Feminist Quotes

Emmeline Pankhurst

Germaine Greer

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Pussy Riot

Rebecca West

Valerie Solanas

Adrienne Rich

It matters not what natural endowment a race may have if it prostitutes itself to the service of death.

Men's ideas about what women are have been formed from their ruling caste position, and have assigned women characteristics that would most advantage their masters, as well as justify men's rule over them. They do not represent 'truth' but have been promoted as if they were, with the backing of science and patriarchal views of biology.

Sheila Jeffreys

The separation of sex from emotion is at the very foundations of Western culture and civilization.

Shulamith Firestone

It's always sunny above the clouds. Always. Every day on earth - every day I have ever had - was secretly sunny, after all.

A fly is a very light burden; but if it were perpetually to return and settle on one's nose, it might weary us of our very lives.

Frederika Bremer

If the souls of lives were voiced in music, there are some that none but a great organ could express, others the clash of a full orchestra, a few to which nought but the refined and exquisite sadness of a violin could do justice. Many might be likened unto common pianos, jangling and out of tune, and some to the feeble piping of a penny whistle, and mine could be told with a couple of nails in a rusty tin-pot.

Sexual harassment is becoming the modus operandi of the new world (on-line)... It is the means by which some males are conquering and claiming the new territory as their own.

My focus on silence is to be understood as an intrinsic part of the body's search for meaning amongst the noisy assaults of everyday life.... What quilts have brought to the viewing of art generally is this intervening layer of silence, of collected thought and concerted attention.

Rape is a national pastime, a form of torture visited upon all girls and women, from babies to the aged.

Since the beginning of the Movement, lesbianism has been a kind of code word for female resistance.

Ti-Grace Atkinson

Monroe, the consummate sexual doll, is empowered to act but afraid to act, perhaps because no amount of acting, however inspired,can convince the actor herself that her ideal female life is not a dreadful form of dying.

This man [Putin] thinks that if you sing and dance in an inappropriate way you get two years in prison!

Even before computers existed, we already knew that natural selection can, -and often will- produce results which look like trial-and-error experiments, including elements of seemingly-intentional fine tuning. But for all the implications of apparent design, there is never any indication of any intended goal or final product, nor any hint of infallibility on the part of the designer. In fact, so many errors of so many types are known that even if there was an unnatural architect using miraculous means instead of natural ones, then it seems that entity must either be blind and barely competent, or there are whole teams of designers working on separate lines competing against each other.

I believe that the dysfunctional Muslim family constitutes a real threat to the very fabric of western life. It is in the family that children are groomed to practise, promote and pass on the norms of their parents' culture.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Woman, then, stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of a woman still tied to her place as the bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.

While learned ladies had always been present among the educated of nobility, and women had contributed to science and mathematics from earliest times, the "scientific lady" was a product of the Scientific Revolution.

Carolyn Merchant

As it turned out, my perception was so much more intimidating than the reality.

Jennifer Baumgardner

Performance's only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.

The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.

The subtlest and most vicious aspect of women's oppression is that we have been conditioned to believe we are not oppressed, blinded so as not to see our own condition.

If female liberation is to happen, if the reservoir of real female love is to be tapped, this sterile self-deception must be counteracted. The only literary form which could outsell romantic trash on the female market is hard-core pornography.

That so-called feminine ardor for clothes shopping had been flagging for some time. Between 1980 and 1986, at the same time that women were buying more houses, cars, restaurant dinners, and health care services, they were buying fewer pieces of clothing-from dresses to underwear.

Attempted modifications of an essential evil always fail.

Josephine Butler

A beautiful eyelash is an important adjunct to the eye. The lashes may be lengthened by trimming them occasionally in childhood. Care should be taken that this trimming is done neatly and evenly, and especially that the points of the scissors do not penetrate the eye.

Eliza Bisbee Duffey

If it is right to be legally married, it is right to be legally divorced... To be deprived of a Divorce is like being shut up in prison because someone attempted to kill you. It is just as honorable to get out of matrimonial trouble legally, as to be freed from any other wrong.

Mary Edwards Walker