Andrea Dworkin Quotes

50 Sourced Quotes

Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the body can use.

Andrea Dworkin
Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.

Andrea Dworkin
It has always been to me, the ocean, overwhelming, monstrous, deep, dark, green and black, so foreign that it requires respect, silence, humility.... All of the life in it is menacing, compelling, exquisite, with nothing consoling.

Andrea Dworkin
I love books the way I love nature.... I can imagine now that a time will come, that it is almost upon us, when no one will love books... It is no accident, I think, that books and nature (as we know it) may disappear simultaneously from human experience. There is no mind-body split.

Andrea Dworkin
Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically important to us that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence against us.

Andrea Dworkin
Three, community built on androgynous identity will mean the end of transsexuality as we know it. Either the transsexual will be able to expand his/her sexuality into a fluid androgyny, or, as roles disappear, the phenomenon of transsexuality will disappear and that energy will be transformed into new modes of sexual identity and behavior.

Andrea Dworkin
Pornography incarnates male supremacy. It is the DNA of male dominance. Every rule of sexual abuse, every nuance of sexual sadism, every highway and byway of sexual exploitation, is encoded in it.

Andrea Dworkin
The essence of oppression is that one is defined from the outside by those who define themselves as superior by criteria of their own choice.

Andrea Dworkin
Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership.

Andrea Dworkin
Men have constructed female sexuality and in so doing have annihilated the chance for sexual intelligence in women. Sexual intelligence cannot live in the shallow, predestined sexuality men have counterfeiteed for women.

Andrea Dworkin
Women's fashion is a euphemism for fashion created by men for women.

Andrea Dworkin
There is no place on earth, no day or night, no hour or minute, when one is not a Jew or a woman.

Andrea Dworkin
The tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognize that they are committing suicide.

Andrea Dworkin
We are born into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed.... We are programmed by the culture as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous way through the scientist's maze, and that programming operates on every level of choice and action.

Andrea Dworkin
Men are rapists, batterers, plunderers, killers; these same men are religious prophets, poets, heroes, figures of romance, adventure, accomplishment, figures ennobled by tragedy and defeat. Men have claimed the earth, called it 'Her'. Men ruin Her. Men have airplanes, guns, bombs, poisonous gases, weapons so perverse and deadly that they defy any authentically human imagination.

Andrea Dworkin
By the time we are women, fear is as familiar to us as air. It is our element. We live in it, we inhale it, we exhale it.

Andrea Dworkin
Men are rewarded for learning the practice of violence in virtually any sphere of activity by money, admiration, recognition, respect, and the genuflection of others honoring their sacred and proven masculinity.

Andrea Dworkin
No phallic hero, no matter what he does to himself or to another to prove his courage, ever matches the solitary, existential courage of the woman who gives birth.

Andrea Dworkin
Men know everything - all of them - all the time - no matter how stupid or inexperienced or arrogant or ignorant they are.

Andrea Dworkin
It is a tragedy beyond the power of language to convey when what has been imposed on women by force becomes a standard of freedom for women: and all the women say it is so.

Andrea Dworkin