Kate Millett Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

What is the future of the woman's movement How in the hell do I know I don't run it.

Kate Millett
To love is simply to allow another to be, live, grow, expand, become. An appreciation that demands and expects nothing in return.

Kate Millett
Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different.

Kate Millett
However muted its present appearance may be, sexual dominion obtains nevertheless as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power.

Kate Millett
Many women do not recognize themselves as discriminated against; no better proof could be found of the totality of their conditioning.

Kate Millett
One of the blessings of adulthood is that one is no longer addressed as a thing.

Kate Millett
The enormous social change involved in a sexual revolution is basically a matter of altered consciousness, the exposure and elimination of social and psychological realities underlying political and cultural structures. We are speaking, then, of a cultural revolution, which, while it must necessarily involve the political and economic reorganization traditionally implied by the term revolution, must go far beyond this as well.

Kate Millett
The whole bloody system is sick: the very notion of leadership, a balloon with a face painted upon it, elected and inflated by media's diabolic need to reduce ideas to personalities.

Kate Millett
Perhaps patriarchy's greatest psychological weapon is simply its universality and longevity.... Patriarchy has a still more tenacious or powerful hold through its successful habit of passing itself off as nature.

Kate Millett
The great mass of women throughout history have been confined to the cultural level of animal life in providing the male with sexual outlet and exercising the animal functions of reproduction and care of the young.

Kate Millett
The rationale which accompanies that imposition of male authority euphemistically referred to as 'the battle of the sexes' bears a certain resemblance to the formulas of nations at war, where any heinousness is justified on the grounds that the enemy is either an inferior [part of the] species or really not human at all.

Kate Millett
For it is precisely because certain groups have no representation in a number of recognized political structures that their position tends to be so stable, their oppression so continuous.

Kate Millett
Let us stop being afraid. Of our own thoughts, our own minds. Of madness, our own or others'. Stop being afraid of the mind itself, its astonishing functions and fandangos, its complications and simplifications, the wonderful operation of its machinery--more wonderful because it is not machinery at all or predictable.

Kate Millett
They are more beautiful than anything in the world, kinetic sculptures, perfect form in motion.

Kate Millett
Mystical state, madness, how it frightens people. How utterly crazy they become, remote, rude, peculiar, cruel, taunting, farouche as wild beasts who have smelled danger, the unthinkable.

Kate Millett
How crazy craziness makes everyone, how irrationally afraid. The madness hidden in each of us, called to, identified, aroused like a lust. And against that the jaw sets. The more I fear my own insanity the more I must punish yours...

Kate Millett
Prostitution is really the only crime in the penal law where two people are doing a thing mutually agreed upon and yet only one, the female partner, is subject to arrest.

Kate Millett
I believe there's a killer in all of us. I know there's one inside me. When you know the killer in you and you know also that you do not want to kill, you have to set yourself upon a course of learning. Not to kill that killer then, but to control it.

Kate Millett
It may be that a second wave of the sexual revolution might at last accomplish its aim of freeing half the race from its immemorial subordination--and in the process bring us all a great deal closer to humanity. It may be that we shall even be able to retire sex from the harsh realities of politics, but not until we have created a world we can bear out of the desert we inhabit.

Kate Millett
A revolution is not the overturning of a cart, a reshuffling in the cards of state. It is a process, a swelling, a new growth in the race. If it is real, not simply a trauma, it is another ring in the tree of history, layer upon layer of invisible tissue composing the evidence of a circle.

Kate Millett
You may well ask how I expect to assert my privacy by resorting to the outrageous publicity of being one's actual self on paper. There's a possibility of it working if one chooses the terms, to wit: outshouting image-gimmick America through a quietly desperate search for self.

Kate Millett
Ah, but depression — that is what we all hate. We the afflicted. Whereas the relatives and shrinks, the tribal ring, they rather welcome it: you are quiet and you suffer.

Kate Millett
The worst part about prostitution is that you're obliged not to sell sex only, but your humanity. That's the worst part of it: that what you're selling is your human dignity. Not really so much in bed, but in accepting the agreement — in becoming a bought person.

Kate Millett
No one should be adored, it's fundamentally immoral.

Kate Millett
If only no one had told them I was mad. Then I wouldn't be.

Kate Millett
There are only moments. Live in this one. The happiness of these days.

Kate Millett
I don't believe in monogamy, possessing people, the rightness or inevitability of jealousy.

Kate Millett
The involuntary character of psychiatric treatment is at odds with the spirit and ethics of medicine itself.

Kate Millett
To be a rebel is not to be a revolutionary. It is more often but a way of spinning one's wheels deeper in the sand.

Kate Millett
We are women. We are a subject people who have inherited an alien culture.

Kate Millett