Women Quotes

I only had three teachers, really, that were interesting, and all three of them were women.

~ Cecil Taylor

Don’t ever compliment me by insulting other women. That’s not a compliment, it’s a competition none of us agreed to.

~ Anonymous

I believe beauty is action. If my action can bring smiles in the innocent faces of people then my act is beautiful.

~ Runa Maharjan

This is how women are trained to stay indoors, she thought, the idea echoing in her mind like a gravesong. This is how women are trained not to act.

~ Erika Johansen

In our global community, when a woman becomes an authoritative figure- it scares the world. She is no longer giving into traditional patriarchal notions of submissiveness, she does not require validation, and subsequently she becomes one of the most feared individuals on the planet. I want all women of the world to throw out notions of validation and act whichever way they want regardless of how they are perceived

~ Mohadesa Najumi

I spent a lot of time vacillating between wanting to be seen as attractive, being terrified by too much attention, and wanting to succeed and fit in without anyone's noticing me.

~ Kim Gordon

EVERYTIMEA GIRL WISHESTOBE A BOY BADLY, IT'S A SIGNAL THAT OUT SOCIETY FAILED IN ITS DEEDS SOMEWHERE.

~ Ameya Agrawal

Behind us are two or three dozen country people from the outlying towns. With them are cages of chicken and goats, sheep, even cattle. That’s where we fit on market day. Between the executions and the livestock sales.

~ Kristen Simmons

We don’t have no say, ‘cause we was an afterthought. He yanked us up out o’ man’s ribs, but He made man out the Earth. He made him out the dirt and the mud and made him out the world, so man is the world. Women…women just a part o’ men.” Elaine snubbed the cigarette out, tapped the dark leather case on the edge of the table and I watched as another slim, white stick slid free.

~ Laura A. Lord

What I am or am not wearing does not correlate with my competency as a professional, a mother, or a feminist role model. My clothes do not define me and nor does my nakedness. I define me.

~ Miya Yamanouchi

People are kinder to the unborn than they are to the women themselves, and soon I had my ticket.

~ Emily Schultz

A woman who gives any advantage to a man may expect a lover -- but will sooner or later find a tyrant.

~ George Gordon Byron

Women were supposed to be strong, but they weren't really, they weren't allowed to be.

~ Carol Shields

Young women are not putting themselves in danger. The people around them are doing the real damage. Who? you might wonder. The abstinence teacher who tells her students that they'll go to jail if they have premarital sex. The well-founded organizarion that tells girls on college campuses that they should be looking for a husband, not taking women's studies classes. The judge who rules against a rape survivor because she didn't meet whatever standard for a victim he had in mind. The legislator who pushes a bill to limit young women's access to abortion because he doesn't think they're smart enough to make their own decisions. These are the people who are making the world a worse place, and a more dangerous one, at that, for girls and young women. We're just doing our best to live in it.

~ Jessica Valenti

Children are often like hostages under the care of authority, with spankings and groundings nudging them like guns pointed at their skulls, threatening to shoot if the wrong words are uttered.

~ Maggie Georgiana Young

Young women are not putting themselves in danger. The people around them are doing the real damage. Who? you might wonder. The abstinence teacher who tells her students that they'll go to jail if they have premarital sex. The well-founded organizarion that tells girls on college campuses that they should be looking for a husband, not taking women's studies classes. The judge who rules against a rape survivor because she didn't meet whatevel standard for a victim he had in mind. The legislator who pushes a bill to limit young women's access to abortion because he doesn't think they're smart enough to make their own decisions. These are the people who are making the world a worse place, and a more dangerous one, at that, for girls and young women. We're just doing our best to live in it.

~ Jessica Valenti

I've thought often about why - why?! - anyone, especially other women, would try to disrupt feminist work that combats violence. What in the world could be the point of that? The only reason I've come up with, and I think it makes sense, is fear of becoming that impure woman.

~ Jessica Valenti

[Robert] Jensen calls for an end to our current understanding of masculinity. He says, We men can settle for being men, or we can strive to be human beings. What's funny is that that statement essentially echoes the same hope I have for women: that we can start to see ourselves, and encourage men to see us, as more than just the sum of our sexual parts: not as virgins or whores, as mothers or girlfriends, or as existing only in relation to men, but as people with independent desires, hopes and abilities.

~ Jessica Valenti

In a world where money, security, children, money, temptation, sex, money, passion and more money is all that women expect of men, that is what men begin to offer. Anyone who has anything different to offer is dismissed, if reluctantly. Men, in their eternal wooing dance, tend to cultivate those qualities which the desired sex expects. What's more, women who gave birth to them and later on rehearse them for their role MAKE them that way, with the help of sisters, mistresses or wives. Those who are too strong or too weak to be thus moulded are cast aside as rejects, socio-sexual-matrimonial drop-outs. The price is paid by humanity as a whole in terms of values. You cannot denigrate a part without diminishing the whole. Women, by relegating man to the status of a working slave, becomes a slave herself. Is diminished morally even if she does remain physically and intellectually superior. Granted that her responsibility for the propagation and survival of the species necessitates her adopting the master role -- she has to have safety, security and comfort, as much as humanly possible, to ensure the continuation of the human race -- it still remains a morally untenable stance.

~ Adam Zameenzad

Dancing falls into the same category as poetry for a woman – it equals dreaming, which may inspire thoughts about such banned topics as love and desire.

~ Jenny Nordberg

Marriage is a core component of the patriarchal system. According to Gerda Lerner's research on ancient societies, a woman could achieve at least some status, and with that, better treatment and privileges, through preserving her only capital – her virginity – and eventually offering it to just one man.

~ Jenny Nordberg

The responsibility for men's behavior, indeed for civilization itself rests entirely with women here, and in how they dress and behave. Men's animalistic impulses are presumed to be overwhelming and uncontrollable. And as men are brutal, brainless savages, women must hide their bodies to avoid being assaulted. In most societies, a respectable woman, to varying degrees, is expected to cover up. If she doesn't she is inviting assault.

~ Jenny Nordberg

There is a difference between having your own movement and cutting yourself off politically from all other movements. This last form of feminist isolationism is attractive in its simplicity. It appears to offer an option which implies that you concentrate on your own struggle and wait for some absolute future when men and women have progressed towards equality. It is of course a profoundly liberal utopian notion. ‘Progress’ is seen as some kind of single linear advance towards a goal. There is no sense of a movement living and working in history, learning though a dialectical interaction of its own efforts in objective circumstances. It forgets that the consciousness of particular groups amongst the oppressed is only partial. While this consciousness must be realized and expressed in their own movement, if the attempt is not continually to extend and connect this partial consciousness to the experience of other oppressed groups, it cannot politicize itself in a revolutionary sense. It becomes locked within its own particularism.

~ Sheila Rowbotham

The picture to my left, that’s me. My name is Stephanie M. Wytovich, and yes, I am a female horror writer. But am I? No, of course not. I mean, if you want to bring my vagina into the conversation, then yes, I guess that’s technically true, but seeing that I don’t write with it, I’m not sure why that would be appropriate.

~ Stephanie M. Wytovich

The way I figure it, here in New Earth, men's power has won out over women's power, just like it's done on Mainground. But men still fear women's power. No one ever forgets their mother's power to give them nourishment or withhold it. And men specially don't forget it, because they never grow into women themselves, and never lose a child's craving for the comfort of women's bodies.

~ Chris Beckett

With the way a lot of men function, I'd say single womyn are a threat to society. In fact, I'd go as single womyn are a threat to the system. As a womyn, if you aren't spending all your time looking for what you were socialized to, you're doing something productive. I'd say that scares a hell of a lot of people.

~ Nocturnus Libertus

Women are seen as imperfect or unclean, because of a myth of a tempting apple, because they bleed monthly, because they lack equivalent upper body strength.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

It's not the nineteenth century, I'm not meant to be judged on how good a housekeeper I am. Getting down on the floor with a lemon and a bucket of vinegar does not make me a better person.

~ Emily Matchar

Oh, I simply can’t think. When I really want to depress myself, I think of all the brilliant men I know, married to their stupid wives. Enough to break your heart, it really is

~ Doris Lessing

Prostitution is not a profession, it is the result of sexism and gender oppression.

~ Nocturnus Libertus

An androgynous mind was not a male mind. It was a mind attuned to the full range of human experience, including the invisible lives of women.

~ Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

I would respect feminist who said Single moms, are you kidding me? Stop taking government benefits because, the government is the patriarchy. So, you are taking things from the patriarchy so you dont have to be responsible. Any woman who takes money from the government using cops who usually extract it from men by force is not a feminist. Is a exceedingly bad bride of the state. I would admire that but, of course feminism doesn't have anything to do with any of that stuff.Look, it's fine. Have your fun. Make fun of men. Go for it. Yea, we're all idiots, we're all selfish, greedy bastards. Ok, it's fine because the government is going to run out of money soon and then all these woman are going to try to find some guy to latch onto when the benefits stop flowing and I mean, you saw this happening with the soviet union. Now we need you! You guys are great! We missed you so much! Give me some money!It's just a bunch of noise from a bunch of people who are stealing from the productive.

~ Stefan Molyneux

Freedom from one man is just another one.

~ Leslie Jamison

Six men control almost all the media in the United States--book publishing, magazines, television, movie studios, newspapers, and radio. They are not friendly toward feminism, which has almost disappeared from the surface of our society. You will almost never see a feminist column on an op-ed page, a feminist article in a magazine, or newspaper, actual (not satirized) feminist ideas on television or in the movies. Only magazines & radio controlled by feminists--and these are few and not well-funded--offer information on the feminist perspective.This might be understandable if feminism were a wild-eyed manic philosophy. But it is a belief, a politics, based on one simple fact: women are human beings who matter as much as men. That is all that feminism claims. As human beings, women have the right to control their own bodies, to walk freely in the world, to train their minds and bodies, and to love and hate at will. Only those who wish to continue to coerce women into a servant/slave class for men cannot accept this principle.

~ Marilyn French

I'm not sure how we got to this place, where a girl's only value is in what kind of marriage she has, how capable she is of keeping a man happy.

~ Amy Engel

My father might not have held my hand or expressed his love openly, but he taught Callie and me that we had inherent values, that we were fully formed human beings without a boy by our side.

~ Amy Engel

What feminists refer to as microaggressions, the rest of us sane adults call life....The concept of microaggressions encourages women to think that every single thing in the world is, or should be, about them. It encourages breathless levels of narcissism, solipsism and just plain delusion....Feminism encourages women to believe that they have the same reasoning and coping abilities as toddlers. No thanks.

~ Janet Bloomfield

If you find the dividing line between fairy tales and reality, let me know. In my mind, the two run together, even though the intersections aren't always obvious. The girl sitting quietly in class or waiting for the bus or roaming the mall doesn't want anyone to know, or doesn't know how to tell anyone, that she is locked in a tower. Maybe she's a prisoner of a story she's heard all her life- that fairest means best, or that bruises prove she is worthy of love.

~ Christine Heppermann

Gingerbread I knew I had to get out of therebefore the icing cracked and they discoveredthat I'm burnt around the edges,doughy in the center,that what they thought was sugaris salt.If I was a good girl,if I could satisfy their cravings, if every dream in my misshapen headdidn't bite, I might have stayed at the table.Wouldn't you run, too,from such voracious love?

~ Christine Heppermann

Women’s history is the primary tool for women’s emancipation.

~ Gerda Lerner