angela could not be the bomber, not that sweet, pretty thing. Thing? Is that how she regarded that young woman, as a thing? And what had she ever said to her except "I hear you're getting married, Angela" or "How pretty you look, Angela." Had anyone asked her about her ideas, her hopes, her plans? If I had been treated like that I'd have used dynamite, not fireworks; no, I would have just walked out and kept right on going. But Angela was different.
— Ellen Raskin, The Westing Game
For a female to write about her feelings, and then be portrayed as some clingy, insane, desperate girlfriend in need of making you marry her and have kids with her, I think that’s taking something that potentially should be celebrated—a woman writing about her feelings in a confessional way—that’s taking it and turning it and twisting it into something that is frankly a little sexist.
— Taylor Swift
That's what you men are always doing; it's so barbarously naive. You feel one of your loose desires for some woman, and because you desire her strongly you immediately accuse her of luring you on, of deliberately provoking and inviting the desire.
— Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow
He thought of women in terms of breasts, not minds, and it always seemed to irritate him that most women had both.
— Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
There were elements of Mad Men at Newsweek, except that unlike the natty advertising types, journalists were notorious slobs and our two- and three-martini lunches were out of the office, not in...Kevin Buckley, who was hired in 1963, described the Newsweek of the early 1960s as similar to an old movie, with the wisecracking private eye and his Girl Friday. "The 'hubba-hubba' climate was tolerated," he recalled. "I was told the editors would ask the girls to do handstands on their desk. Was there rancor? Yes. But in this climate, a laugh would follow.
— Lynn Povich
...at Newsweek only girls with college degrees--and we were called "girls" then--were hired to sort and deliver the mail, humbly pushing our carts from door to door in our ladylike frocks and proper high-heeled shoes. If we could manage that, we graduated to "clippers," another female ghetto. Dressed in drab khaki smocks so that ink wouldn't smudge our clothes, we sat at the clip desk, marked up newspapers, tore out releveant articles with razor-edged "rip sticks," and routed the clips to the appropriate departments. "Being a clipper was a horrible job," said writer and director Nora Ephron, who got a job at Newsweek after she graduated from Wellesley in 1962, "and to make matters worse, I was good at it.
— Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace
She is a good girl," Park said. "You don't even know her." His dad was standing, pushing Park toward the door. "Go," he said sternly. "Go play basketball or something.""Good girls don't dress like boys," his mother said.
— Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park
After all, you can argue – argue until you cry – about whatmodern, codified misogyny is; but straight-up ungentlemanliness,of the kind his mother would clatter the back of his head for, isinarguable. It doesn’t need to be a ‘man vs woman’ thing. It’s just atiff between The Guys.Seeing the whole world as ‘The Guys’ is important. The ideathat we’re all, at the end of the day, just a bunch of well-meaningschlumps, trying to get along, is the basic alpha and omega of myworld view. I’m neither ‘pro-women’ nor ‘antimen’. I’m just ‘Thumbsup for the six billion’.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as the poles asunder. Therefore — since sitting in a chair and thinking is precisely what Orlando is doing now — there is nothing for it but to recite the calendar, tell one’s beads, blow one’s nose, stir the fire, look out of the window, until she has done…Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and a woman in the prime of life, she will soon give over this pretence of writing and thinking and begin at least to think of a gamekeeper (and as long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking). And then she will write him a little note (and as long as she writes little notes nobody objects to a woman writing either) and make an assignation for Sunday dusk…She was kind to dogs, faithful to friends, generosity itself to a dozen starving poets, had a passion for poetry. But love — as the male novelists define it — and who, after all, speak with greater authority? — has nothing whatever to do with kindness, fidelity, generosity, or poetry. Love is slipping off one’s petticoat and — But we all know what love is…If then, the subject of one’s biography will neither love nor kill, but will only think and imagine, we may conclude that he or she is no better than a corpse and so leave her.
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Surely, of all creatures that have life and will, we women are the most wretched. When, for an extravagant sum, we have bought a husband, we must then accept him as possessor of our body.
— Euripides, Medea and Other Plays: Medea / Alcestis / The Children of Heracles / Hippolytus
Siddhartha wants liberation, Dante wants Beatrice, Frodo wants to get to Mount Doom—we all want something. Quest is elemental to the human experience. All road narratives are to some extent built on quest. If you’re a woman, though, this fundamental possibility of quest is denied. You can’t go anywhere if you can’t step out onto a road……(T)here is no female counterpart in our culture to Ishmael or Huck Finn. There is no Dean Moriarty, Sal, or even a Fuckhead. It sounds like a doctoral crisis, but it’s not. As a fifteen-year-old hitchhiker, my survival depended upon other people’s ability to envision a possible future for me. Without a Melvillean or Kerouacian framework, or at least some kind of narrative to spell out a potential beyond death, none of my resourcefulness or curiosity was recognizable, and therefore I was unrecognizable.
— Vanessa Veselka
Have you ever observed that when a man gets a son he takes all the credit, and when he gets a daughter he blames his wife? And if they do not breed at all, we say it is because her womb is barren. We do not say it is because his seed is bad.
— Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
There's no being out too late in Whileaway, or up too early, or in the wrong part of town, or unescorted. You cannot fall out of the kinship web and become sexual prey for strangers, for there is no prey and there are no strangers -- the web is world-wide. In all of Whileaway there is no one who can keep you from going where you please (though you may risk your life, if that sort of thing appeals to you), no one who will follow you and try to embarrass you by whispering obscenities in your ear, no one who will attempt to rape you, no one who will warn you of the dangers of the street, no one who will stand on street corners, hot-eyed and vicious, jingling loose change in his pants pocket, bitterly bitterly sure that you're a cheap floozy, hot and wild, who likes it, who can't say no, who's making a mint off it, who inspires him with nothing but disgust, and who wants to drive him crazy.
— Joanna Russ, The Female Man
He’s a young man, my own age or a little older, which is young for a man although not for a woman, as at my age a woman is an old maid but a man is not an old bachelor until he’s fifty, and even then there’s still hope for the ladies, as Mary Whitney used to say.
— Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace
I stopped typing and started having a conversation about the blog post with my boyfriend. He said he’d liked the part where the narrator had explained that, while she was disturbed by the revelation that the Internet writer had a girlfriend – because that meant he wasn’t the pure ethical person she’d perceived him to be via reading his literary criticism (which, !) –she was flattered and aroused that he was overcoming his principles in order to be with her.Keith said, “It’s like he can do no wrong. I thought that was nice.”I surprised myself by turning to him and shouting. “It’s a SLAVE MENTALITY. IT’S A SLAVE MENTALITY!!!”I tried to explain what I meant.I talked about how Ellen Willis had a theory that women didn’t know what their true sexuality was like, because they’d been conditioned to develop fantasies that enable them to act in a way that conforms to what men want from them, or what they think men want from them. And I thought about how Eileen Myles described the difference between having sex with men and having sex with women, how having sex with men was more about forcing yourself into what their idea of what sex was supposed to be. I told him that in my experience men do not often become suddenly charmed or intrigued by aspects of women that they have also perceived as off-putting or scary. Men, heterosexual men, don’t tend to make excuses for women and find reasons to admire them despite and even slightly because of their faults, unless their faults are cute little hole-in-the-stocking faults. Whereas women, heterosexual women, are capable of finding being ignored, being alternately worshiped and insulted, not to mention male pattern baldness, not just tolerable but erotic.
— Emily Gould
Lots of talk lately about the GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL that seems to be exclusively masculine. And how many of the characters in the GENIUS BOOKS are likable? Is Holden Caulfield likable? Is Meursault in The Stranger? Is Henry Miller? Is any character in any of these system novels particularly likable? Aren’t they usually loathsome but human, etc., loathsome and neurotic and obsessed? In my memory, all the characters in Jonathan Franzen are total douchebags (I know, I know, I’m not supposed to use that, feminine imagery, whatever, but it is SO satisfying to say and think). How about female characters in the genius books? Was Madame Bovary likable? Was Anna Karenina? Is Daisy Buchanan likable? Is Daisy Miller? Is it the specific way in which supposed readers HATE unlikable female characters (who are too depressed, too crazy, too vain, too self-involved, too bored, too boring), that mirrors the specific way in which people HATE unlikable girls and women for the same qualities? We do not allow, really, the notion of the antiheroine, as penned by women, because we confuse the autobiographical, and we pass judgment on the female author for her terrible self-involved and indulgent life. We do not hate Scott Fitzgerald in “The Crack-Up” or Georges Bataille in Guilty for being drunken and totally wading in their own pathos, but Jean Rhys is too much of a victim.
— Kate Zambreno
I dreamt that I took William Burrough’s penis and tied it up with piano wire. I hung him like a Chagall painting…In the next part J.G. Ballard swam through streets of female urine. The girls read his book Crash and then mowed him down with their Volkswagen, crushing his chest slowly against a brick wall. As he screamed in agony larger than representation can accommodate, they referred to his text and had orgasms. Later, they jumped up and down yelling, ‘You’re not a hero. You’re not a hero. You’re not. You’re not. You’re not.’ ““How do you analyze that part of the dream, Anna?”…”I guess I’m nervous about my birthday.
— Sarah Schulman, Empathy
She was always on her feet. Cooking. Washing. Ironing.
— Niccolò Ammaniti, I'm Not Scared
And I *know* I wrote in the above that I hate biographies and reviews that focus on the psychological, surface detail, especially when they pertain to women writers, because I think it’s really about the cult of the personality, which is essentially problematic, and I think simplistically psychologizing which biographies are so wont to do is really problematic, and dangerous, especially when dealing with complicated women who just by being writers at a certain time and age were labelled as nonconformist, or worse, hysterical or ill or crazy, and I think branding these women as femme fatales is all so often done. And I know in a way I’m contributing to this by posting their bad-ass photos, except hopefully I am humanizing them and thinking of them as complicated selves and intellects AND CELEBRATING THEM AS WRITERS as opposed to straight-up objectifying. One particular review long ago in Poetry that really got my goat was when Brian Phillips used Gertrude Stein’s line about Djuna Barnes having nice ankles as an opener in a review of her poetry, and to my mind it was meant to be entirely dismissive, as of course, Stein was being as well. Stein was many important revolutionary things to literature, but a champion of her fellow women writers she was not. They published my letter, but then let the guy write a reply and scurry to the library and actually read Nightwood, one of my all-time, all-times, and Francis Bacon’s too, there’s another anecdote. And it’s burned in my brain his response, which was as dismissive and bourgeois as the review. I don’t remember the exact wordage, but he concluded by summing up that Djuna Barnes was a minor writer. Well, fuck a duck, as Henry Miller would say. And that is how the canon gets made.
— Kate Zambreno
Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft are written by men.
— Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
Don't call a woman a bitch. Call her an ass-hole. It still gets your point across and it's not sexist.
— Eleanor Roosevelt
Nowadays I’m really cranky about comics. Because most of them are just really, really poorly written soft-core. And I miss good old storytelling. And you know what else I miss? Super powers. Why is it now that everybody’s like “I can reverse the polarity of your ions!” Like in one big flash everybody’s Doctor Strange. I like the guys that can stick to walls and change into sand and stuff. I don’t understand anything anymore. And all the girls are wearing nothing, and they all look like they have implants. Well, I sound like a very old man, and a cranky one, but it’s true.
— Joss Whedon
Whedon: Studios will tell you: A woman cannot headline an action movie. After The Hunger Games they might stop telling you that a little bit. Whatever you think of the movie, it’s done a great service. And after The Avengers, I think it’s changing.Johansson: A lot of the female superhero movies just suck really badly.Whedon: The suck factor is not small.Johansson: They are really not well made, and already you’re fighting against the tide. There are a couple [female-driven action movies] that have worked-ish, don’t you think?Hemsworth: Angelina Jolie tends to do it pretty well, as the dominant female.Jackson: They got to get The Pro to the screen!Whedon: [Groaning] See, that is the problem. Sam is the problem!Jackson: I love that book!Whedon: [Reluctantly] The Pro is hilarious.Jackson: The Pro’s hilarious. [To the group] You ever see or hear of it?Johansson: No, what’s The Pro?Jackson: It’s [a comic book] about a hooker who gets super powers!Johansson: [Pauses] That is exactly the problem right there.Whedon: That’s why I wasn’t going to bring up The Pro!(From an Entertainment Weekly interview)
— Joss Whedon
I have a rule for working out if the root problem of something is, in fact, sexism. And it is this: asking 'Are the boys doing it? Are the boys having to worry about this stuff? Are the boys the centre of a gigantic global debate on this subject?
— Caitlin Moran, Moranthology
It's funny, he said, have you ever thought that a girl's clothes cost more than the girl inside them?
— Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark
I can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
Male dominance in society always means that out of public sight, in the private, ahistorical world of men with women, men are sexually dominating women.
— Andrea Dworkin, Right Wing Women
When I look closely at dairy, I see the hurtful exploitation of specifically female bodies so that some people can enjoy sensual pleasures of consumption while others enjoy the psychological pleasure of collecting profits from the exertions of somebody else's body. Cows are forcibly impregnated, dispossessed of their children, and then painfully robbed of the milk produced by their bodies for those children. No wonder I didn't want to see my complicity! Most women don't consciously perceive the everyday violence against girls and women that permeates and structures our society. How much harder it is, then, to see the gendered violence against nonhuman animals behind the everyday items on the grocery store shelf. When we, as women, partake of that violence, we participate in sexism even as we enjoy the illusory benefits of speciesism. No wonder a glimpse of the sexist violence behind my breakfast cereal left me dizzy.
— pattrice jones
Maybe she's preemptively getting her karmic backlash for that, but there's something icky about all this. Yes, the "hello, boys" chest like two friendly chinchillas, Bigfoot ball stomper Lara Croft was oversexualized, but this is still sexualization from the opposite, somehow even creepier side of the coin. At least that Tyrannosaurus in the first game never tried to feel her up.
— Yahtzee Croshaw
A postsexist environment is not something that animal liberationists need passively await, in the meantime deferring to present sexism in the manner of our presentation.
— Brian Luke
Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.
— Martin Luther King Jr.
To ease another’s heartache is to forget one’s own.
— Abraham Lincoln
Charity, if you have the means, is a personal choice, but charity which is expected or compelled is simply a polite word for slavery.
— Terry Goodkind, The Pillars of Creation
Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.
— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Charity . . . is the opium of the privileged.
— Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah
There is not a man of us who does not at times need a helping hand to be stretched out to him, and then shame upon him who will not stretch out the helping hand to his brother.
— Theodore Roosevelt
Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.
— Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man
Each New Year, we have before us a brand new book containing 365 blank pages. Let us fill them with all the forgotten things from last year—the words we forgot to say, the love we forgot to show, and the charity we forgot to offer.
— Peggy Toney Horton
Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.
— William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience
The healing power of charity, bestowed by our Father and made possible by the Atonement of Jesus Christ, can make it virtually impossible for us even to feel emotions common to the natural man.
— Sheri Dew, If Life Were Easy, It Wouldn't Be Hard: And Other Reassuring Truths
But charity is the PURE LOVE OF CHRIST, and it endureth forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well with him.Moroni 7
— The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ
The Sikh gave him the money. When Menon asked for his address so that he could repay the man, the Sikh said that Menon owed the debt to any stranger who came to him in need, as long as he lived. The help came from a stranger and was to be repaid to a stranger.
— Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it.
— George Sand
Those who are truly alive are kindly and unsuspecting in their human relationships and consequently endangered under present conditions. They assume that others think and act generously, kindly and helpfully, in accordance with the laws of life. This natural attitude, fundamental to healthy children as well as primitive man, inevitably represents a great danger in the struggle for a rational way of life as long as the emotional plague subsists, because the plague-ridden impute their own manner of thinking and acting to their fellow men. A kindly man believes that all men are kindly, while one infected with the plague believes that all men lie and cheat and are hungry for power. In such a situation, the living are at an obvious disadvantage. When they give to the plague-ridden they are sucked dry, then ridiculed or betrayed.
— Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!
He wondered why the pelican was the symbol of charity, except it was that it wanted a good deal of charity to admire a pelican.
— G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday
Fundraising is an extreme sport!
— Marc A. Pitman, Ask Without Fear!: A Simple Guide to Connecting Donors with What Matters to Them Most
Not until the creation and maintenance of decent conditions of life for all people are recognized and accepted as a common obligation of all people and all countries - not until then shall we, with a certain degree of justification, be able to speak of humankind as civilized.
— Albert Einstein, The World As I See It
The first rule of Evernight is that any vampire who seeks sanctuary must be given a place." -Charity
— Claudia Gray, Stargazer
What's the point of doing something good if nobody's watching?
— Nicole Kidman
I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc, is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditure excludes them.
— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate.
— Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
You will find out that Charity is a heavy burden to carry, heavier than the kettle of soup and the full basket. But you will keep your gentleness and your smile. It is not enough to give soup and bread. This the rich can do. You are the servant of the poor, always smiling and good-humored. They are your masters, terribly sensitive and exacting master you will see. And the uglier and the dirtier they will be, the more unjust and insulting, the more love you must give them. It is only for your love alone that the poor will forgive you the bread you give to them.
— St. Vincent de Paul
I interviewed my dad on video in his final weeks. When I asked about his work and finding meaning through helping others, he responded, "I don't think you can be focused on, 'Oh gee, I want to make a difference.' It has to be spontaneous. If it's not...there's some kind of egotistical thing going on. That's a red flag. You hope you impact people on the deepest level you are capable of at the time. Sometimes you hit it, sometimes you don't. You're trying.
— Lisa J. Shannon, A Thousand Sisters: My Journey into the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman
Once you go on welfare it changes you. Even if you get off welfare, you never escape the stigma that you were a charity case. You're scarred for life.
— Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle
Visiting the sick' is an orgasm of superiority in the contemplation of our neighbor's helplessness
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
They say a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. I took mine and fell flat on my face. As a young woman, I dreamed of changing the world. In my twenties, I went to africa to try and save the continent, only to learn that Africans neither wanted nor needed saving. Indeed, when I was there, I saw some of the worst that good intentions, traditional charity, and aid can produce...I concluded that if I could only nudge the world a little bit, maybe that would be enough.But nudging isn't enough.
— Jacqueline Novogratz, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World
In college I took a social psychology course, something I thought useful for a career in advertising. Psychologists tested the story of the Good Samaritan. What they learned gives us reason to pause. The greatest determinant of who stopped to help the stranger in need was not compassion, morality, or religious creed. It was those who had the time. Makes me wonder if I have time to do good. Apparently, Angel does.
— Richard Paul Evans, Miles to Go
Through their donations and work for voluntary organizations, the charitable rich exert enormous influence in society. As philanthropists, they acquire status within and outside of their class. Although private wealth is the basis of the hegemony of this group, philanthropy is essential to the maintenance and perpetuation of the upper class in the United States. In this sense, nonprofit activities are the nexus of a modern power elite.
— Teresa Odendahl, Charity Begins At Home: Generosity And Self-interest Among The Philanthropic Elite
I've purged myself of worldly goods
—  half my stuff is either being sold or going to charity. I need to go shopping.
We believe that only government has the capacity--not to mention the political and moral responsibility--to promote the general welfare. Father Kramer as quoted in Sweet Charity?
— Janet Poppendieck, Sweet Charity?: Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement
Emergency food has become very useful indeed, and to a very large assortment of people and institutions. The United States Department of Agriculture uses it to reduce the accumulation of embarrassing agricultural surpluses. Business uses it to dispose of nonstandard or unwanted product, to protect employee morale and avoid dump fees, and, of course, to accrue tax savings. Celebrities use it for exposure. Universities and hospitals, as well as caterers and restaurants, use it to absorb leftovers. Private schools use it to teach ethics, and public schools use it to instill a sense of civic responsibility. Churches use it to express their concern for the least of their brethren, and synagogues use it to be faithful to the tradition of including the poor at the table. Courts use it to avoid incarcerating people arrested for Driving While Intoxicated and a host of other offense. Environmentalists use it to reduce the solid waste stream. Penal institutions use it to create constructive outlets for the energies of their inmates, and youth-serving agencies of all sorts use it to provide service opportunities for young people. Both profit-making and nonprofit organizations use it to absorb unneeded kitchen and office equipment. A wide array of groups, organizations, and institutions benefits from the halo effect of 'feeding the hungry,' and this list does not even include the many functions for ordinary individuals--companionship, exercise, meaning, and purpose. . .If we didn't have hunger, we'd have to invent it.
— Janet Poppendieck, Sweet Charity?: Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement
The worth of a gift lies as much in the way it is offered as in its intrinsic value.
— Aldous Huxley
Charity is the entrance to the garden.
— Seth Adam Smith, Rip Van Winkle and the Pumpkin Lantern
One day when we came to a stop, a worker took a piece of bread out of his bag and threw it into a wagon. There was a stampede. Dozens of starving men fought desperately over a few crumbs. The worker watched the spectacle with great interest... Years later, I witnessed a similar spectacle in Aden. Out ship's passengers amused themselves by throwing coins to the "natives," who dove to retrieve them. An elegant Parisian lady took great pleasure in this game. When I noticed two children desperately fighting in the water, one trying to strangle the other, I implored the lady, 'Please don't throw any more coins!' 'Why not?' said she. 'I like to give charity...
— Elie Wiesel, Night
States were barred from financing their immigration systems with specific taxes on immigrants and transportation companies, leaving the continued existence of these state institutions to the general state fisc or the generosity of private charitable organizations interested in immigrant welfare and integration. The resource strain on states and charitable organizations placed enormous pressure on Congress to enact federal law.
— Pratheepan Gulasekaram, The New Immigration Federalism
Lady Kingsley, when you read this, do attempt to keep an open mind.”“I will if you will,” she retorted hotly.To her surprise, he chuckled. “I daresay neither of us will. It’s a pity, too, because if we could ever see our way clear to agreeing on a matter, we might accomplish a great deal of good in this world.”It infuriated her that he could pretend to care even one whit for these boys. “Now you’ve confused me. I’d assumed that your reason for serving on so many charitable boards was to further your political aims. Yet all the time you were merely hoping to accomplish some ‘good in this world.’ How very astonishing.”Just that quickly, his amusement vanished. “While I don’t pretend to be as morally superior as you and your late husband, my intentions are good, no matter what you make of them. It may shock you to learn that those of us with character flaws sometimes do as much good as those of you without.
— Sabrina Jeffries, Fantasy
We always want to love the recipients of our charity," the doctor said, negotiating a sharp bend in the road with a surprising demonstration of steering skill, "but it is not necessary. Indeed, it is sometimes not possible.
— Alan Bradley, A Red Herring Without Mustard
Giving someone the benefit of the doubt is not so simple as it sounds. What it means, in fact, is being charitable--which, as the vicar is fond of pointing out, is the most difficult of the graces to master. Faith and hope are a piece of cake but charity is a Pandora's box: the monster in the cistern which, when the lid is opened, comes swarming out to seize you by the throat.
— Alan Bradley, Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd
True charity, I had had discovered, consists of swallowing an invisible flaming sword.
— Alan Bradley, Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd
I beg...I don’t think that’s a contradiction at all. I don’t hold people up or threaten them. They give me money because they want to. It's a service. The satisfaction they get from giving me money is worth more to them than the money they give. You are a naïve little man if you think that people give charity for the good of others. The good of others is so difficult to quantify. All that people know is their own satisfaction. The vast majority of people who donate to charities do so to make others notice them and think of them as magnanimous and good hearted. Sure, there are those who donate in anonymity. These people are only trying to feel better about themselves. They don’t desire the approval of others, but they still seek to fulfill their satisfaction using another person. Really, they are no different than a patron of a brothel. The satisfaction they seek isn’t sexual, but what’s the difference? I provide a huge service for those people. They are looking to exchange a few bucks for a man’s dignity.
— Francisco Grant
The best opportunity for our uplifting is the opportunity to give.
— Auliq-Ice
People will give away almost anything in charity, but their unadulterated attention must be earned
— Faisal Khosa
The idea that private money can solve our problems is very dangerous. Ultimately that's charity. Charity is a lovely thing. I'll never turn it down. But charity is not a substitute for systematic justice and equality.
— Jonathan Kozol
Begging for love but charitised... in turn!
— Archana Singh
Begging for love and charitising in turn.
— Archana Singh
Isn't it amazing how it's always the very people who insist other people be grateful for charity that get the most insulted when they're offered charity themselves? I've often noticed it.
— Emily Rodda, Something Special
You say you need to love others, but do you love yourself
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, The Great Pearl of Wisdom
Charity has an embedded message of alleviating the consequences of poverty and not of eradicating it. As the evidence suggested, charity seems to be pervert form of social mechanism that validates contemporary social inequality maintained by neoliberalism policies under the capitalist ideology. It seems problematic that the world’s current ideology i.e. capitalism alienation is the main contributor of contemporary issues with poverty world-wide and the solution presented to this social problem is charity. In addition, charity seems to be the humanitarian side of a system that advocates and promotes exploitation.
— Bruno De Oliveira
In contemporary society as the evidence suggests charity under the capitalist ideology is a social paradox where in one hand it helps the poor to be part of the system and it also alleviates the consequences of poverty. On the other hand, it maintains the ruling class in power safe guarded by the ideology of capitalism which absorbed charity as part of the ideology itself. In addition, with this class that charity brings it validates and minimizes class struggle of capitalism.
— Bruno De Oliveira
Charity must be voluntary.
— Ayn Rand
Minimalism is a way of living at the maximum of your potential.
— Anastasiya Kotelnikova
So much easier to give. I detest asking.
— Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues
We are all receiving Charity. There is something in each of us that cannotbe naturally loved. It is no one's fault if they do not so love it. Only the lovable can be naturally loved. You might as well ask people to like the taste of rotten bread or the sound of a mechanical drill. We can be forgiven, and pitied, and loved in spite of it, with Charity; no other way. All who have good parents, wives, husbands, or children, may be sure that at some times and perhaps at all times in respect of some one particular trait or habit they are receiving Charity, are loved not because they are lovable but because Love Himself is in those who love them.
It’s easier to donate a few thousands 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 may not be my brothers keeper, but I am my brother's brother.
— Jeffrey R. Holland
The promise to save or create a ‘perfect’ humanity is almost always only and excuse for the urge to rule it.
— Moxie Will
Listen, Monsieur Director, here's what I think. Obviously this is wrong. There are twenty-six of you in five or six small rooms; there are three of us in space enough for sixty. That is wrong, I assure you. You have my house and I am in yours. Give me back mine and this will be your home.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
There aren't nearly enough worldly mansions for the kind folks who deserve them.
— Bryant A. Loney, To Hear The Ocean Sigh
Compassion is a reflection of our connectedness. YOUR devotion to helping others is an expression of YOUR greatness.
— Widad Akreyi
But if you do not wish to die of thirst in the desert, drink charity. This is the fountain the Lord has willed to place here, lest we faint on the way, and we shall drink it more abundantly when we come to the Fatherland.
— Augustine of Hippo
Sharing is just like spending, we give or spend for others while hoping them to be happy and better. At this way we can accept and find in our hearts the happiness that we want.
— Auliq Ice
Present injustices exist not so much because simple individuals are acting in bad faith or lacking in charity, but because huge, impersonal systems (that seem beyond the control of the individuals acting within them) disprivilege some even as they unduly privilege others.
— Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality
Not only are the poorest people the most generous but they don't expect anything in return, least of all recognition from others by means of showing off or posting a humble brag like so many from average society do and you can identify these people through the abundance of photos they post, literally with their hands in the air, showing off what they've done for the "less fortunate." I guess they missed the part where God said to be humble and to do good works in private.
— Donna Lynn Hope
Let's put our money where our mouth is; let's invest in the future by investing in the education of our youth and the re-education of those who need it and aren't so young anymore. It's not charity; it's an investment in the mental, intellectual, and social infrastructure of our country and our planet. Charity is something you give to corporations when they commit crimes of fraud and plunge the world into economic turmoil.
— Steve Bivans, Be a Hobbit, Save the Earth: the Guide to Sustainable Shire Living
Listening and showing you are there for someone is often more important than trying to find a "fix" for a problem. I wish there were more people who practice this.
— Auliq Ice
It feels so good making so much money when other people have to work for so much less but it is so much beautiful if humanity takes much from you, it is an investment into life.
— Auliq Ice
We are all receiving Charity. There is something in each of us that cannot benaturally loved.
— C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
The Celebrity Charity Industrial Complex Makes a Mockery of Compassion
— Dean Cavanagh
Charity is merely returning what we have stolen.
— Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical
Be wary of people who go out of their way in charity. They're usually compensating for some evil they're trying to erase.
— Christopher Herz, Pharmacology
If all of us in the world just shared love, just a little, charity foundations wouldn’t be needed.
— Cristiane Serruya, Trust: Pandora's Box
Until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings.
— Gerald Durrell