Women Quotes

[Patricia Highsmith] was a figure of contradictions: a lesbian who didn't particularly like women; a writer of the most insightful psychological novels who, at times, appeared bored by people; a misanthrope with a gentle, sweet nature.

~ Andrew Wilson

Not that she's a political animal, she's just an ordinary woman, but as a woman she's of the view that you don't bring children into the world to have them shot.

~ Hans Fallada

And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally this is so. Yet is it the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are important; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes trivial. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

~ Virginia Woolf

Oh! What honour for the female sex! It is perfectly obvious that God has special regard for it when all these wretched people who destroyed the whole Kingdom – now recovered and made safe by a woman, something that 5000 men could not have done – and the traitors [have been] exterminated. Before the event they would scarcely have believed this possible.

~ Christine De Pizan

Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people's women who pay the most.

~ David Mitchell

I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce.

~ Margaret Mead

When we take your person into account, you who are a young maiden, to whom God gives the strength and power to be the champion who casts the rebels down and feeds France with the sweet, nourishing milk of peace, here indeed is something quite extraordinary! For if God performed such a great number of miracles through Joshua who conquered many a place and cast down many an enemy, he, Joshua, was a strong and powerful man. But, after all, a woman – a simple shepherdess – braver than any man ever was in Rome! As far as God is concerned, this was easily accomplished. But as for us, we never heard tell of such an extraordinary marvel, for the prowess of all the great men of the past cannot be compared to this woman's whose concern it is to cast out our enemies. This is God's doing: it is He who guides her and who has given her a heart greater than that of any man.

~ Christine De Pizan

Women deserve better than organizations bearing the names of racist rapists funding million dollar campaigns on subway trains. These wealthy middle aged white men tell us what to do with our bodies while they wage wars and kill other people's babies.

~ Sonya Renee Taylor

Organizations like the UN do a lot of good, but there are certain basic realities they never seem to grasp ...Maybe the most important truth that eludes these organizations is that it's insulting when outsiders come in and tell a traumatized people what it will take for them to heal.You cannot go to another country and make a plan for it. The cultural context is so different from what you know that you will not understand much of what you see. I would never come to the US and claim to understand what's going on, even in the African American culture. People who have lived through a terrible conflict may be hungry and desperate, but they are not stupid. They often have very good ideas about how peace can evolve, and they need to be asked.That includes women. Most especially women ...To outsiders like the UN, these soldiers were a problem to be managed. But they were our children.

~ Leymah Gbowee

Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women - and abusrd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.

~ John Fowles

Without war there are no heroes.What harm would that be?Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

This peculiar connexion between a certain view of woman and the European conception of war has had profound consequences for morality, education, and politics.

~ Denis De Rougemont

I've got one thing to say: I killed a lot of germans, and I'm only sorry I didn't kill more.

~ Nancy Wake

Perhaps there is something good that had come from this war: everything has been turned around, all the unfairness made grimly plain. It has given us everyday women a voice - dared us to stand up for ourselves, and to stand up for others. We have less to lose in this world of chaos and death, after all.

~ Jennifer Ryan

Knights do protect ladies, but only to keep them from being abducted by other knights.

~ Steven Pinker

Girls with poison necklacesto save themselves from torture.Just as women wear amuletswhich hold their rolled up fortunestranscribed on ola leaf.

~ Michael Ondaatje

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

~ Zora Neale Hurston

Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer’s 'Odyssey' as if it were the sweet body of a woman.

~ Roman Payne

They say Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I have never led an army, I am a wanderer. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer’s 'Odyssey' as if it were the sweet body of a woman.

~ Roman Payne

The insinuation that without a female president women cannot pursue and achieve their dreams is not only false but recalls the ever-condenscending liberal attitude towards women: We know what women want, even if they do not.

~ Alyssa Bornhorst

They were doers and thinkers and lovers and seekers and givers, but dreamers, most dangerously of all.

~ Taiye Selasi

I am no bird, and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.

~ Charlotte Brontë

I do not think, sir, you have any right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.

~ Charlotte Brontë

I do not wish them [women] to have power over men, but over themselves.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

~ Audre Lorde

If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?

~ Mary Astell

It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

If I follow the inclination of my nature, it is this: beggar-woman and single, far rather than queen and married.

~ Elizabeth I

There are some who want to get married and others who don't. I have never had an impulse to go to the altar. I am a difficult person to lead.

~ Greta Garbo

No nation can rise to the height of glory unless your women are side by side with you. We are victims of evil customs. It is a crime against humanity that our women are shut up within the four walls of the houses as prisoners. There is no sanction anywhere for the deplorable condition in which our women have to live.

~ Muhammad Ali Jinnah

This is what it means to be a woman in this world. Every step is a bargain with pain. Make your black deals in the black wood and decide what you’ll trade for power. For the opposite of weakness, which is not strength but hardness. I am a trap, but so is everything. Pick your price. I am a huckster with a hand in your pocket. I am freedom and I will eat your heart.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

I Became a free woman when I decided to stop dreaming, freedom that is waiting for nothing .. and anticipation is a state of slavery - Ahlam (Chaos of the Senses)

~ Ahlam Mosteghanemi

It really is something ... that men disapprove even of our doing things that are patently good. Wouldn't it be possible for us just to banish these men from our lives, and escape their carping and jeering once and for all? Couldn't we live without them? Couldn't we earn our living and manage our affairs without help from them? Come on, let's wake up, and claim back our freedom, and the honour and dignity that they have usurped from us for so long. Do you think that if we really put our minds to it, we would be lacking the courage to defend ourselves, the strength to fend for ourselves, or the talents to earn our own living? Let's take our courage into our hands and do it, and then we can leave it up to them to mend their ways as much as they can: we shan't really care what the outcome is, just as long as we are no longer subjugated to them.

~ Moderata Fonte

[I]n the end this shall be for me sufficient, that a marble stone shall declare that a Queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin.

~ Elizabeth I

I love man as my fellow; but his scepter, real, or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

She could just pack up and leave, but she does not visualize what's beyond ahead.

~ Núria Añó

Repression is a seamless garment; a society which is authoritarian in its social and sexual codes, which crushes its women beneath the intolerable burdens of honour and propriety, breeds repressions of other kinds as well.

~ Salman Rushdie

Divorced?''Separated.'He tested his thumb against the pricks of the rose. 'Women. They say you got all the freedom. Then you give them their freedom, and they don't want it.' (Novelty)

~ John Crowley

Her husband seemed to her now like a person whom she had married without love as an excuse.

~ Kate Chopin

When the women begin to take an active part in the struggle, no power on earth can stop us from achieving freedom in our lifetime.

~ Nelson Mandela