Feminism Quotes

Any book that spreads weakness in the heart of one gender, and authoritarianism in the other, must be burnt to ashes.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Any nation that does not learn to place women on the same pedestal of respect and dignity as men, will never in a thousand years attain greatness.

~ Abhijit Naskar

You are not born to follow the society, you are born to inspire it - you are born to teach it - you are born to build it.

~ Abhijit Naskar

The world doesn't need a good woman who is meekly obedient to the uncivilized social norms that advocate female inferiority. The world needs those bad women who can think for themselves, to break the primeval norms of the society that consistently drag the human civilization back to the stone-age.

~ Abhijit Naskar

For thousands of years, the dumb, uncivilized, stone-age society has reduced women to mere prizes to be won, objects to be shown off, and playthings to be abused and toyed with. Now is the time to stop this primitive madness.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Beauty is an illusion.

~ Abhijit Naskar

If attempting to make the world a civilized one, makes you a bad woman in the eyes of the dumb patriarchal society, then, by all means, be it.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Arise my Sister! Awake my Sister! Start walking in the path of building your own identity!

~ Abhijit Naskar

What a hundred caring, courageous and conscientious women can achieve in ten years, would take a thousand men a hundred years.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.

~ Doris Lessing

There will be no mass-based feminist movement as long as feminist ideas are understood only by a well-educated few.

~ Bell Hooks

Since a time has come, Mademoiselle, when the severe laws of men no longer prevent women from applying themselves to the sciences and other disciplines, it seems to me that those of us who can should use this long-craved freedom to study and to let men see how greatly they wronged us when depriving us of its honor and advantages. And if any woman becomes so proficient as to be able to write down her thoughts, let her do so and not despise the honor, but rather flaunt it instead of fine clothes, necklaces, and rings. For these may be considered ours only by use, whereas the honor of being educated is ours entirely.

~ Louise Labé

If you consider a woman less pure after you’ve touched hermaybe you should take a looks at your hands.

~ Kaija Sabbah

I mean what else is there for a woman to do if she doesn't want to go from the parental to the marital home with nothing in between? 'An educated woman,'Millie amended. 'An educated woman,' Ursula agreed.

~ Kate Atkinson

When men decided women could be educated - this is what I think - they educated them on the male plan; they put them into schools with mottoes and school songs and muddy team games, they made them were collars and ties. It was a way to concede the right to learning, yet remain safe; the products of the system would always be inferior to the original model. Women were forced to imitate men, and bound not to succeed at it.

~ Hilary Mantel

What women want as a class is irrelevant. I want to know about Aristotle. It is true that most women care nothing about him, and a great many male undergraduates turn pale and faint at the thought of him-but I, eccentric individual that I am, do want to know about Aristotle, and I submit that there is nothing in my shape or bodily functions which need prevent my knowing about him.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

But if I'm useless only because I haven't been properly educated, is that my fault?

~ Richard Aldington

A woman today who has no goal, no purpose, no ambition patterning her days into the future, making her stretch and grow beyond that small score of years in which her body can fill its biological function, is committing a kind of suicide.

~ Betty Friedan

Woman's sexual problems are, in this sense, by-products of the suppression of her basic need to grow and fulfill her potentialities as a human being, potentialities which the mystique of feminine fulfillment ignores.

~ Betty Friedan

The best insurance that a girl can be given is a proper education and a steady career. That way she can assure a bright future for her family herself, instead of depending on her future groom to give her a comfortable life.

~ Hanadi Falki

Being graded for memorizing male accomplishments with the deep message that we can learn what others do but never do it ourselves.

~ Gloria Steinem

Making someone feel obligated, pressured or forced into doing something of a sexual nature that they don't want to is sexual coercion. This includes persistent attempts at sexual contact when the person has already refused you. Nobody owes you sex, ever; and no means no, always.

~ Miya Yamanouchi

But nearly every woman I know has a roughly similar story - in fact, dozens of them: stories about being obsessed with a celebrity, work colleague or someone they vaguely knew for years; living in a parallel world in their head; conjuring up endless plots and scenarios for this thing that never actually happened.

~ Caitlin Moran

No woman is an island-ess. We fall in love in hope of anchoring ourselves to someone else, to keep from falling.

~ Chris Kraus

Love is not honourable, unless it is based on equality.

~ Marie De France

It takes a great woman to respect the little man in her child, and the little child in her man.

~ Amit Howard

Despite all of the social advances in women’s rights and the push for gender equality in the workplace, it seems like modern men still want a woman that they can take care of at home.

~ Shannon Mullen

Significantly, romantic friendships can coexist with the fact of partners' marrying because their reason for being is not to replace marriage but to open the possibility of sustained, committed true love existing among friends, and not just same-sex friends. No matter that our chosen relationship commitments change. Those of us who have long-term romantic friendships, some that have lasted longer than any of our marriages or partnerships, do not fear that these commitments will falter if we create primary bonds.

~ Bell Hooks

Young girls often feel strong, courageous, highly creative, and powerful until they begin to receive undermining sexist messages that encourage them to conform to conventional notions of femininity. To conform they have to give up power.

~ Bell Hooks

To all the women I say, don’t ask to be saved by anyone, “my brave baghinis” (tigresses). Remember, if you deem yourselves as sheeps, men will treat you as such, but if you deem yourselves as tigresses, then you are the ones who will shape humanity.

~ Abhijit Naskar

I have a little moral trouble with the term “mankind”, as it possesses an innate gender bias, which I cannot approve of, hence, I prefer the term “humanity” over it, and the term “human” over “man”.

~ Abhijit Naskar

And I like a good horror story as much as the next person so long as they kill off some men too and not just girls. But the voices Joan heard were real. There’s clear and substantiated proof they were real. She won battles that would otherwise have been lost because of what those voices told her in advance of them allowing the French generals to strategize in ways completely different than they did before Joan came along. People’s lives were saved because of what those voices told her.

~ Meg Cabot

In the event that your feminist activities are discovered, quick diversions include bursting into song, asking him how to fix something in the room and fainting.

~ Reductress

Simon gave her a startled look. 'I don't believe I have ever been condescended to by a woman before.' She shrugged. 'It was probably past time.

~ Julia Quinn

Conservatives, who have presumed that the key to preventing AIDS is abstinence-only education, and liberals, who have focused on distribution of condoms, should both note that the intervention that has tested most cost-effective in Africa is neither... Secular bleeding hearts and religious bleeding hearts will have to forge a common cause.

~ Nicholas D. Kristof

I have been impressed by the realization that a few men have virtually 'decided' what experiences count and even exist in the world. The language of Western science--the reigning construct of male hegemony--precludes the ability to express the experiential realities it talks about. Virtually all the actual experiences of this world, expressed through the manifest and mysterious characteristics of all the different beings, are unrepresented in the stainless steel edicts of experts. Where is the voice of the voiceless in the scientific literature, including the literature of environmental ethics?

~ Karen Davis

Here’s another example that some overworked mothers might find inspiring. We saw in Chapter 2 that being the one who producesthe sperm doesn’t dictate, by universal principle, that parenting is out of the portfolio. However, in the case of the rat (as with mostmammals), the balance of trade-offs make it more adaptive for males to leave parenting to the mothers. This might tempt us to take it forgranted that males, by virtue of their sex, therefore lack the capacity to care for pups. We might well assume that, through sexual selection, they lost or never acquired the biological capacity to parent: that it isn’t “in” their genes, hormones, or neural circuits. That it isn’t in their male nature. But bear in mind that one reliable feature of a male rat’s developmental system is a female rat that does the child care. So what happens when a scientist, under controlled laboratory conditions, simulates a first-wave feminist rodent movement by placing males in cages with pups but no females? Before too long you will see the male “mothering” the infant, in much the same way that females do. Feminism: 1. Sexual selection: nil.

~ Cordelia Fine

The unstated premise that nature is nice lies behind many of the objections to the Darwinian theory of human sexuality. Carefree sex is natural and good, it is assumed, so if someone claims that men want it more than women do, it would imply that men are mentally healthy and women neurotic and repressed. That conclusion is unacceptable, so the claim that men want carefree sex more than women do cannot be correct. Similarly, sexual desire is good, so if men rape for sex (rather than to express anger towards women), rape would not be as evil. Rape is evil; therefore the claim that men rape for sex cannot be correct. More generally, what people instinctively like is good, so if people like beauty, beauty would be a sign of worth. Beauty is not a sign of worth, so the claim that people like beauty cannot be correct.These kinds of arguments combine bad biology (nature is nice), bad psychology (the mind is created by society), and bad ethics (what people like is good). Feminism would lose nothing by giving them up.

~ Steven Pinker

The Darwinian approach to sex is often attacked as being antifeminist, but that is just wrong. Indeed, the accusation is baffling on the face of it, especially to the many feminist women who have developed and tested the theory. The core of feminism is surely the goal of ending sexual discrimination and exploitation, an ethical and political position that is in no danger of being refuted by any foreseeable scientific theory or discovery.

~ Steven Pinker

Science faculties at renowned research institutions were given two identical CVs to assess. Half the scientists received a CV with a female name, and half with a male name. The 'female' applicant was consistently rated as less competent and less hireable, and the scientists were less likely to want to mentor her. The 'male' candidate was offered a significantly higher starting salary

~ Emer O'toole