c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Ye cannot live for yourselves; a thousand fibres connect you with your fellow-men, and along those fibres, as along sympathetic threads, run your actions as causes, and return to you as effects.
— Henry Melvill
We're on the same wavelength. We're connected that way, even if I'm away from her.
— Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
Love is that micro-moment of warmth and connection that you share with another living being
— Barbara L. Fredrickson, Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become
Now, feel. I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other. And feel now. Thou hast no heart but mine.
— Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
no life of faith can be lived privately. There must be an overflow into the lives of others.
— G.K. Chesterton
I just got my signals crossed. First thing, I have to untangle the connections. Otherwise, I come away empty-handed. Or with someone else's hands. Or even with a missing hand.
— Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
In any case, the goal is the same: to connect.
— Nicolas Billon, Fault Lines: Greenland – Iceland – Faroe Islands
Whose idea was it that we should all get jobs, work faster, work better, race from place to place with our brains stewing on tweets, blogs, and sound bites, on must-see movies, must-do experiences, must-have gadgets, when in the end, all any of us will have is our simple beating heart, reaching up for the connection to whoever might be in the room or leaning into our mattress as we draw our last breath?
— Dee Williams
To connect is to dissolve the imaginary pyramids of artificial privilege.
— Stefan Molyneux
Before passing through the gates of a town I've never visited, I take a minute to salute its saints - the dead and the living, the known and the hidden. Never in my life have I arrived at a new place without getting the blessing of its saints first. It makes no difference to me whether that place belongs to Muslims, Christians, or Jews. I believe that the saints are beyond such trivial nominal distinctions. A saint belongs to all humanity.
— Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love
Connection was always enough. Not touching. Not talking. Just a feeling that in the world your not alone.
— Donal O'Callaghan
In that instant of eye contact, in the mesmerizing depths of that sweet emotion, she felt bound to him in a way she’d never felt connected to another man. It was as if in that moment their hearts and minds, their very souls, were one.
— Carla Cassidy, Last Gasp
For love, as she knew it now, was something without shame and without reserve, the possession of two people who had no barrier between them, and no pride; whatever happened to him would happen to her too, all feeling, all movement, all sensation of body and of mind.
— Daphne du Maurier, Frenchman's Creek
I found you in the whispers of the shadow... luring me out into the light. Swallowed by the song and richness of the breath dancing in depth and perception wide. Heart within your eyes, soul in your word, I found home upon the essence of you.
— Jennifer Hillman
He was lonely because he could imagine himself as anything but himself and as anywhere but where he was. His competitiveness and self-centeredness cut him off from any thought of shared life. He wanted to have more because he thought that having more would make him able to live more, and he was lonely because he never thought of the sources, the places, where he was going to get what he wanted to have, or of what his having it might cost others. It was loneliness that sometimes even he felt; you could see it. A self-praiser has got to accept a big loneliness in order to accept a little credit.
— Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
In its encounter with Nature, science invariably elicits a sense of reverence and awe. The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos. And the cumulative worldwide build-up of knowledge over time converts science into something only a little short of a trans-national, trans-generational meta-mind.
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
For a second, my hand touched yours, but that second is gone, and cannot be seen, heard or felt ever again. This second is gone, too, the moment in which I spoke by your side. It is dead. Let it die.
— Claire North, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
In my eyes, BDSM is not a sexual experience, it's a spiritual connection.
— Simon Shroud
Fully experiencing the connection that exists between us all is the secret to true contentment.
— Simon Boylan
There was something about him that drove the shyness out of you, a kind of understanding that went deeper than words and set up an instantaneous closeness. It was odd; we couldn’t have been more different. Arthur Gordon
— Arthur Gordon
We have reached the end of the road that is built on the set of traits held out for male identity--advance at any cost, pay any price, drive out all competitors, and kill them if necessary.... we have arrived at a point from which we must seek a basis of faith in connection-- and not only faith but recognition that it is a requirement for the existence of human beings.
— Gary Paul Nabhan Stephan Trimble, The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places
Neither one of them could turn off their feelings, even with so much time and distance between them. The more they were apart, and the more they weren't allowed to be together, the more they loved each other.
— Donna Lynn Hope, Willow
I've never felt a connection like this with anyone else... I don't even know how to explain it. I feel like I already knew you before I met you, and the first time I saw you, the first time I talked to you, was incidental, because the connection was already there --.
— M. Molly Backes, The Princesses of Iowa
...the strands that connect us are frail, so don't hang great weights on slender wires...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Spiritual counselling is helping people find the deep root of stillness in themselves, which is also a connection to everything else.
— Jay Woodman
And I have to admit that there is something undeniably fulfilling about hunting with Rosie. Somehow, it makes me feel as if the long list of differences between us doesn't exist. We're dressed the same, we fight the same enemy, we win together ... It's as though for that moment I get to be her, the one who isn't covered in thick scars, and she gets to understand what it is to be me. It's different than hunting with Silas--he and I are partners, not part of the same heart.
— Jackson Pearce, Sisters Red
She was told it was magnetism that kept them engaged, and how do you separate magnets? You force them apart.
— Donna Lynn Hope
Benjamin and I sat in the middle of one of the large canoes with our grandmother in the stern, directing us past shoals and through rapids and into magnificent stretches of water. One day the clouds hung low and light rain freckled the slate-grey water that peeled across our bow. The pellets of rain were warm and Benjamin and I caught them on our tongues as our grandmother laughed behind us. Our canoes skimmed along and as I watched the shoreline it seemed the land itself was in motion. The rocks lay lodged like hymns in the breast of it, and the trees bent upward in praise like crooked fingers. It was glorious. Ben felt it too. He looked at me with tears in his eyes, and I held his look a long time, drinking in the face of my brother.
— Richard Wagamese, Indian Horse
… What about the main thing in life, all its riddles? If you want, I'll spell it out for you right now. Do not pursue what is illusionary -property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life -don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn for happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don't claw at your insides. If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes can see, if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart -and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it may be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted on their memory.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
And ask each passenger to tell his story, and if there is one of them all who has not cursed his existence many times, and said to himself over and over again that he was the most miserable of men, I give you permission to throw me head-first into the sea.
— Voltaire, Candide: or, Optimism
Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.
— Judy Garland
Beer does not satisfy magic, however. So the magic ordered a round of Harvey Wallbangers. But it takes more than vodka to fuel magic. It takes risks. It takes EXTREMES.
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
What can be more absurd than choosing to carry a burden that one really wants to throw to the ground? To detest, and yet to strive to preserve our existence? To caress the serpent that devours us and hug him close to our bosoms tillhe has gnawed into our hearts?
— Voltaire, Candide
Go forth into the busy world and love it. Interest yourself in its life, mingle kindly with its joys and sorrows.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Be warned in time, James, and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood
— Oscar Wilde
Let the Gods create the days, and just live through them.
— Andrew Ashling
Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dess? I though that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. "We must see all scars as beauty. OKay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on dying. A scar means, I survivied.
— Chris Cleave, Little Bee
If there was a volcano under their feet, a Vesuvius that could erupt and bury this modern-day Pompeii at any moment, the best thing to do was dance on it. 
— Deborah   Davis, Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X
Fear not death
—  fear not having lived.
he hates skiing but he loves the mountains and like that with everything.
— Gwen Calvo, Cocaine Masks: Cocaine Masks
We are terrible for each other, and, yes, we are a disaster. But tell me your heart doesn't race for a hurricane or a burning building. I'd rather die terrified than live forever.
— Joey Comeau
It is the very thing I thought I could never be that the real me has settled into like a puzzle. Who would have thought I could be me?
— Malebo Sephodi
He who fails to know his real and true competitor shall never be able to give a good account of his stewardship in life! Your true and real competitor is your real and true solemn duty to your Maker!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
to avoid being blamed after here, do what you must do as a must do whilst you are here!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
The great man is he who does not lose his child's-heart.
— Mencius
I live larger than life.
— Neo Shamon
When faced with the choice of living one breath longer or cashing in right now, most folks will take the extra moment. That single extra breath. Even when your world stops spinning and gravity dies and the blood glitters in the air like a galaxy of warm red suns all around you. A lot can happen between breaths, after all.
— Amie Kaufman
Simplicity shall make you simple and keep you away from so many woes of life! It is simple! Just go for simplicity and be simple, Period!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Every kind of contempt for sex, every impurification of it by means of the concept "impure", is the crime par excellence against life--is the real sin against the holy spirit of life
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo
If you want to feel the life and the body of great men who are long gone, go to their tombs or monuments; if you want to understand the real life and the wisdom of great men who are long gone, go to their libraries!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
A human. A bystander. A person who is not you, him or her, just me. Living under this timeless sky; never changing sky. Waiting unknowing for the day I die.
— Jojo Ghostrider
She was happy to be alive and breathing, when her whole being seemed to be one with the sunlight, the color, the odors, the luxuriant warmth of some perfect Southern day.
— Kate Chopin, The Awakening
If you cannot get a job then make a living for yourself.
— Stephen Richards
Most of the things that remain tied to earth do not know that they have hidden wings under the hard shell of life” - The Monk in the book "Songs of the Mist
— Shashi, Songs of the Mist
Yep, that girl was as dead as you could get inside. But Scarlett Jo wasn't worried. Not really. Because sometimes a person has to die in order to really live.
— Denise Hildreth Jones, Secrets Over Sweet Tea
This thing in your chest, slightly tilted towards the left, could be fidgety at times. Make sure you set it right.
— Steven Chopade
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself & in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying, & human existence is indistinguishable from an absurd vegetation; a life justifies itself only if its effort to perpetuate itself is integrated into its surpassing & if this surpassing has no other limits than those which the subject assigns himself.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
You think your smarter and braver than anyone?, well,, think again, you don't always win from the battle you're in.
— Aireen Pontillo
I should live each day as if it were significant, as if everyday the fate of the world depended on my action.
— Robin Hobb, Assassin's Quest
I may not have the standard physical beauty of a human being, but I am more human than any other human could be, I have a human heart that's why I understand human need.
— Aireen Pontillo
Success makes tyrants of most of the humankind; making us forget basic courtesy, and being kind.
— Fakeer Ishavardas
Life is the gift of being able to do something, so use it
— Ean Rodriguez
when true purpose calls, double mindedness, confusion and frustration come along.
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
You don't have to find out you're dying to start living.
— Zach Sobiech
You try your best to love the world despite obvious flaws in design and execution and you take care of whatever needy things present themselves to you during your passage through it. Otherwise you're worthless.
— Charles Frazier, Nightwoods
I am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
In the old days he had clutched life with such violence that the juice of it ran out between his fingers and was lost, but now he would touch it delicately, thankful for the good and accepting the ills with patience.
— Elizabeth Goudge, A City of Bells
We choose to live life to the fullest because it is in our best interest to do so. - Charmainism
— Charmaine Smith Ladd, Shake Hands with Yourself: A Peacemaker's Guide to Happiness & Inner Peace
There is always a hope for the living.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Do not wait to know you are drying before you start living.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
It tough to live a whole life with an act
— Prabhukrishna M
Live one day at a time.Do not worry about tomorrow.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Life must be lived to the fullness.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you felt inside -- you were a fraud. And the more of a fraud you felt like, the harder you tried to convey an impressive or likable image of yourself so that other people wouldn't find out what a hollow, fraudulent person you really were.
— David Foster Wallace, Oblivion
This is the greatest consolation in life. In poetically well-built museums, formed from the heart's compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects that we love, but by losing all sense of Time.
— Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence
Nobody on Earth can tell you how you should live your life. Nobody with any real authority anyway.
— Dan Pearce, Single Dad Laughing
You've been treading water," she said. "You're marking the years, not living them.
— Robyn Carr, Temptation Ridge
Living in a world that full of busy people is like living in a world ALONE.
— Heraline
Don't Copy What Someone Is Doing, Copy What God Wants You To Do.
— Cyc Jouzy
Living life with a plan can be harder without a plan.
— Pontius Joseph
Let me stop there, but my God, how beautiful Shakespeare is, who else is as mysterious as he is; his language and method are like a brush trembling with excitement and ecstasy. But one must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.
— Vincent van Gogh
The question isn't "Why do we die?" The question is "Why do we live?
— S.M. Reine, Six Moon Summer
Live every day like it's your last. Treasure the moments you have, and make sure you make them count.
— Nicole Reed, Ruining You
Quit planning your dream and start living it.
— Alan Cohen
She wanted to live, and live fully, and to give life, she who loved life! What was the good of existing, if you couldn't give yourself?
— Émile Zola, The Joy of Life
Don't do the things just for the sake of it. Do something extra. It makes ordinary things, extraordinary.
— Chandan Sharma
A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave.
— Peter Shaffer, Equus
Not in the flight of ideas, but only in action is freedom. Make up your mind and come out into the tempest of the living.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
TO be practical not merely means to steal when everybody steals but to act with wits and wisdom...
— Ranu Das
You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.
— John Berger, Ways of Seeing
Woman is not born: she is made. In the making, her humanity is destroyed. She becomes symbol of this, symbol of that: mother of the earth, slut of the universe; but she never becomes herself because it is forbidden for her to do so.
— Andrea Dworkin
Beware of the man who denounces woman writers
—  his penis is tiny and he cannot spell.
The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says: "It's a girl.
— Shirley Chisholm
They are all innocent until proven guilty. But not me. I am a liar until I am proven honest.
— Louise O'Neill, Asking For It
Anyone who calls you "little lady" has already excluded you from the set of people worth listening to.
— Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys
Anyway, it's like with bikes,' said the first speaker authoritatively. 'I thought I was going to get this bike with seven gears and one of them razorblade saddles and purple paint and everything, and they gave me this light blue one. With a basket. A girl's bike.''Well. You're a girl,' said one of the others.'That's sexism, that is. Going around giving people girly presents just because they're a girl.
— Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
What would my first sergeant do if he came across me and another girl getting it on? He'd want pictures. He'd want to join in. He'd want me and this other girl to double-team him right then and there. On the other hand, since most heterosexual men are homophobic and sexist, most straight guys figure gay men will treat them the way they themselves treat women- that is, like sex objects. And this freaks them the fuck out.
— Kayla Williams, Love My Rifle More than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army
The girls were expected to grow up to be somebody's wife. They were also expected to read and write, those being considered soft indoor jobs that were too fiddly for the boys.
— Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men
The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation because in the degradation of woman the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source.
— Lucretia Mott
The "feminine" woman is forever static and childlike. She is like the ballerina in an old-fashioned music box, her unchanging features tiny and girlish, her voice tinkly, her body stuck on a pin, rotating in a spiral that will never grow.
— Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women
That not all men are piggy, only some; that not all men belittle me, only some; that not all men get mad if you won’t let them play Chivalry, only some; that not all men write books in which women are idiots, only most; that not all men pull rank on me, only some; that not all men pinch their secretaries’ asses, only some; that not all men make obscene remarks to me in the street, only some; that not all men make more money than I do, only some; that not all men make more money than all women, only most; that not all men are rapists, only some; that not all men are promiscuous killers, only some; that not all men control Congress, the Presidency, the police, the army, industry, agriculture, law, science, medicine, architecture, and local government, only some.I sat down on the lawn and wept.
— Joanna Russ, On Strike Against God
If God had wanted us to think with our wombs, why did he give us a brain?
— Clare Boothe Luce
You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women.
— Neil Gaiman
Femininity is wearing shoes that make it difficult to run, skirts that inhibit movement, and underclothes that interfere with blood circulation. It can hardly be coincidental that the clothes men find most flattering on a woman are precisely those that make it most difficult for her to defend herself against aggression.
— Suzanne Brøgger, Deliver Us From Love
The crew was mostly men. That's how it was and that's pretty much how it still is. It's a man's world & show business is a man's meal with women generously sprinkled through it like over-qualified spice.
— Carrie Fisher, The Princess Diarist
Our culture is obsessed with perfection, especially when it comes to the way women look. The parameters of acceptability as far as physical appearance go are so limiting that only a handful of women actually fall into this category. And the rest of us are left to either squeeze ourselves into molds that don't fit, hating ourselves all the while, or we just give up entirely.
— Yancy Lael, Soulful Skincare: The ultimate guide to radically transforming your complexion
Mistresses, have you ever noticed that when we disagree with a male – I hesitate to say ‘man’ – or find ourselves in a position over males, the first comment they make is always about our reputations or our monthlies?”One of the new women snorted. Others snic
— Tamora Pierce, Lady Knight
A womanly occupation means, practically, an occupation that a man disdains.
— George Gissing, The Odd Women
Guy welcomed my breasts warmly. He hugged them like long-lost friends and stared at them with the protectiveness of a mother lion, as if to make sure they didn't decide to get up on their own and leave the two of us alone together in his office. He waved them into a chair and asked if they would like anything to drink. On their behalf, I ordered Perrier.
— Ally O'Brien, The Agency
The problem with confronting people who make these comments is that the most you will get out of it is mockery and reprisal by superiors. You are just one girl who got offended by the comment, while so many others adhere to it.
— Kaitlyn Scarboro
When our mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters are considered both different and inferior in the eyes of the God we worship, this belief tends to permeate society and everyone suffers.
— Jimmy Carter, A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power
As women of the western world, we see our sisters in other lands being raped, maimed and even executed simply for trying to exercise the most basic freedoms, such as taking a bus alone or wearing a bright red sweater. And when we look at our own world, we see that it too still lacks equality for the sexes. It's a terrible thing to go through one's entire lifetime not getting to do all the things we dream of doing just because others say we're not permitted to do them, and to know that they will hurt us if we try. But far, far worse than that is when there's not a thing or a person outside that's stopping us from living exactly as we wish, but we stop ourselves; internally we do not give ourselves permission, simply because we're too scared of what will happen if we dare.
— Patricia V. Davis, The Diva Doctrine: 16 Universal Principles Every Woman Needs to Know
In short, women themselves absorb and transmit misogynistic values, just as men do. This is not a tidy world of tyrannical men and victimized women, but a messier realm of oppressive social customs adhered to by men and women alike.
— Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
Inside the (Domestic) Sphere women did things which weren't too demanding like childcare, scrubbing the floor, washing the sheets and curtains, sewing on buttons, and coalmining.
— Jacky Fleming, The Trouble With Women
If it would destroy [a 12-year-old boy] to be called a girl, what are we then teaching him about girls?
— Tony Porter
The problem with the 'masculinity crisis' is not that women have excelled too much and therefore created a crisis for men, but that we have such a stein inability to let go of what it has traditionally meant to be a man...As long as we perpetuate the myth that men have inherent qualities that make them more suitable than women for certain types of work, the shifting nature of the economy (and women's attainment of better jobs) is going to continue to be interpreted as a crisis of masculinity.
— Samhita Mukhopadhyay, Outdated: Why Dating Is Ruining Your Love Life
But no one wants to listen to our sad stories unless they are smoothed over with a joke or nice melody. And even then, not always. No one wants to hear a woman talking or writing about pain in a way that suggests that it doesn't end. Without a pat solution, silver lining, or happy ending we're just complainers -- downers who don't realize how good we actually have it.Men's pain and existential angst are the stuff of myth and legends and narratives that shape everything we do, but women's pain is a backdrop- a plot development to push the story along for the real protagonists. Disrupting that story means we're needy or shellfish, or worst of all, man-haters - as if after all men have done to women over the ages the mere act of not liking them for it is most offensive.
— Jessica Valenti, Sex Object
When a man dies, his wife is burned alive with him, but if the wife dies before her husband, the man does not suffer the same fate. If a man dies before marriage, he is given a posthumous wife. The women passionately want to be burned because they believe they will enter paradise.
— Al-Mas'udi, From the Meadows of Gold
She had never met a woman from the waking world. Once she asked Carter about it."Women don't dream large dreams," he had said, dismissively. "It is all babies and housework. Tiny dreams."Men said stupid things all the time, and it was perhaps no surprise that men of the waking world might do so as well, yes she was disappointed in Carter.
— Kij Johnson, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe
She hadn't loved Randolph Carter. He had been a man like many, so wrapped and rapt in his own story that there was no room for the world around him except as it served his own tale: the black men of Parg and Kled and Sona Nyl, the gold men of Thorabon and Ophir and Rinar; and all the women invisible everywhere, except when they brought him drinks or sold him food - all walk-on parts in the play that was Randolph Carter, or even wallpaper.
— Kij Johnson, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe
He loved who he was: Randolph Carter, master dreamer, adventurer. To him, she had been landscape, an articulate crag he could ascend, a face to put to his place. When were women ever anything but footnotes to men's tales?
— Kij Johnson, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe
The characters so many Bollywood actresses portray are ultimately flat, uncomplicated, two-dimensional stock characters that typically range between the girl-next-door and the diva. They may be flawed in small ways, but ultimately lack nuance, conform to and reinforce cultural expectations of a wholesome but ultimately submissive Indian women. The likability of these flat and boring characters hold the actresses' off screen reputations in good stead but reinforce the very norms that imprison and render so many Indian women vulnerable to disrespect and sexism.
— Sharanya Haridas
When I finally did confront Mr. Arcott, after my return to Falchester, he had the cheek to try and argue that his intellectual thievery had been a compliment and a favor. After all, it meant my work was good enough to be accepted into ibn Khattusi's series -- but of course they never would have taken a submission from a woman, so he submitted it on my behalf. What I said in reply is not fit to be printed here, as by then I had spent a good deal of time in the company of sailors, and had at my disposal a vocabulary not commonly available to ladies of quality.
— Marie Brennan, The Voyage of the Basilisk
There is no relationship between brain size and intelligence. There is however a strong correlation between the size of the brain and the tendency to monthly episodes of irrational moodiness.
— Andre the BFG, Andre's Adventures in MySpace
Silencing women silences justice.
— DaShanne Stokes
i think one has to even abandon the phrase "ally" and understand that you are not helping someone in a particular struggle; the fight is yours.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates
I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool--that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Yet despite all these things we know to be true- despite the preponderance of evidence showing the mental and emotional distress people demonstrate in violent and harassing environments- we still have no name for what happens to women living in a culture that hates them.
— Jessica Valenti, Sex Object
IT is enough for the Men to find a thing establish'd to make them believe it well grounded. In all countries we are seen in subjection and absolute dependence on the Men, without being admitted to the advantages of sciences, or the opportunity of exerting our capacity in a public station. Hence the Men, according to their usual talent of arguing from seemings, conclude that we ought to be so. (...)But why do the Men persuade themselves that we are less fit for public employments than they are? Can they give any better reason than custom and prejudice form'd in them by external appearances (...)? (...) For if Women are but consider'd as rational creatures, abstracted from the disadvantages imposed upon them by the unjust usurpation and tyranny of the Men, they will be found, to the full, as capable as the Men, of filling these offices.
— Lady Sophia Fermor, Woman Not Inferior to Man: Or, a Short and Modest Vindication of the Natural Right of the Fair-Sex to a Perfect Equality of Power, Dignity and Esteem with the Men
The history of hysteria is a history of the relation between the colonizing father and the colonized devalued other.
— Judith L. Alpert, Sexual Abuse Recalled
Church is important to most folks in the South. So the most important thing going is basically ruled by men as decreed by the Big Man himself. Not only that, but the church puts pressures on women that it does not put on men. Young women are expected to be chaste, moral, and pure, whereas young men are given way more leeway, ’cause, ya know, boys will be boys. Girls are expected to marry young and have kids, be a helpmate to their husbands (who are basically like having another child), and, of course, raise perfect little Christian babies to make this world a better place. So while it’s the preacher man who controls the church, it’s the women—those helpmates—who keep that shit going. They keep the pews tidy and wash the windows; type up the bulletins; volunteer for Sunday school, the nursery, youth group, and Vacation Bible School; fry the chicken for the postchurch dinners; organize the monthly potluck dinners, the spaghetti supper to raise money for a new roof, and the church fund drive; plant flowers in the front of the church, make food for sick parishioners, serve food after funerals, put together the Christmas pageant, get Easter lilies for Easter, wash the choir robes, organize the church trip, bake cookies for the bake sale to fund the church trip, pray unceasingly for their husband and their pastor and their kids and never complain, and then make sure their skirts are ironed for Sunday mornin’ service. All this while in most churches not being allowed to speak with any authority on the direction or doctrine of the church. No, no, ladies, the heavy lifting—thinkin’ up shit to say, standing up at the lectern telling people what to do, counting the money—that ain’t for yuns. So sorry.
— Trae Crowder, The Liberal Redneck Manifesto: Draggin' Dixie Outta the Dark
I was a small insect faced with a formidable male network web in which I might be ensnared but never a part.
— Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem
Men justify the women taking care of the kids and the house and holding down a job because, after all, men are the primary breadwinners in the family. But that’s because we fucking pay women less! Men claiming superiority over women because men make more money than they do is like claiming you’re stronger than a lion that you tranquilized and put in a cage. Sure, you’re in a better spot now—but how ’bout you unchain the beast and see what happens?
— Trae Crowder, The Liberal Redneck Manifesto: Draggin' Dixie Outta the Dark
What a relief, Nadya thought; in that light he would not be able to tell that she had been crying."You mean if it weren't for the blackout you wouldn't have come?" Dasha took up Shchagov's tone, flirting unconsciously, as she did with every unmarried man she met."By no means, never. In bright light women's faces are deprived of all their charm; it reveals their spiteful expressions, their envious glances, their premature wrinkles, their heavy cosmetics."Nadya shuddered at the words "envious glances"—it was as if he had overheard their argument.Shchagov went on:" If I were a woman, I would make it a law that lights be kept low. Then everyone would soon have a husband."Dasha looked disapprovingly at Shchagov. He always talked that way, and she didn't like it. All his phrases seemed memorized, insincere.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle
Women are silenced by both the invisibility and the acceptability of the problem.
— Laura Bates, Everyday Sexism
One of the cleverest and most insidious twists in the whole sorry tale is the way women are double bound by a gender-biased definition of professionalism and the threat of being labeled "whining.
— Laura Bates, Everyday Sexism
Whether the woman shares the man's passion or not, whether she is willing or unwilling to satisfy it, she always repulses him and defends herself, though not always with the same vigour, and therefore not always with the same success.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education
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Our experiences of all forms of gender prejudice - from daily sexism to distressing harassment to sexual violence - are part of a continuum that impacts all of us, all the time, shaping ourselves, and our ideas about the world. To include stories of assault and rape within a project documenting everyday experiences of gender imbalance is simply to extend its boundaries to the most extreme manifestations of that prejudice. To see how great the damage can become when the minor, "unimportant" issues are allowed to pass without comment. To prove how the steady drip-drip-drip of sexism and sexualization and objectification is connected to the assumption of ownership and control over women's bodies, and how the background noise of harassment and disrespect connects to the assertion of power that is violence and rape.
— Laura Bates, Everyday Sexism
The more stories I heard, the more I tried to talk about the problem. And yet time and time again I found myself coming up against the same response: Sexism doesn't exist anymore. Women are equal now, more or less. You career girls these days have the best of all worlds - what more do you want? Think about the women in other countries dealing with real problems, people told me - you women in the West have no idea how lucky you are. You have "gilded lives"! You're making a fuss about nothing. You're overreacting. You're uptight, or frigid. You need to learn to take a joke, get a sense of humor, light up...You really need to learn to take a compliment.
— Laura Bates, Everyday Sexism
Sexism is often an invisible problem. This is partly because it's so frequently manifest in situations where the only witnesses present are victim and perpetrator.
— Laura Bates, Everyday Sexism
The incidents that go unwitnessed definitely help to keep sexism off the radar, and unacknowledged problem we don't discuss. But so too do the regular occurrences that hide in plain sight, within a society that has normalized sexism and allowed it to become so ingrained that we no longer notice or object to it. Sexism is a socially acceptable prejudice and everybody is getting in on the act.
— Laura Bates, Everyday Sexism
When we suggest victims can stop rape, we also (however unintentionally) imply that rape is an inevitable aspect of life rather than an action deliberately carried out by a perpetrator.
— Laura Bates, Everyday Sexism
As long as we as a society continue to belittle and dismiss women's accounts, disbelieve and question their stories, and blame them for their own assaults, we are playing right into the hands of those who silence victims by asking: "who would believe you anyways?".
— Laura Bates, Everyday Sexism
The very fact that it is necessary in the twenty-first century to explain why it's not okay to publicly debate whether or not women are "asking" for sexual assault is mind-boggling.
— Laura Bates, Everyday Sexism
This combination of ageism and sexism was also blatant in the Boston Herald's treatment of sixty-three-year-old Elizabeth Warren, whose 2012 Senate bid it sought to undermine by repeatedly dubbing her "Granny" in its pages, as if to imply that an older woman could not possibly be trusted with political responsibility.
— Laura Bates, Everyday Sexism
One day, in the very early months of the project, I read several entries in a single week from girls who had been subjected to leering and shouting from men in the street while walking home from school in their uniforms. Dismayed, I posted a question on Twitter: Surely, I asked, this couldn't be a common occurrence? By the end of the day, a deluge of hundreds of tweets had confirmed that the experience was not only common but almost ubiquitous.
— Laura Bates, Everyday Sexism
Girls are not only being denied access to scientific and adventurous toys, they're also presented with such a narrow range of options that domesticity and stereotypically "female" duties are shoved down their throats before they've even reached the age of five.
— Laura Bates, Everyday Sexism
Disbelief is the first great silencer.
— Laura Bates, Everyday Sexism
He certainly is very charming, but he makes me feel slightly ill at ease—almost as if I were a woman manquée, if there could be such a thing—you know, something lacking in me.""Oh, well, that's hardly his fault.""No," Dulcie agreed. "Mine, of course.
— Barbara Pym, No Fond Return of Love
It appeared the more religious and older men got, the more insatiable their appetite grew for teenage hymens; a short sighted, selfish, entitled and wicked appetite at that by the kind of men who were disillusioned enough to believe that the world revolved around their poles.
— Dauglas Dauglas, Roses in the Rainbow
The UN has protocols on both 'smuggling people' and on 'trafficking in persons.' At meetings to discuss these laws, it became clear that 'trafficking' was the term used to discuss women and children, while 'smuggling' was used to refer to men.
— Melissa Ditmore, Juhu Thukral
Discrimination on the basis of age is as unacceptable as discrimination on the basis of any other aspect of ourselves that we cannot change.
— Ashton Applewhite, This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism
Quickly I find another surprise. The boys are wilder writers — less careful of convention, more willing to leap into the new. I start watching the dozens of vaguely familiar girls, who seem to have shaved off all distinguishing characteristics. They are so careful. Careful about their appearance, what they say and how they say it, how they sit, what they write. Even in the five-minute free writes, they are less willing to go out from where they are — to go out there, where you have to go, to write. They are reluctant to show me rough work, imperfect work, anything I might criticize; they are very careful to write down my instructions word by word.They’re all trying themselves on day by day, hour by hour, I know — already making choices that will last too unfairly long. I’m surprised to find, after a few days, how invigorating it all is. I pace and plead for reaction, for ideas, for words, and gradually we all relax a little and we make progress. The boys crouch in their too-small desks, giant feet sticking out, and the girls perch on the edge, alert like little groundhogs listening for the patter of coyote feet. I begin to like them a lot.Then the outlines come in. I am startled at the preoccupation with romance and family in many of these imaginary futures. But the distinction between boys and girls is perfectly, painfully stereotypical. The boys also imagine adventure, crime, inventions, drama. One expects war with China, several get rich and lose it all, one invents a time warp, another resurrects Jesus, another is shot by a robber. Their outlines are heavy on action, light on response. A freshman: “I grow populerity and for the rest of my life I’m a million air.” [sic] A sophomore boy in his middle age: “Amazingly, my first attempt at movie-making won all the year’s Oscars. So did the next two. And my band was a HUGE success. It only followed that I run the country.”Among the girls, in all the dozens and dozens of girls, the preoccupation with marriage and children is almost everything. They are entirely reaction, marked by caution. One after the other writes of falling in love, getting married, having children and giving up — giving up careers, travel, college, sports, private hopes, to save the marriage, take care of the children. The outlines seem to describe with remarkable precision the quietly desperate and disappointed lives many women live today.
— Sallie Tisdale, Violation: Collected Essays by Sallie Tisdale
How come when a woman says she wants a baby no one ever asks ‘why?
— Radhika Vaz, Unladylike: A Memoir
This myth of meritocracy and equal opportunities encourages individualism over collective action, because when people believe this myth, they obviously see no need for protest movements around particular classes or identities, such as the Women's Movement or the Civil Rights workplace, education or in their personal lives, they are more likely to blame themselves, rather than sexism, racism, class oppression or homophobia; concepts which in current society are often seen as out of date. This type of blame even applies to experiences of actual violence or harassment with too many people believing that it is their fault if they are sexually harassed in the workplace or at school, abused by a partner or are a victim of sexual violence. Our society encourages this view, and in turn, that keeps people isolated and alone, rather than providing them the opportunity to get involved in collective struggles against such common experiences.
— Finn Mackay
Men as Victims: Challenging Cultural MythsJudith Herman’s recent treatise on “complex PTSD" (Herman, 1992) is an extremely articulate and compelling analysis of some of the failings of the current PTSD diagnosis, and of some of the psychological legacies of prolonged, repeated trauma. However, there was one aspect of the article which concerned me and which I wish to address.Throughout the article, "Complex PTSD: A Syndrome in Survivors of Prolonged and Repeated Trauma," whenever reference is made by pronoun to perpetrators or "captors," the pronoun "he" or "him' is used. There are four such references. Whenever reference is made by pronoun to victims or survivors, the pronoun "her" or "she" is used. There are 11 such references. This is not simply an issue of the use of sexist language, which it is. By uniformly linking perpetration with males and victimhood with females, a misconception is perpetuated, one that is shared by the public and by mental health professionals. While there is evidence that most perpetrators of sexual abuse are male, and that there are more female victims of sexual abuse than male victims, it is not true that all perpetrators are male and all victims are female. In fact, in the article, some of the traumas from which Dr. Herman was deriving her argument—political torture, concentration camp survivors, for example—affect as many males as females. Even in the case of sexual abuse, there is increasing evidence that the sexual abuse of males is far more prevalent than has heretofore been believed. Research on male sexual victimization lags more than a decade behind that of female victimization, but several recent studies have reported prevalence rates near or above 20% (Finkelhor et at, 1990; Urquiza, 1988, cited in Urquiza and Keating, 1990; Lisak and Luster, 1992).
— David Lisak
In talking about misogyny and gender-based violence, it would be easy to slip into the conceit that men are the villains. But it's not true. Granted, men are often brutal to women. Yet it is women who routinely manage brothels in poor countries, who ensure that their daughter's genitals are cut, who feed sons before daughters, who take their sons but not their daughters to clinics for vaccination.
— Nicholas D. Kristof, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
The biased use of pronouns serves to perpetuate the culturally based myth that men are perpetrators and women are victims. This myth is extremely damaging to the millions of male victims of sexual and physical abuse who live unacknowledged by our society.
— David Lisak
Hello,” said the beautiful elven maid. “I was just thinking, and I mean no offence, but—how can any fighting force crowded with the softer sex hope to prevail in battle?”“Huh?” said Elliot, brilliantly. “The softer what?”“I refer to men,” said the elf girl. “Naturally I was aware the Border guard admitted men, and I support men in their endeavor to prove they are equal to women, but their natures are not warlike, are they?
— Sarah Rees Brennan, The Turn of the Story