Feminism Quotes

There must be more than male benevolence as the basis for a woman's well-being.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Teach her to question men who can have empathy for women only if they see them as relational rather than as individual equal humans.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Make dressing a question of taste and attractiveness instead of a question of morality.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

To slur “feminism” into “humanism” is to usurp women’s voices once again, to make the singular feminine into the so-called universal masculine.

~ Gina Barreca

A world that does not love, respect and protect its Women is doomed to perish! Because Women are Mother Earth!

~ Avijeet Das

we bwlive that feminism is a transformative philosophy that embraces the amelioration of life on earth for all life-forms, for all natural entities

~ Carol J. Adams

many efforts on bahalf of of animals will qualitatively improve humans' living conditions as well, which is likely to be the case

~ Carol J. Adams

Feminism...is not 'women as victims' but women refusing to be victims.

~ Gloria Steinem

The vagina is obliterated from the imagery of femininity in the same way that the signs of independence and vigor in the rest of her body are suppressed.

~ Germaine Greer

...it is the most militant, most radical intervention anyone can make to not only speak of love, but to engage in the practice of love. For love as the foundation of all social movements for self-determination is the only way we create a world that domination and dominator thinking cannot destroy. Anytime we do the work of love we are doing the work of ending domination.

~ Bell Hooks

A woman of feeling does not easily give way. You may call it pride, or tenacity, call it what you will. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, their emotions are more primitive than ours. They hold to the thing they want, and never surrender. We have our wars and battles, Mr. Ashey. But women can fight too.

~ Daphne Du Maurier

She said, 'No, you learned that you have power - power and determination. I love you and I am proud of you. With those two things, you can go anywhere and everywhere.

~ Maya Angelou

There is not a woman born who desires to eat the bread of dependence, no matter whether it be from the hand of father, husband, or brother; for anyone who does so eat her bread places herself in the power of the person from whom she takes it.

~ Susan B. Anthony

Never has it been inappropriate for a girl to wear a red dress.

~ Caroline George

It wouldn’t be very ladylike to punch a guy in the balls, but it isn’t very manlike to harass a woman because she has different parts and a sweet face.

~ Caroline George

WE SHOULD ALL BE HUMANISTS.So I had this conversation with a friend and I am of the view that, we need no tags to speak against violence of all sorts. We need no tags to love and protect ourselves. We need no tags to do the right thing. We need no tags to treat each other fairly.We need no tags to be our neighbours’ keeper.We need no tags to stand up for what is right.We need no tags to demand for justice.We need no tags to punish offenders.We need no tags to live in harmony.All we need is a defined standard of acceptable behaviour.All we need is to properly and promptly determine who has stepped out of the defined boundary.All we need is to mete out prescribed punishment to defaulters without fear or favour.There can be no different identities.We are all humans, male or female.We need nothing more than our humanity.WE SHOULD ALL BE HUMANISTS.

~ Magnus Nwagu Amudi

The truth is I don't give a damn why anyone has an abortion. I believe unconditionally in the right of people with uteruses to decide what grow inside of their body and feeds on their blood and endangers their life and reroutes their future. There are no good abortions and bad abortions, there are only pregnant people who want them and pregnant people who don't, pregnant people who have access and support and pregnant people who face institutional roadblocks and lies.

~ Lindy West

Take control. You are a strong, independent woman.

~ Bella Swan

It is humanism that should run in the veins of the thinking humanity, not a certain gender-oriented ism. This entire book is a treatise on gender equality, and as such, it may be hailed as a work of feminism, but it is not - it is a work of humanism.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Besides(..), it's a poor woman whose ambition is only to be loved.

~ Sarah Perry

If we divide human attributes into masculine and feminine and strengthen only those attributes that belong to that sex, we cut off half of ourselves from ourselves as human beings, condemned forever to search for our other half. The world is in desperate need of multilayered human beings with the voices, stamina, and insight to break through our current calcified ways of doing things, (...) The patriarchal structures of honor, shame, violence, and might is right, do as much harm to Hamlet, Edgar, Lear, and Coriolanus as they do to Ophelia, Desdemona, Lady Macduff (...)(...) To have feelings, intuitive flights of understanding, a desire to have knowledge of what is happening below the surface, to serve. These are often called feminine attributes, and it is true that many women in the plays possess them. But they also belong to Kent, Ferdinand, Florizel, Camillo, as well as the women. So they are not feminine attributes: they are human attributes.

~ Tina Packer

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more priviledged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

~ Charlotte Brontë

Without even trying to be a teacher, Fredrika is teaching us,Showing us how to see things in new waysInstead of always thinkingThe same old thoughtsThat have been passed along by strangersDay after day, year after yearWithout any spirit of amazementOr wonder

~ Margarita Engle

What the hell does this say about India? Appearances are more important than truths. Gossip is more potent than facts. Loyalty is all one way, from the woman to the man. And when society stacks up all the odds against a woman, she’d better not count on the man’s support. She has no way out other than to end her own life. And I’m in love with an Indian. I must be crazy.

~ Shashi Tharoor

Thanks for nothing, regular human mom. Footnote: nothing except for the unconditional love and support and meticulous care to make sure I faced the world fully informed about my body and reproductive health.

~ Lindy West

Don’t tell me my writing is misogynistic or anti-feminist just because I or my heroines like to be controlled in the bedroom and find great satisfaction and freedom with it. That is the most anti-feminist statement I have ever heard. Feminism is all about letting women be who THEY want to be. Not how YOU want them to be...I am both a feminist AND a submissive in my sexual fantasies and reality. You are the one who is anti-feminist who tells me I can’t be.

~ R.b. O'brien

Even women deeply committed to the emancipatory promises of modernity were alarmed by the inappropriateness of unrelated men and omen socializing in the streets. In the women's press, articles exhorted young men to treat women respectfully in public. Other articles encouraged women to act as their own police and to be more observant of their hijab and public modesty.From the beginning, then, women's entry on the streets was subject to the regulatory harassment of men. The modernist heterosocializing promise that invited women to leave their homosocial spaces and become educated companionate partners for modernist men was underwritten by policing of women's public presence through men's street actions. Men at once desired heterosociality of the modern and yet would not surrender the privileged masculinity of the streets. Women's public presence was also underwritten by disciplinary approbation of modernizing women themselves whose emancipatory drive would be jeopardized by unruly public conduct.

~ Afsaneh Najmabadi

Connie’s man could be a bit sulky, and Hilda’s a bit jeering. But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don’t have them they hate you because you won’t; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are discontented children, and can’t be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman do what she may.

~ D.h. Lawrence

She had to fight against developing too combative a personality or becoming altogether a misanthrope. She suddenly caught herself. Misanthrope is someone who dislikes everybody, not just men.And they certainly had a word for someone who hates women: misogynist. But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word.

~ Carl Sagan

Men define intelligence, men define usefulness, men tell us what is beautiful, men even tell us what is womanly

~ Sally Kempton

Men weren’t really the enemy — they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.

~ Betty Friedan

Like racism, misogyny can never be adequately addressed by its victims alone.

~ Rebecca Solnit

God, what a depressing day that was and what an irony that Britain’s first female prime minister had to be Margaret Thatcher. She was the woman who asked, ‘What has feminism ever done for me?’ Well, dear, if you need to ask that question then you’re obviously not very bright

~ Jo Brand

Love is described like GOD.

~ Sara Pascoe

There is more difference within the sexes than between them.

~ Ivy Compton-Burnett

It's the problem with having a logical mind and giving women the same credit for ability as men, he mused as he dismounted. You can't contrive reasons to keep them safe.

~ Raymond E. Feist

To me, 'sexual freedom' means freedom from having to have sex.

~ Lily Tomlin

I'm just a person trapped inside a woman's body.

~ Elayne Boosler

For this was the age of The Girl. We had come out of the back parlor, out of the kitchen and nursery, we turned our backs upon the blackboards, shed aprons and paper cuffs. A war had freed us and given women a new kind of self-respect. The adjective poor no longer preceded the once disreputable working girl. It was honorable, it was jolly, it was even superior to be a career girl.

~ Vera Caspary

I am a strong and powerful woman.I am proud to be a woman and I celebrate the qualities that I have as a woman.I am not defined by other people’s opinion of who I should be or what I should do as a woman. I determine that, not anyone else.I am not passed up for a position, title, or promotion because I am a woman.I fully deserve all the good things that comes my way.Irrespective of what anyone might think, being a woman places no boundaries or limits on my abilities.I can do anything I set my mind to.I celebrate my womanhood and I am beautiful both inside and out.

~ Idowu Koyenikan