Simone de Beauvoir - Situation Quotes

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One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.

Simone de Beauvoir
At the present time there still exist many doctrines which choose to leave in the shadow certain troubling aspects of a too complex situation. But their attempt to lie to us is in vain. Cowardice doesn't pay. Those reasonable metaphysics, those consoling ethics with which they would like to entice us only accentuate the disorder from which we suffer.

Simone de Beauvoir
Personal accomplishment is almost impossible in the human categories that are maintained collectively in an inferior situation.

Simone de Beauvoir
When an individual (or a group of individuals) is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he is inferior. But the significance of the verb to be must be rightly understood here; it is in bad faith to give it a static value when it really has the dynamic Hegelian sense of "to have become." Yes, women on the whole are today inferior to men; that is, their situation affords them fewer possibilities. The question is: should that state of affairs continue?
Many men hope that it will continue; not all have given up the battle.

Simone de Beauvoir
The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman's concrete situation.

Simone de Beauvoir
A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.

Simone de Beauvoir
The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project.

Simone de Beauvoir
Woman has always been man's dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.

Simone de Beauvoir
The innumerable conflicts that set men and women against one another come from the fact that neither is prepared to assume all the consequences of this situation which the one has offered and the other accepted.

Simone de Beauvoir