Quotes by Women Academics

Samantha Power
Audrey Niffenegger
Susan Blackmore
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Azar Nafisi
Carolyn Heilbrun
Nikki Giovanni

We see in Nature what we have been taught to look for, we feel what we have been prepared to feel.

General improvisations often give actors an insight beyond their words by helping them to 'see the word' and achieve a reality for the scene.

The Mississippi and its paddle boats, and the rivers of Bengal and their gleaming steamers evoked a similar atmosphere of romance, of long, song-filled voyages, high winds and lonely sunsets.

Qurratulain Hyder
Qurratulain Hyder
Let's take this figure of the feminist killjoy seriously. Does the feminist kill other people's joy by pointing out moments of sexism? Or does she expose the bad feelings that get hidden, displaced, or negated under public signs of joy? Does bad feeling enter the room when somebody expresses anger about things, or could anger be the moment when the bad feelings that circulate through objects get brought to the surface in a certain way?

He told me that it only seemed reasonable that if there were female studies programs there should be something for men. My answer was that we already had men's studies — it was called education.

Violent predators are not like the rest of us. They kill for fun, for sport, for the sake of it. To compare them to animals is an insult to animals. To expect that we can rehabilitate them assumes a will to change.

Many white people experience themselves as powerless, even in the face of privilege. But the fact is that we all have a sphere of influence, some domain in which we exercise some level of power and control. The task for each of us, White and of color, is to identify what our own sphere of influence is (however large or small) and to consider how it might be used to interrupt the cycle of racism.

We all think we have time, you know. It's this miracle substance and there seems to be so much of it, and then all of a sudden, it's gone.

Society just doesn't care about young people anymore, even if we are the future.

Erin Gruwell
Erin Gruwell
Dreams are matters of the heart, things that pull you along as if they have hooked you someplace deep inside.

The optimism of politics before a revolution is exceeded only by the pessimism of politics after one.

The emphasis of study upon a particular aspect of music is in itself ideological because it contains implications about the music's value.

Someday our grandchildren will very likely look back at the individual, selfish control of the wealth of the world by a small elite the same way we view slavery today.

The hero [of a narrative] must be male, regardless of the gender of the text-image, because the obstacle, whatever its personification, is morphologically female.... The hero, the mythical subject, is constructed as human being and as male; he is the active principle of culture, the establisher of distinction, the creator of differences. Female is what is not susceptible to transformation, to life or death; she (it) is an element of plot-space, a topos, a resistance, matrix and matter.

I am six years old and instead of celebrating with birthday cakes, I chew on a piece of charcoal.

Loung Ung
Loung Ung
Memetics provides a new approach to the evolution of language in which we apply Darwinian thinking to two replicators, not one. On this theory, memetic selection, as well as genetic selection, does the work of creating language.

Susan Blackmore
Susan Blackmore
You get into the habit of being angry and hurt by life, and then when something good happens you can't accept it because it doesn't fit the pattern.

In using terms like patriarchy, hermeneutics, and sexual/textual, I do not wish to misrepresent the Qurn as a feminist text; rather, the use of such terminology shows my own intellectual disposition and biases.

The joke used to be that in every Indian home, there is the mother, father, children, grandparents, and the anthropologist.

The tyranny of The Majority is just as much a problem of silencing minority viewpoints as it is of excluding minority representatives or preferences. We cannot all talk at once, but that does not mean only one group should get to speak. We can take turns.

That is where homeland is. In that shifting space, kinfolk know one another by secret signs; and wherever kinfolk meet, homeland soil coalesces about their feet in the mysterious way that coral cays, like seabirds pausing in flight, anchor themselves to the Barrier Reef.

We should never allow ourselves to be bullied by an either-or. There is often the possibility of something better than either of these two alternatives.

Write down your barrier thoughts, and then consider ways to reinterpret the situation. In the process, ask yourself questions like... What else could this situation or experience mean? Can anything good come from it? Does it present any opportunities for me? What lessons can I learn and apply to the future? Did I develop any strengths as a result?

We are not friends
because of the laughs
we spend
but the tears
we save

Nikki Giovanni
Nikki Giovanni
Madonna is the true feminist. She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode. Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising control over their lives.