Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The moment we find the reason behind an emotion the wall is breached, and the positive memories it has kept from us return too. That's why it pays to ask those painful questions. The answers can set you free.
I think of the future in two ways - survival plus moving forward. Under survival, I would put all the efforts to save the female half of the world from violence directed at us specifically because we are female.
The original languages didn't even have he and she. They didn't have concepts of masculine and feminine. People were people. And the whole idea was that we were in a circle together, not in a hierarchy together.
The anti-equality right wing has interests. We have to learn to stand up for our interests. To seek purity is self-defeating and a stereotype in itself: women have to be pure, women are not concerned about money.
I once fell in love with a man only because we both belonged to that large and secret club of children who had "crazy mothers." We traded stories of the shameless houses to which we could never invite our friends.
Patriarchy 101 would have you believe otherwise, but you know - that's just not true. Those inequalities are recipes for resentment. And, yes, the formula isn't perfect yet. We don't all have that. But we're trying.
I remember someone once asked Jack Kennedy why he was paying such close attention to the renovation of the square across from the White House, and he said, 'It may be the only thing my presidency is remembered for.'
It's hard to measure success when we're dealing with between 500 and 5,000 years of patriarchy depending on which continent we sit, so I would say feminism has been successful and we have a huge distance to go, huge.
The danger of the Internet is cocooning with the like-minded online - of sending an email or Twitter and confusing that with action - while the real corporate and military and government centers of power go right on.
Women get hit with a double whammy. If they're attractive, they're presumed to have slept their way to the top. If they're unattractive, they are presumed to have chosen a profession because they could not get a man.
I want to help correct the inaccurate image of immigration in the media. There is an idea that women's issues are over here and immigration is over there. Three quarters of undocumented workers are women and children.
Women don't want to exchange places with men. Male chauvinists, science-fiction writers and comedians may favor that idea for its shock value, but psychologists say it is a fantasy based on ruling-class ego and guilt.
The most impersonal seeming audiences eventually just say such intimate, smart, wise, amazing, totally surprising, funny things. It's empowering, in the sense of feeling like you're a part of something really important.
I would say that each of us has only one thing to gain from the feminist movement: Our whole humanity. Because gender has wrongly told us that some things are masculine and some things are feminine... which is bullshit.
I'm not saying that women leaders would eliminate violence. We are not more moral than men; we are only uncorrupted by power so far. When we do acquire power, we might turn out to have an equal impulse toward aggression.
Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That's their natural and first weapon. She will need her sisterhood.
If you are not a feminist in love, you fail to recognise someone who does not love you. Feminism makes love easier. Otherwise, there is the danger of feeling romantically drawn to someone who does not see you as an equal.
The state of female artists is very good. But the very definition of art has been biased in that 'art' was what men did in a European tradition and 'crafts' were what women and natives did. But it's actually all the same.
Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.
Given the expectations of society at large, men are generally correct in their assumption that it is important for a woman to have a man. What they do not understand is how pathetically little difference it makes what man.
Why are solutions not just as newsworthy as problems? The notion that hostility is necessary all the time to create interest and news is not going to help us [humanity] come to agreements and solve the huge problems we have.
I was rescued by librarians. It was librarians who said 'maybe you would like to read The Hardy Boys as well as Nancy Drew.' It is true for me, as for so many countless others, that librarians saved my life, my internal life.
I think I've wasted some of my time, but used most of it well, and have realized that my life is not separate from other people's lives or from the universe. I think our moments of happiness really come from a feeling of unity.
The problem is that America is still so racist - I guess it's hard to find another word for it - that they still, the press in general and many people, perceive only white women as feminists. They think black women are black.
People are quite clear in viewing nuns as the servants and the teachers and the supporters of the poor. You contrast that with the fact that the Vatican did virtually nothing about long-known pedophiles, and it's just too much.
Like so many women, I was living out the unlived life of my mother, so I wouldn't be her. But the price I paid was that I distanced myself internally. I wasn't as close to her then as I nowadays, in retrospect, wish I had been.
The road itself is informative, because it forces you to respond spontaneously and to encounter the unexpected. It forces you to reassess what you felt about people or issues or places, and it forces you to live in the present.
We know from many forms of suffering that what is important first is a witness - people want to know that someone else knows what's happening, that they're not alone - and someone who listens to what is needed and tries to help.
Obviously, untangling sex from aggression and violence or the threat of it is going to take a very long time. And the process is going to be greatly resisted as a challenge to the very heart of male dominance and male centrality.
As a writer and as a human being, Susan Dworkin has always had the ability to draw us into new dreams of justice, and to make them irresistibly practical, humorous and human. She makes clear that progress and pleasure go together.
No matter how hard I worked, whatever I accomplished was attributed to my looks. If you're working your ass off, then you don't want to be told that you only got whatever because of the way you look. It takes the heart out of you.
I was never against marriage per se. Before feminism, I didn't think you had any choice. In fact, for a long time I always assumed I would get married. I just didn't see any marriages I wanted to emulate, so I kept putting it off.
I believe that transgender people, including those who have transitioned, are living out real, authentic lives. Those lives should be celebrated, not questioned. Their health care decisions should be theirs and theirs alone to make.
Whatever the gender of the participants, all pornography including male-male gay pornography is an imitation of the male-female, conqueror-victim paradigm, and almost all of it actually portrays or implies enslaved women and master.
We need to return and go forward to the understanding that there is God in all living things, not more in men than women, and not more in humans than in nature. To believe otherwise is only an excuse for dominating women and nature.
There's a wonderful cartoon of Reagan in a Western hat and he's saying, "A pregnant woman in every home, a gun in every holster. Make America a man again." That sums up his attitudes: pro-military, anti-equality, pro-rich, anti-poor.
Part of the reason that women go to college is to get out of the food service, clerical, pink-collar ghetto and into a more white-collar job. That does not necessarily mean they are being paid more than the blue-collar jobs men have.
I definitely think men can be leaders. I see an analogy in the case of what helped me think about racism, which was to find parallels with sexism. In other words, I don't think I was such a great ally until I got mad on my own behalf.
As an activist, you do find yourself directed more toward public action. But I've always tried to use stories from my own life in my writing. It has always been clear to me that the stories of each other's lives are our best textbooks.
I wouldn't want to generalize, but we still do live in a society that's sexist and racist and addicted to class and has the ridiculous idea that if you have money you're smarter, which Donald Trump by himself should be able to disprove.
As long as working women also have to do the work of child and family care at home, they will have two jobs instead of one. Perhaps more important, children will grow up thinking that only women can be loving and nurturing, and men cannot.
The error that we tend to make is that we think that women's magazines are what editors want and what their readers want - and thus are social indicators - when, in fact, they are what advertisers want. They're just advertising indicators.
I'm more often confronted by women who come from religious traditions and don't feel that they have a place in the feminist movement. I've felt pressure when reporters asked me, "Do you believe in God?" I do say, "No. I believe in people."
Women with body image or eating disorders are not a special category; [they’re] just more extreme in their response to a culture that emphasizes thinness and impossible standards of appearance for women instead of individuality and health.
If we have reproductive freedom, that is the ability to decide for ourselves when and whether to have children and what happens to our bodies, sexism can be reversed. It's the understanding that it's not inevitable. I think that is crucial.
Though both erotica and pornography refer to verbal or pictorial representations of sexual behavior, they are as different as a room with doors open and one with doors locked. The first might be a home, but the second could only be a prison.
Pop culture shapes our ideas of what is normal and what our dreams can be and what our roles are. Politics, of course, decides how the power and the money in the country is distributed. Both are equally important, and each affects the other.
But somewhere within each of us, buried at varying depths depending on the age and degree of neglect or abuse, shame or coercion we endured, there is a resistant, daydreaming, rebellious, creative, unique child -- a true self who is waiting.
I'm completely happy not having children. I mean, everybody does not have to live in the same way. And as somebody said, "Everybody with a womb doesn't have to have a child any more than everybody with vocal cords has to be an opera singer."
Little girls do not wake up in the morning and say "I dream of being a prostitute." It is a terrible, terrible life. Body invasion is more traumatic than even getting beaten up. In certain circumstances, obviously, it may be a way to survive.