Quotes by Women Feminists

Emmeline Pankhurst

Germaine Greer

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Rebecca West

Adrienne Rich

Valerie Solanas

Frederika Bremer

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

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

Ahab makes a great impression on his first appearance in Moby Dick... And if either by birth or by circumstance something pathological was at work deep in his nature, this did not detract from his dramatic character. For tragic greatness always derives from a morbid break with health, you can be sure of that.

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 male.... tries to convince himself and women - he's succeeded best at convincing women - that the female function is to bear and raise children and relax, comfort and boost the egos of the male, that her function is such as to make her interchangeable with every other female. In actual fact, the female function is to relate, groove, love and be herself, irreplacable by anyone else; the male function is to produce sperm. We now have sperm banks.

Valerie Solanas

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

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

I have not personally suffered from the deprivations, the bitterness and sorrow which bring so many men and women to a realisation of social injustice.

Emmeline Pankhurst

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.

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

Shulamith Firestone

Our native language is like a second skin, so much a part of us we resist the idea that it is constantly changing, constantly being renewed.

It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity; spasmodic, not constant toil.