Feminist Quotes

Women are brought up to depend on a man and to feel naked and frightened without one. We have been taught to believe that as females we cannot stand alone, that we are too fragile, too delicate, too needful of protection.

Colette Dowling

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

Books saved my sanity, knowledge opened the locked places in me and taught me first how to survive and then how to soar.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa

For certainly there cannot be a higher pleasure than to think that we love and are beloved by the most amiable and best Being.

As long as the working-people fold hands and pray the gods in Washington to give them work, so long they will not get it.

Voltairine de Cleyre

Knowing your history can give you the tools to shape your future.

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.

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.

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.

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

But it will be said that the husband provides for the wife, or in other words, he feeds, clothes and shelters her! I wish I had the power to make every one before me fully realize the degradation contained in that idea.

Following the rise of the Labour Party it seemed reasonable, in 1927, to expect, or at least hope, that co-operation for the common good might gradually replace the competitiveness of capitalism.

We are tired of having a 'sphere' doled out to us, and of being told that anything outside that sphere is 'unwomanly'. We want to be natural just for a change … we must be ourselves at all risks.

The problem is not that public schools do not work well, but rather that they do. The first goal and primary function of schools is not to educate good people, but good citizens. It is the function which we normally label state indoctrination.

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

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.

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

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.

Economic globalization creates wealth, but only for the elite who benefit from the surge of consolidations, mergers, global scale technology, and financial activity.

A child's eyes, those clear, wells of undefiled thought - what on earth can be more beautiful? Full of hope, love and curiosity, they meet your own. In prayer, how earnest; in joy, how sparkling; in sympathy, how tender! The man who never tried the companionship of a little child has carelessly passed by one of the great pleasures of life, as one passes a rare flower without plucking it or knowing its value

Caroline Norton

Women have suffered too much from the Conspiracy of Silence to allow that conspiracy to last one minute longer. It has been an established and admitted rule in the medical profession to keep a wife in ignorance of the fact that she has become the victim of venereal disease.

Christabel Pankhurst

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

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.

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

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