c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I would respect feminist who said "Single moms, are you kidding me? Stop taking government benefits because, the government is the patriarchy. So, you are taking things from the patriarchy so you dont have to be responsible. Any woman who takes money from the government using cops who usually extract it from men by force is not a feminist. Is a exceedingly bad bride of the state." I would admire that but, of course feminism doesn't have anything to do with any of that stuff.Look, it's fine. Have your fun. Make fun of men. Go for it. Yea, we're all idiots, we're all selfish, greedy bastards. Ok, it's fine because the government is going to run out of money soon and then all these woman are going to try to find some guy to latch onto when the benefits stop flowing and I mean, you saw this happening with the soviet union. "Now we need you! You guys are great! We missed you so much! Give me some money!"It's just a bunch of noise from a bunch of people who are stealing from the productive.
— Stefan Molyneux
The real core of the feminist vision, its revolutionary kernel if you will, has to do with the abolition of all sex roles - that is, an absolute transformation of human sexuality and the institutions derived from it. In this work, no part of the male sexual model can possibly apply. Equality within the framework of the male sexual model, however that model is reformed or modified, can only perpetuate the model itself and the injustice and bondage which are its intrinsic consequences. I suggest to you that transformation of the male sexual model under which we now all labor and "love" begins where there is a congruence, not a separation, a congruence of feeling and erotic interest; that it begins in what we do know about female sexuality as distinct from male - clitoral touch and sensitivity, multiple orgasms, erotic sensitivity all over the body (which needn't - and shouldn't - be localized or contained genitally), in tenderness, in self-respect and in absolute mutual respect. For men I suspect that this transformation begins in the place they most dread - that is, in a limp penis. I think that men will have to give up their precious erections and begin to make love as women do together. I am saying that men will have to renounce their phallocentric personalities, and the privileges and powers given to them at birth as a consequence of their anatomy, that they will have to excise everything in them that they now value as distinctively "male." No reform, or matching of orgasms, will accomplish this.
— Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics
I do write about men now and then, but I mostly write about women because that's the work I like best. When I became a feminist, I realized that somebody had to write all about this women's art that was out there ignored, and it was going to be me. And of course the ideas were particularly interesting to me, and the discoveries, about what women's art was and could be. I often say I'm more interested and mediocre art by women than in mediocre art by men – which is interpreted as I only like mediocre art or women only do mediocre art – all that shit. I don't write about mediocre art but I look at it and it does interest me for the information it gives me about women's imagery, women's psyches, women's lives, women's experience.
— Lucy R. Lippard
Often, when I read the news, I have to make sure I am not, in fact, reading The Onion. We continue to have national and state debates about abortion, birth control, and reproductive freedom, and men, mostly, are directing that debate. That is the stuff of satire.
— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
In some ways the operation of the feminine stereotype is so obvious and for many women entirely unattainable, that it can be easily reacted against. It takes a great deal of courage and independence to decide to design your own image instead of the one that society rewards, but it gets easier as you go along. Of course, a woman who goes her own way will find her conditioning is ineradicable, but she at least can recognize its operation and choose to counteract it, whereas a man might find that he was being more subtly deluded.
— Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch
On the scale of relevance, public approval or disapproval of a woman's choices should not merit measure.
— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
We stood, separated by space, certainly, in identical conditions of pleasant uncertainty and anticipation, and we both held our heart in our hands, all pink and palpitating and ready for pleasure and pain, and we were about to throw these hearts in each other's faces like snowballs, or cricket balls (How's that?) or, more accurately, like great bleeding wounds: "Take my wound". Because the last thing one ever thinks at such moments is that he (or she) will say: Take my wound, please remove the spear from my side. No, not at all; one simply expects to get rid of one's one.
— Doris Lessing, A Man and Two Women: Stories
If Beyoncé Knowles and Miley Cyrus represent the latest branch of feminism, then surely the male-dominated power elite must be aroused with concern.
— Mitchell Rhodes
Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women’s bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them and their owners. Whether the curves imposed are the ebullient arabesques of the tit-queen or the attenuated coils of art nouveau, they are deformations of the dynamic, individual body, and limitations of the possibilities of being female.
— Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch
Pride. You have it where you can have it.
— Marilyn French, The Women's Room
Enlightened sexism is a response, deliberate or not, to the perceived threat of a new gender regime. It insists that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism — indeed, full equality has allegedly been achieved — so now it’s okay, even amusing, to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women.
— Susan J. Douglas, Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message That Feminism's Work Is Done
Freedom from one man is just another one.
— Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays
Six men control almost all the media in the United States--book publishing, magazines, television, movie studios, newspapers, and radio. They are not friendly toward feminism, which has almost disappeared from the surface of our society. You will almost never see a feminist column on an op-ed page, a feminist article in a magazine, or newspaper, actual (not satirized) feminist ideas on television or in the movies. Only magazines & radio controlled by feminists--and these are few and not well-funded--offer information on the feminist perspective.This might be understandable if feminism were a wild-eyed manic philosophy. But it is a belief, a politics, based on one simple fact: women are human beings who matter as much as men. That is all that feminism claims. As human beings, women have the right to control their own bodies, to walk freely in the world, to train their minds and bodies, and to love and hate at will. Only those who wish to continue to coerce women into a servant/slave class for men cannot accept this principle.
— Marilyn French, The Women's Room
Does rejecting feminism mean rejecting women's equality? No, because that's not what feminism is about. Rejecting feminism means recognizing that women don't need feminism to make them equal to men because they already are equal--just not the same.
— Suzanne Venker, The Flipside of Feminism: What Conservative Women Know—and Men Can't Say
Worse than that, however, was the CFO, a dapper-suited, neat-haired new age carapace containing an uninhibited misogynistic bogan, whose actual words to me, in concert with my boss in the same room were: 'To be successful you have to accept that weekends are for families.
— Annabel Crabb
To repeat some of the most basic facts: women still do not have the equal political power they have long sought, since only one in five MPs is a woman. They do not have economic equality, since the pay gap is still not only large but actually widening. They do not have the freedom from violence they have sought, and with the conviction rate in rape cases standing at just 6 percent, they know that rapists enjoy an effective impunity in our society.
— Natasha Walter
When my brother,…, was a young boy learning the Chinese classics, I was in the habit of listening with him and I became unusually proficient at understanding those passages that he found too difficult to grasp and memorize. Father a most learned man, was always regretting the fact: ’Just my luck!’ he would say. ’What a pity she was not born a man!’ But then I gradually realized that people were saying ’It’s bad enough when a man flaunts his Chinese learning; she will come to no good,’ and since I have avoided writing the simplest character.
— Murasaki Shikibu
I'm not sure how we got to this place, where a girl's only value is in what kind of marriage she has, how capable she is of keeping a man happy.
— Amy Engel, The Book of Ivy
Gender is like a Rubik’s Cube with one hundred squares per side, and every time you twist it to take a look at another angle, you make it that much harder a puzzle to solve.
— Sam Killermann, The Social Justice Advocate's Handbook: A Guide to Gender
My father might not have held my hand or expressed his love openly, but he taught Callie and me that we had inherent values, that we were fully formed human beings without a boy by our side.
— Amy Engel, The Book of Ivy
Sofia the kind of woman no matter what she have in her hand she make it look like a weapon.
— Alice Walker, The Color Purple
My girlfriends and I talk a lot about feminism and the inequality between the way men and women are talked about, the kind of things we say are, ‘Why is it mischievous, fun and sexy if a guy has a string of lovers that he’s cast aside; loved and left? Yet if a woman dates three or four people in an eight-year period she is a serial dater and it gives some 12-year-old the idea to call her a ‘slut’ on the internet?’ It’s not the same for boys, it just isn’t and that’s a fact.
— Taylor Swift
Gender identity is our internal response to a social construction that attempts to make a connection between a person’s biological makeup and their eventual role in society.
— Sam Killermann, The Social Justice Advocate's Handbook: A Guide to Gender
What feminists refer to as microaggressions, the rest of us sane adults call life....The concept of microaggressions encourages women to think that every single thing in the world is, or should be, about them. It encourages breathless levels of narcissism, solipsism and just plain delusion....Feminism encourages women to believe that they have the same reasoning and coping abilities as toddlers. No thanks.
— Janet Bloomfield
Forcing girls to be ashamed for doing the things that come natural to them — it's a ridiculous double standard, and we should all, frankly, tell anyone who judges us to screw off.
— Siobhan Vivian, Not That Kind of Girl
It's as if our girls don't understand that they can be recognized for other things--their goals, their brains. Not just their bodies.
— Siobhan Vivian, Not That Kind of Girl
Give a man a fish
— and he'll eat for a day.Give a WOMAN a fish
Our society encourages women to place a very high value on maternity as an essential part of female identity, both a high moral calling and the deepest source of satisfaction on earth. It's not easy to redefine motherhood as handing your baby over to a stranger.
— Katha Pollitt
She was a spiky teenager rebelling against the soul-suck mirror reflected back at her in her mother’s blank stare, her question mark of a spine. Determined to beat the odds, she completed high school with distinction. But there was a caveat. Beydan was allowed to roam and educate herself – up to a point. On her eighteenth birthday her Father sat her down and held out his Rolexed wrist. Studded with crystals and flecks of diamond, the watch dazzled in the light. All Beydan could hear, however, was tick-tock-tick-tick-tick-tick - time to neatly fold all her hard work, to parcel up her progress, send it to the attic in her subconscious and let dust gather on her dreams. There was a lump in her throat and a stopwatch in her womb.
— Diriye Osman
Cixi was not at the coronation. The majestic main part of the Forbidden City was out of bounds to her – because she was a woman. She still could not set foot in it, even though she was now the de facto ruler. In fact, when her sedan-chair went within sight of it, she had to close the curtain and show humility by not looking at it. Virtually all decrees were issued in the name of her son, as Cixi had no mandate to rule. It was with this crippling handicap that she proceeded to change China.”Excerpt From: Chang, Jung. “Empress Dowager Cixi.” Random House, 2013-09-25T18:30:00+00:00. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.
— Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China
The lie [of compulsory female heterosexuality] is many-layered. In Western tradition, one layer—the romantic—asserts that women are inevitably, even if rashly and tragically, drawn to men; that even when that attraction is suicidal (e. g, Tristan and Isolde, Kate Chopin’s ‘The Awakening’) it is still an organic imperative. In the tradition of the social sciences it asserts that primary love between the sexes is ‘normal,’ that women need men as social and economic protectors, for adult sexuality, and for psychological completion; that the heterosexually constituted family is the basic social unit; that women who do not attach their primary intensity to men must be, in functional terms, condemned to an even more devastating outsiderhood than their outsiderhood as women.
— Adrienne Rich
For Cixi, the whole episode taught her that to survive at court she must hold her tongue about state affairs. This was difficult, as she could see that the dynasty was in trouble. The victorious Taiping rebels not only consolidated their bases in southern China, but were sending military expeditions with a view to attacking Beijing. Cixi felt that she had practicable ideas – in fact it was under her rule that the Taiping rebels were later defeated. But she could not say a word, and could only share non-political interests with her husband, such as music and art.
— Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China
As events would show, Cixi was indeed opposed to the foreign policy of her husband and his inner circle – but for very different reasons. Silently observing from close quarters, she in fact regarded their stubborn resistance to opening the door of China as stupid and wrong. Their hate-filled effort to shut out the West had, in her view, achieved the opposite to preserving the empire. It had brought the empire catastrophe, not least the destruction of her beloved Old Summer Palace. She herself would pursue a new route.
— Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China
I have chosen to use the terms lesbian existence and lesbian continuum because the word lesbianism has a clinical and limiting ring Lesbian existence suggests both the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of that existence I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range—through each woman’s life and throughout history—of woman-identified experience; not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman. If we expand it to embrace many more forms of primary intensity between and among women, including the sharing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giving and receiving of practical and political support; if we can also hear in it such associations as marriage resistance and the ‘haggard’ behavior identified by Mary Daly (obsolete meanings ‘intractable,’ ‘willful,’ ‘wanton,’ and ‘unchaste’ a woman reluctant to yield to wooing’)—we begin to grasp breadths of female history and psychology that have lain out of reach as a consequence of limited, mostly clinical, definitions of ‘lesbianism.’Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life It is also a direct or indirect attack on male right of access to women But it is more than these, although we may first begin to perceive it as a form of nay-saying to patriarchy, an act or resistance It has of course included role playing, self-hatred, breakdown, alcoholism, suicide, and intrawoman violence; we romanticize at our peril what it means to love and act against the grain, and under heavy penalties; and lesbian existence has been lived (unlike, say, Jewish or Catholic existence) without access to any knowledge of a tradition, a continuity, a social underpinning The destruction of records and memorabilia and letters documenting the realities of lesbian existence must be taken very seriously as a means of keeping heterosexuality compulsory for women, since what has been kept from our knowledge is joy, sensuality, courage, and community, as well as guilt, self-betrayal, and pain.
— Adrienne Rich, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence
Woman-identification is a source of energy, a potential springhead of female power, violently curtailed and wasted under the institution of heterosexuality. The denial of reality and visibility to women’s passion for women, women’s choice of women as allies, life companions, and community; the forcing of such relationships into dissimulation and their disintegration under intense pressure, have meant an incalculable loss to the power of all women to change the social relations of the sexes to liberate ourselves and each other. The lie of compulsory female heterosexuality today admits not just feminist scholarship, but every profession, every reference work, every curriculum, every organizing attempt, every relationship or conversation over which it hovers. It creates, specifically, a profound falseness, hypocrisy, and hysteria in the heterosexual dialogue, for every heterosexual relationship is lived in the queasy strobe-light of that lie. However we choose to identify ourselves, however we find ourselves labeled, it flickers across and distorts our lives.
— Adrienne Rich
The two women did more than resolve a major problem, they went on to form a political alliance and launch a coup. Cixi was twenty-five years old and Empress Zhen a year younger. Facing them were eight powerful men in control of the state machine. The women were well aware of the risk they were taking. A coup was treason, and if it failed the punishment would be the most painful ling-chi, death by a thousand cuts. But they were willing to take the risk. Not only were they determined to save their son and the dynasty, but they also rejected the prescribed life of imperial widows – essentially living out their future years as virtual prisoners in the harem. Choosing to change their own destiny as well as that of the empire, the two women plotted, often with their heads together leaning over a large glazed earthenware water tank, pretending to be appraising their reflections or just talking girls’ talk.
— Jung Chang
Finally, in 1888, Cixi approved the Western-style Navy Regulations. It was in endorsing these Regulations that she effectively unveiled China’s first national flag. The country had had no national ensign, until its engagement with the West at the beginning of her reign necessitated a triangular-shaped golden yellow flag for the nascent navy. Now she endorsed its change into the internationally standard quadrangular shape. On the flag, named the Yellow Dragon, was a vividly blue, animated dragon, raising its head towards a bright-red globe, the sun. With the birth of this national flag, remarked contemporary Western commentators, ‘China proudly took her proper place among the nations.
— Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China
He say, Celie, tell me the truth. You don't like me cause I'm a man?I blow my nose. take off they pants, I say, and men look like frogs to me. No matter how you kiss 'em, as far as I'm concern, frogs is what they stay.
— Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Following the Soviet invasion, the Communists, to their credit, passed decrees making girls’ education compulsory and abolishing certain oppressive tribal customs—such as the bride-price, a payment to the bride’s family in return for her hand in marriage. However, by massacring thousands of tribal elders, they paved the way for the “commanders” to step in as the new elite. Aided by American and Saudi patronage, extremism flourished. What had once been a social practice confined to areas deep in the hinterlands now became a political practice, which, according to ideologues, applied to the entire country. The modest gains of urban women were erased.“The first time a woman enters her husband’s house," Heela “told me about life in the countryside, “she wears white”—her wedding dress—“and the first time she leaves, she wears white”—the color of the Muslim funeral shroud. The rules of this arrangement were intricate and precise, and, it seemed to Heela, unchanged from time immemorial. In Uruzgan, a woman did not step outside her compound. In an emergency, she required the company of a male blood relative to leave, and then only with her father’s or husband’s permission. Even the sound of her voice carried a hint of subversion, so she was kept out of hearing range of unrelated males. When the man of the house was not present, boys were dispatched to greet visitors. Unrelated males also did not inquire directly about a female member of the house. Asking “How is your wife?” qualified as somewhere between uncomfortably impolite and downright boorish. The markers of a woman’s life—births, anniversaries, funerals, prayers, feasts—existed entirely within the four walls of her home. Gossip, hopscotching from living room to living room, was carried by husbands or sons.
— Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes
The effect of male-identification means ‘internalizing the values of the colonizer and actively participating in carrying out the colonization of one’s self and one’s sex… Male identification is the act whereby women place men above women, including themselves, in credibility, status, and importance in most situations, regardless of the comparative quality the women may bring to the situation…. Interaction with women is seen as a lesser form of relating on every level.
— Adrienne Rich, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence
We may revere motherhood, the hazy abstraction, the cream-of-wheat-with-a-halo ideal, but a mother is just a kind of woman, after all, and women are trouble and not so valuable. Low-income mothers drag down the country—why'd they have kids if they couldn't support them? Middle-class mothers are boring frumps. Elite ones are obsessed sanctimommies.
— Katha Pollitt
There had always been a little wiggle room in state abortion laws, because doctors were still permitted to perform them for “therapeutic” reasons—to save a woman’s life, for example.7 But what did that mean, exactly? An amicus curiae brief in Roe from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and several other medical groups observed that “a woman suffering from heart disease, diabetes or cancer whose pregnancy worsens the underlying pathology may be denied a medically indicated therapeutic abortion under the statute because death is not certain.
— Katha Pollitt, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights
Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice. I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change. But I am also hopeful, because I believe deeply in the ability of human beings to remake themselves for the better.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists
If you find the dividing line between fairy tales and reality, let me know. In my mind, the two run together, even though the intersections aren't always obvious. The girl sitting quietly in class or waiting for the bus or roaming the mall doesn't want anyone to know, or doesn't know how to tell anyone, that she is locked in a tower. Maybe she's a prisoner of a story she's heard all her life- that fairest means best, or that bruises prove she is worthy of love.
— Christine Heppermann, Poisoned Apples: Poems for You, My Pretty
Gingerbread I knew I had to get out of therebefore the icing cracked and they discoveredthat I'm burnt around the edges,doughy in the center,that what they thought was sugaris salt.If I was a good girl,if I could satisfy their cravings, if every dream in my misshapen headdidn't bite, I might have stayed at the table.Wouldn't you run, too,from such voracious love?
— Christine Heppermann, Poisoned Apples: Poems for You, My Pretty
Those who are so eager for women and girls to go back to the kitchen might think again about just what it is we might be up to in there. You can plan a lot of damage from a kitchen. It’s also where the knives are kept.
— Laurie Penny
On my more difficult days, I'm not sure what's more of a pain in my ass -- being black or being a woman. I'm happy to be both of these things, but the world keeps intervening.
— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
Women’s history is the primary tool for women’s emancipation.
— Gerda Lerner
[In case of zombie uprising] Marxists and Feminists would likely sympathize more with zombies. To Marxists, the undead symbolize the oppressed proletariat. Unless the zombies were all undead white males, feminists would likely welcome the posthuman smashing of existing patriarchal structures.
— Daniel W. Drezner, Theories of International Politics and Zombies
And that's the point! Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force strength power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their week ones.
— Jill Lepore
Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
I felt bad for the girls in my school, who flocked to prom like it was the second coming of Christ, complete with double-rainbows and unicorns.
— G.G. Silverman, Vegan Teenage Zombie Huntress
So now you are a woman. Do you have the least idea of what that means?It means that I am now fit to be wedded and bedded (...) and to bear children for the king.
— George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings
In the old days feminists would mock women who depended so much on a man. Today if the man is the government, not so much. A man who opens the door for you is a Neanderthal; a bureaucrat who pays for your pills? A hero.
— Greg Gutfeld
The language of marriage is often a language of ownership, not a language of partnership.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I hate how long it takes to feel radical, militantly maternal self-acceptance.
— Anne Lamott
Feminism, as of late, has suffered from a certain guilt by association because we conflate feminism with women who advocate feminism as part of their personal brand. When these figureheads say what we want to hear, we put them up on the Feminist Pedestal, and when they do something we don't like, we knock them right off and then say there's something wrong with feminism because our feminist leaders have failed us. We forget the difference between feminism and Professional Feminists.
— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
The start of empowering women comes with acknowledgment of thought that every born child is equal irrespective of its sex. 
— Nikita Dudani
You are a woman, let them see your fire
— Alicia D'Aversa, The First Child
This is when the pill became widely known as The Pill, perhaps the only product in American history so powerful that it needed no name. Women went to their doctors and said they wanted it. They wanted The Pill. Some of them might still have been uncomfortable talking about birth control. Others might have been unsure of its brand name. But The Pill was The Pill because it was the only one that mattered, the one everyone was talking about, the one they needed.
— Jonathan Eig, The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution
[F]eminism wasn't supposed to make us feel guilty, or prod us into constant competition over who is raising children better, organizing more cooperative marriages, or getting less sleep. It was supposed to make us free -to give us not only choices but the ability to make these choices without constantly feeling that we'd somehow gotten it wrong.
— Sheryl Sandberg
How do we reconcile the imperfections of feminism with all the good it can do? In truth, feminism is flawed because it is a movement powered by people and people are inherently flawed. For whatever reason, we hold feminism to an unreasonable standard where the movement must be everything we want and must always make the best choices. When feminism falls short of our expectations, we decide the problem is with feminism rather than with the flawed people who act in the name of the movement.
— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
Power has always been held by those who manage to controls the origins of life by controlling woman's bodies.
— Jenny Nordberg, The Underground Girls of Kabul: The Hidden Lives of Afghan Girls Disguised as Boys
The problem with movements is that, all too often, they are associated only with the most visible figures, the people with the biggest platforms and the loudest, most provocative voices. But feminism is not whatever philosophy is being spouted by the popular media feminist flavor of the week, at least not entirely.
— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
If sex is not just about reproduction, it is not just about genes, XY chromosomes, and hormones either. Sex is introduced to explain skeletal structure, mental aptitude, posture, emotional disposition, aesthetic preference, body fat, sexual orientation and responsiveness, athletic ability, social dominance, shape and weight, artistic ability. It is also supposed to explain any number of so-called "instincts", including the nesting instinct, the maternal instinct, and perhaps even the Budweiser instinct.
— Riki Anne Wilchins
Possible then the professor inited a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of omen, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his superiority.
— Virginia Woolf
Islam affords women their rightful status, and encourages them to work in all sectors, as long as they are afforded appropriate respect.
— Sheikh Zayed Al Nahyan
Always happens with men. They promise friendship. They promise to treat you as an equal. In the end, all they want is to possess you.
— Rick Riordan, The Blood of Olympus
Feminism's failings do not mean we should eschew feminism entirely. People do terrible things all the time, but we don't regularly disown our humanity. We disavow the terrible things. We should disavow the failures of feminism without disavowing its many successes and how far we have come.
— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
While boys are taught that the things that make them men--good men--are universally accepted ethical ideals, women are led to believe that our moral compass lies somewhere between our legs. Literally.
— Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
There is a pernicious notion held by many that being a submissive means being a victim or a doormat. The so-called Fifty Shades phenomenon gives this repulsive lie some very long legs, spreading it far and wide and giving it unwarranted credibility. This fallacy must be exposed for what it is. It is a despicable lie that mischaracterizes and tarnishes millions of good people living a healthy and enjoyable lifestyle. At the same time, it undermines the feminist cause, promotes rape culture, and ultimately revictimizes true victims of the very real problems of sexual abuse and violence in this country.
— Michael Makai, The Warrior Princess Submissive
Feminism, which is supposedly for everybody, apparently has no place for conservative women. Why would feminists need to exclude entire swaths of the population? Because they know their ideology cannot stand up to challenges, they know they themselves do not understand it, and they know that to accomplish their goals they cannot allow discussion to occur....To pretend that your ideology is impenetrable and the obvious answer to modern social problems and then to turn around and exclude people from the discussion only creates more holes in the theories themselves and serves to demonstrate the liberal superiority complex.
— Chris Sardegna
Why should anyone raise an eyebrow because a latter-day Einstein’s wife expects her husband to put aside that lifeless theory of relativity and help her with the work that is supposed to be the essence of life itself: diaper the baby and don’t forge to rinse the soiled diaper in the toilet paper before putting it in the diaper pail, and then wax the kitchen floor.
— Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique
Men are not from Mars and women are not from Venus instead we are all people. Deal with it.
— Shahla Khan, Friends With Benefits: Rethinking Friendship, Dating & Violence
Such was the complexity of things. For what happened to her, especially staying with the Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently two opposite things at the same time; that’s what you feel, was one; that’s what I feel, was the other, and then they fought together in her mind, as now. It is so beautiful, so exciting, this love, that I tremble on the verge of it, and offer, quite out of my own habit, to look for a brooch on a beach; also it is the stupidest, the most barbaric of human passions, and turns a nice young man with a profile like a gem’s (Paul’s was exquisite) into a bully with a crowbar (he was swaggering, he was insolent) in the Mile End Road. Yet, she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this–love; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Does it explain my astonishment the other day when Z, most humane, most modest of men, taking up some book by Rebecca West and reading a passage in it, exclaimed, 'The arrant feminist! She says that men are snobs!' The exclamation, to me so surprising - for why was Miss West an arrant feminist for making a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex? - was not merely the cry of wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself. Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
— Virginia Woolf
I always feel so sorry for women who don't like to walk
—  they miss so much - so many rare little glimpses of life
In truth, feminism is flawed because it is a movement powered by people and people are inherently flawed. For whatever reason, we hold feminism to an unreasonable standard where the movement must be everything we want and must always make the best choices. When feminism falls short of our expectations, we decide the problem is with feminism rather than with the flawed people who act in the name of the movement.
— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
...a woman, silent, voiceless, a mere woman who didn't bear on her shoulders the enormous responsibility of building the conquest with her words. A woman, who, contrary to what would be expected, felt relief in reclaiming her condition of submission, for it was a much more familiar sensation to be an object at the service of men than to be a creator of destiny
— Laura Esquivel, Malinche
I understand that you come from a generation of women who had to work hard to be heard, but for you to impugn my feminism and act as though I'm a scourge upon women everywhere, just because I refuse to spread your particular agenda? That's dark, and it's not what you fought for. If you continue this way, you're worse than they are (they = men). We are all just trying to get by. There is room for all of us.
— Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"
That evening, in her apartment, still in Warsaw, Ana takes down a book from her shelf – a rather thick, ordinary paperback. It looks old, because it's worn out and somehow shabby. But it's not ordinary. I can tell by the way she handles it so carefully, like something unique. 'This is the book I told you about,' she says, holding out the Anthology of Feminist Texts, a collection of early American feminist essays, 'the only feminist book translated into the Polish language,' the only such book to turn to when you are sick and tired of reading about man-eater/man-killer feminists from the West, I think, looking at it, imagining how many women have read this one copy. 'Sometimes I feel like I live on Jupiter, among Jupiterians, and then one day, quite by chance, I discover that I belong to another species. And I discover it in this book. Isn't that wonderful.
— Slavenka Drakulić, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed
The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we ´should' be rather than recognizing how we are.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Make no mistake about it, a perfect storm is forming, and it's coming our way. Its sudden onset and fierce intensity will surprise even its most vocal proponents and cheerleaders. Many people who are now in the fetish lifestyle will vainly leap into the fray, foolishly thinking that this will be an orderly battle of opposing ideas that can be fought civilly and rationally. They will quickly learn that they are tragically wrong in this assumption, and many of them will pay a terrible price emotionally, socially, and financially as a result.
— Michael Makai, The Warrior Princess Submissive
Life for both sexes - and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement - is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority - it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney - for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination - over other people.
— Virginia Woolf
My Dad has been a feminist, way before I learnt how to spell the word.
— Shahla Khan
For the Warrior Princess Submissive, her feminism is less about “talking the talk,” and more about “walking the walk.” She doesn’t have to wear her feminism on her sleeve; she exudes it from every pore and typically demonstrates it in practically everything she does. No, the issue - when it comes to the Warrior Princess’ feminism - isn’t whether or not she is a feminist; it’s about how she reconciles her feminism with her submission and how she is perceived by those around her.
— Michael Makai, The Warrior Princess Submissive
Now you know what hurt it brings to women when men come into the world. Remember, and make it up to your Mama and to all women.
— Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley
The Warrior Princess Submissive is - at least in my humble opinion - quite possibly destined to be the hope and salvation of the D/s lifestyle from an ever-increasing wave of attacks by a small cadre of radical feminists and misandrists who seek to equate D/s with misogyny.
— Michael Makai, The Warrior Princess Submissive
The problem with gender is that is prescribes how we ´should' be rather than recognizing how we are.
— chimamamanda Ngozie Adichie
The sad truth of the matter is that when it comes to appearance, we start off with men as the standard, the norm.
— chimamamanda Ngozie Adichie
Culture does not make people. People make culture. if it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.
— chimamamanda Ngozie Adichie
As with most liberal sexual ideas, what makes the world a better place for men invariably makes it a duller and more dangerous place for women.
— Julie Burchill
Man is willing to accept woman as an equal, as a man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a baby-face, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a servant, an encyclopaedia, an ideal or an obscenity; the one thing he won’t accept her as, is a human being, a real human being of the feminine sex.
— D.H. Lawrence
The answers would come to her. No need to rush them. Ten years ago, but so well remember it was as if it had happened yesterday, she had suffered the repercussions brought on by thoughtless rushing. This time, she would wait. Not wait for him to act, like she had been doing these past months. She would wait to see how she would act.
— Anne Cherian, A Good Indian Wife
It may upset my secret sisters that I say this, but between you and me, if you're so fortunate as to have captured the perfect male, peeling off that chain-mail bikini and becoming a part-time Amazon is not so bad after all.-Author's Note, Anne Fortier
— Anne Fortier, The Lost Sisterhood
Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.
— Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics
Public ‘career feminists’ have been more concerned with getting more women into ‘boardrooms’, when the problem is that there are altogether too many boardrooms, and none of them are on fire.
— Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution
When they (the men, the scavengers)come for you, do not give yourselfto them so easily.Wear your strength like armour,fight like a beast.Do not let them tell you thatyou belong to them.Be fearless.Be a lion.Be like lava.Rip them apart,and burn their bones.And when you are done,tell the world that you belong to no man.That you are a lady,a warrior,a tsunami, and you belong only to yourself.
— Zaeema J. Hussain, The Sky Is Purple
Rest in your God-breathed worth. Stop holding your breath, hiding your gifts, ducking your head, dulling your roar, distracting your soul, stilling your hands, quieting your voice, and satiating your hunger with the lesser things of this world.
— Sarah Bessey, Jesus Feminist: An Invitation to Revisit the Bible’s View of Women
You won’t shoot me.""People tend to overestimate my character," I say quietly. "They think that because I’m small, or a girl, or a Stiff, I can’t possibly be cruel. But they’re wrong.
— Veronica Roth, Divergent
Point being that you don't have to get too worked up about us, dear educated minds. You don't have to think of us as real girls, real flesh and blood, real pain, real injustice. That might be too upsetting. Just discard the sordid part. Consider us pure symbol. We're no more real than money.
— Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad
You are strong, self-reliant, entirely able to take care of yourself and of me... You are fearless, courageous; you saved my life, nursed me back to health, hunted for my food, provided for my comfort. You don't need me. Yet you make me want to protect you, watch over you, make sure no harm comes to you. I could live with you all my life and never really know you; you have depths it would take many lifetimes to explore. You are wise and ancient... and as fresh and young as a woman as... And you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. I love you more than life itself.
— Jean M. Auel, The Valley of Horses
I will be­lieve that the bat­tle of fem­i­nism is over, and that the fe­male has reached a po­si­tion of equal­ity with the male, when I hear that a coun­try has al­lowed it­self to be turned up­side-down and led to the brink of war by its pas­sion for a to­tally bald woman writer.
— Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
Let’s be very clear about this, asshole: I’ve been a woman in Arkansas. I know damn well what it means when a man says to me 'Calm down.' Being raped comes next, and that’s a fact I’m never going to forget.
— Agnostic Zetetic
These women accept their beatings with a simplicity worthy of all praise, and far from considering themselves insulted, admire the strength and energy of the man who can administer such eloquent rebukes. In Russia, not only may a man beat his wife, but it is laid down in the catechism and taught all boys at the time of confirmation as necessary at least once a week, whether she has done anything or not, for the sake of her general health and happiness."I thought I observed a tendency in the Man of Wrath rather to gloat over these castigations."Pray, my dear man," I said, pointing with my whip, "look at that baby moon so innocently peeping at us over the edge of the mist just behind that silver birch; and don't talk so much about women and things you don't understand. What is the use of your bothering about fists and whips and muscles and all the dreadful things invented for the confusion of obstreperous wives? You know you are a civilised husband, and a civilised husband is a creature who has ceased to be a man."And a civilised wife?" he asked, bringing his horse close up beside me and putting his arm round my waist, "has she ceased to be a woman?""I should think so indeed,--she is a goddess, and can never be worshipped and adored enough.
— Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden
Though I did not have the statistics, just observing the number of women on the streets during peak hours dressed for work, it was obvious that a greater percentage of women in Vanni went to work outside the home. There were also more women in civilian clothes riding motorbikes on Vanni roads compared to the rest of the island. Women, both LTTE members as well as civilians, occupied the public space in large numbers. They were very visible on the roads and in the LTTE institutions. This gave Vanni a uniquely pro-woman character, which was absent elsewhere on the island. ...It was a unique kind of feminism, created by connecting the majority of women living all over Vanni, from all walks of life, for public action regarding women and children in need of help
— N.  Malathy, A Fleeting Moment in My Country: The Last Years of the Ltte de-Facto State
What is acted out on the female body parallels the larger practices of domination, fragmentation, and conquest against the earth body, which is being polluted, strip-mined, deforested, and cut up into parcels of private property. Equally, this pattern points to the fragmentation of the psyche, which ultimately underlies and enables all of this damage.
— Jane Caputi
Aristotle didn't have a problem with abortion," she says. "Oh, well, good, that's a comfort," I say.
— Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore
It doesn't matter what women wear. No matter what, someone's going to have a problem with it.
— Meghan Blistinsky
Theory-the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees
— Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985
If you educate a man you educate a person, but if you educate a woman you educate a family
— Brigham Young
[S]ocial order displays not the absolute presence or absence of intolerance to difference but a spectrum of intolerance. Each of us bears responsibility to some degree for maintaining these protocols of intolerance, which could not be kept in place if every single one of us did not play our part. From bringing up children ‘appropriately’, to lovingly correcting or punishing their inappropriate behaviour, to making sure we never breach the protocols ourselves, to staring or sniggering at people who look different, to coercive psychiatric and medical intervention, to emotional blackmail, to physical violence-it’s a range of slippages all the way that we seldom recognize.
— Nivedita Menon, Seeing Like a Feminist
You have to listen to women. You should never ignore a woman's fears.
— Roberto Bolaño, 2666
Your idea of a woman is someone who gets on a chair and shrieks if she sees a mouse. That's all prehistoric.
— Agatha Christie