'I hate discussions of feminism that end up with who does the dishes,' she said. So do I. But at the end, there are always the damned dishes.
All of the women I know feel a little like outlaws.
Anyone determined to find another person or group inferior can always find whole lists of grounds that demonstrate inferiority because we are all inferior to the ideals of humanness we have erected.
Control over a woman is the only form of dominance most men possess, for most men are merely subjects of more powerful men.
Desire consumes you, it takes you over. You forget yourself completely. All you can think about is the other, the one you desire, your self is just a fire.
Fear is a question. What are you afraid of and why? Our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.
For many people, morality means a set of rules governing the disposition on one's genital organs; or a set of injunctions against lying, stealing, or killing except when such acts are sanctioned by church or state.
For men to focus on controlling women's reproduction to solve a society's problems seems nothing short of mad or, at best, superstitious. But men's superstition or insanity has real and dire consequences for the women who are its object. And states, too, home in on women's bodies, perhaps to create the illusion that men are in control of uncontrollable forces. Indeed, almost all governments try to control women's bodies and regulate their appearance in some way.
I'd discovered you never know yourself until you're tested and that you don't even know you're being tested until afterwards, and that in fact there isn't anyone giving the test except yourself.
In a way it doesn't matter whether you open doors or close them, you still end up in a box.
It isn't success after all, is it, if it isn't an expression of your deepest energies?
Loneliness is not a longing for company, it is a longing for kind. And kind means people who can see you who you are, and that means they have enough intelligence and sensitivity and patience to do that.
Marriage accustomed one to the good things, so one came to take them for granted, but it magnified the bad things, so they came to feel as painful as a grain in one's eye. An open window, a forgotten quart of milk, a TV set left blaring, socks on the bathroom floor could become occasions for incredible rage.
Men seem unable to feel equal to women: they must be superior or they are inferior.
Men's need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness; we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it.
Never underestimate the power of helplessness!
Nothing is ever simple. What do you do when you discover you like parts of the role you're trying to escape?
Oh, God, why don't I remember that a little chaos is good for the soul?
She died for truth, and she died of it. Some truths are mortal illnesses.
Survival is an art. It requires the dulling of the mind and the senses, and a delicate attunement to waiting, without insisting on precision about just what it is you are waiting for.
The real motivation of the campaign to criminalize abortion is to establish the principles that women's bodies belong to the state and that women bear the responsibility for sex.
The same men who are blind and deaf to feminism are acutely sensitive to what threatens their dominance and privilege.
The very notion of superiority of one kind over another will have to disappear, although differences among kind will remain.
The view of life as a struggle for power generates a language in which life has no significance and only power matters.
There is no power greater than the power of passive dependency.
There's no justice, there's only love.
There's power to: and everyone should have that, but everyone doesn't. Power to play Bach, or tennis, or boccie if you like. And there's power over; and no one should have that, but people do.
They leave the genitals off Barbie and Ken, but they manufacture every kind of war toy. Because sex is more threatening to us than aggression.
To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.
Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that. It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion and self-destruction. You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you can't even think straight.
When they kept you out it was because you were black; when they let you in, it is because you are black. That's progress?
Women are afraid in a world in which almost half the population bears the guise of the predator, in which no factor- age, dress, or color- distinguishes a man who will harm a woman from one who will not.
You can't equate passive dependent power with assertive power because the dependent kind isn't fun, it doesn't give you a kick, it just allows you to survive.
Found 33 occurence(s) in 52,045 quotation(s).
Categories: Quotes of the day
KGB Quotation Database Search page design and software
contributed by Rafal Sulejman.
