Feminist Quotes

she'd played mother and wives. Women in narratives were always defined by their relations.

~ Lauren Groff

a feminist is just someone who recognizes power structures that keep people from having the fullest life they can.

~ Lauren Groff

The truest kindness to any woman is to provide her with an opportunity for self-expression in some constructive field: to work, not at home with cook-stove and scrubbing brush, but outside, independently, in the world of men and affairs.

~ William Moulton Marston

I am a feminist because in every woman I can see reflection of my mother.

~ Debasish Mridha

The only hope for civilization is the greater freedom, development and equality of women.

~ William Moulton Marston

When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another's spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abusive cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposites of nurturance and care.

~ Bell Hooks

#ToTheGirls2016 Value yourself, your voice, your body, your opinions, your dreams, your pride, your ego. You have a RIGHT to take up space.

~ Abigail Tarttelin

Legs was always proud even before FOXFIRE, that’s the primary fact about Legs Sadovsky: pride.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

... because the Legs wasn't fearful of heights or swimming in rough water or Death itself she wasn't afraid to risk making a fool of herself. Maybe you think that's something of no consequence but it isn't - for making a fool of yourself, offering yourself to others to laugh at, to jeer, that takes guts.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

Excessive praise arises from the same bigotry matrix as excessive criticism.

~ Stefan Molyneux

Abort the thought, save the baby

~ Chinonye J. Chidolue

Change happens very slow and very sudden.

~ Dorothy Bryant

In order to validate our Africanness, we hold on to tradition at all cost, banning critical engagement in an attempt to preserve its sacredness

~ Malebo Sephodi

A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.

~ Naomi Wolf

Since middle-class Western women can best be weakened psychologically now that we are stronger materially, the beauty myth, as it has resurfaced in the last generation, has had to draw on more technological sophistication and reactionary fervor than ever before. The modern arsenal of the myth is a dissemination of millions of images of the current ideal; although this barrage is generally seen as a collective sexual fantasy, there is in fact little that is sexual about it. It is summoned out of political fear on the part of male-dominated institutions threatened by women's freedom, and it exploits female guilt and apprehension about our own liberation -- latent fears that we might be going too far.

~ Naomi Wolf

When she turned I could see her face was plain and outwardly unremarkable, yet possessing of a bearing that showed inner strength and resolve. I stared at her intently with a mixture of feelings. I had realised not long ago that I was no beauty, and even at the age of nine had seen how the more attractive children gained favour more easily. But here in that young woman I could see how those principles could be inverted. I felt myself stand more upright and clench my jaw in subconscious mimicry of her pose

~ Jasper Fforde

Hospitality is the practice of God's welcome by reaching across difference to participate in God's actions bringing justice and healing to our world in crisis.

~ Letty M. Russell

God gives out good gifts of wisdom, talent, beauty, and skill 'graciously'--that is, in a completely unmerited way. He casts them across all humanity, regardless of religious conviction, race, gender, or any other attribute to enrich, brighten, and preserve the world.

~ Timothy J. Keller

Richard seemed to like our morning conversations about Brecht and Althusser and Andre Gorz, but later on he turned the group against me for being too cerebral and acting like a boy. And weren't all these passionate interests and convictions just evasions of a greater truth, my cunt? I was an innocent, a de-gendered freak, 'cause unlike Liza Martin, who was such a babe she refused to take her platforms off for Kundalini Yoga, I hadn't learned the trick of throwing sex into the mix.

~ Chris Kraus

The deeper into this chapter in my life I get, the fainter the hum of crucifixion becomes.

~ Maggie Georgiana Young

... in practice the standard for what constitutes rape is set not at the level of women's experience of violation but just above the level of coercion acceptable to men.

~ Judith Lewis Herman

You learn that the only way to get rock-star power as a girl is to be a groupie and bare your breasts and get chosen for the night. We learn that the only way to get anywhere is through men. And it's a lie.

~ Kathleen Hanna

A woman should always know her place, and it's exactly wherever she wants to be.

~ Kierra C.t. Banks

In the Mars-and-Venus-gendered universe, men want power and women want emotional attachment and connection. On this planet nobody really has the opportunity to know love since it is power and not love that is the order of the day. The privilege of power is at the heart of patriarchal thinking. Girls and boys, men and women who have been taught this way almost always believe love is not important, or if it is, it is never as important as being powerful, dominant, in control, on top-being right. Women who give seemingly selfless adoration and care to the men in their lives appear to be obsessed with 'love,' but in actuality their actions are often a covert way to hold power. Like their male counterparts, they enter relationships speaking the words of love even as their actions indicate that maintaining power and control is their primary agenda.

~ Bell Hooks

She was simply Asha, a woman on her own. Had the situation been otherwise, she might not have come to know her own brain.

~ Katherine Boo

Women, you have all this power, I’m telling you. In business, you have something called an inferred fiduciary duty to yourself. Look at the other hugely successful women in industry, commerce, science and everywhere else and you’ll see women who are feminine, beautiful but also do not rely on men for their self-empowerment.

~ Gene Simmons

My wakeup call wasn’t some light switch of empowerment. From as early as preschool I feared that if I didn’t grow up to be the pretty princess men fawned over, I was a failure. That mentality was my disease. It got me raped. It made me feel dirty and devalued because my cherry wasn’t popped on a bed of rose petals. It fueled an adolescence juggling starvation and vomiting until my throat bled out and my stomach acid burned through the plumbing. It made me snort coke, smoke meth, and routinely gulp down narcotic petri dishes in hopes of obtaining hallucinogenic intimacy with junkie boyfriends. But most of all, it made me waste my youth chasing, obsessing over, fighting for, worshipping, clinging to, and crying over one after another loser. At some point, I just quit giving a fuck.

~ Maggie Georgiana Young

Incarceration is when nobody writes a happy ending for a woman without a man.

~ Maggie Georgiana Young

My life views on sex, men, dating, and self-worth were sculpted with the unfiltered ramblings of a drunken misogynist.

~ Maggie Georgiana Young

Feminism is a way of thinking and being, not a way of dressing. You know a feminist by her gaze, not her neckline.

~ Sophia Amoruso

I could never, I knew then, lose myself in love. Margery had accused me of coldness, and she was right, but she was also wrong: For me, for always, the paramount organ of passion was the mind. Unnatural, unbalanced, perhaps, but it was true: Without intellect, there could be no love.

~ Laurie R. King

Men come to sex hoping that it will provide them with all of the emotional satisfaction that would have come from love. Most men think that sex will provide them with a sense of being alive, connected, that sex will offer closeness, intimacy, pleasure. And more often than not sex simply does not deliver the goods. This fact does not lead men to cease obsessing about sex; it intensifies their lust and their longing.

~ Bell Hooks

Male social conditioning encourages boys and men to aim to bed as many women as possible....so much so, that their self esteem and self worth become intertwined with the number of sexual partners they have; and when that number is low or even zero, so too is their self-confidence.

~ Miya Yamanouchi

I milked my typical persona as a gritty, intellectual sex-positive feminist that men loved to conquer, toss aside, and shove into their conquest collection in the dusty backs of their closets.

~ Maggie Georgiana Young

We long for an intimate connection, but that longing makes us feel vulnerable. Therefore, we guard our hearts for self-preservation, which barricades that intimacy we are longing for. Casual sex is a very sad cat and mouse game. The man is entrapped in his role as the sex-driven predator constantly on the hunt for new conquests, while the woman is the prey that must find her perfect combination of sexual allure and virtue, with the sexual allure being what attracts him and virtue what keeps him.

~ Maggie Georgiana Young

And though nobody has been dumb enough to say anything close to You need to get laid to my face, I resent the idea that anyone might think, if they knew my history, that I'd be slightly different by virtue of having a penis-however briefly-inside me. That is some phallocentric bullshit if I ever heard any. Hypothetical penises don't make the rules. I make the rules. I love the rules.

~ Katie Heaney

A Dom never takes away. He only builds.

~ Delaine Moore

You self-proclaimed MILF hunters have it all wrong -- we aren't the prey, YOU are. You are but a Service Male - a SMILF!

~ Delaine Moore

Batman doesn’t want a baby in order to feel he’s ‘done everything’. He’s just saved Gotham again! If this means that Batman must be a feminist role model above, say, Nicola Horlick, then so be it.

~ Caitlin Moran

She divorced her husband, y' know. I never knew him, it was before I met Jane. Apparently she came back from work one mornin' an' found her husband in bed with the milkman. With the milkman, honest to God. Well, apparently, from that day forward Jane was a feminist. An' I've noticed, she never takes milk in her tea.

~ Willy Russell