Feminism Quotes

Madonna

I'm tough, I'm ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.

George Carlin

Men are from Earth, women are from Earth. Deal with it.

Rebecca Solnit

The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.

Nocturnus Libertus

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

Martha Gellhorn

I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his
I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.

Roman Payne

She is free in her wildness, she is a wanderess, a drop of free water. She
She is free in her wildness, she is a wanderess, a drop of free water. She knows nothing of borders and cares nothing for rules or customs. 'Time' for her isn’t something to fight against. Her life flows clean, with passion, like fresh water.

Roman Payne

You must give everything to make your life as beautiful as the dreams that dance in
You must give everything to make your life as beautiful as the dreams that dance in your imagination.

Sheng Wang

Why do people say "grow some balls"? Balls are weak and sensitive. If you wanna be tough, grow a vagina. Those things can take a pounding.

Molly Ivins

Margaret Atwood, the Canadian novelist, once asked a group of women at a university why they felt threatened by men. The women said they were afraid of being beaten, raped, or killed by men. She then asked a group of men why they felt threatened by women. They said they were afraid women would laugh at them.

Elizabeth Peters

I disapprove of matrimony as a matter of principle.... Why should any independent, intelligent female choose to subject herself to the whims and tyrannies of a husband? I assure you, I have yet to meet a man as sensible as myself! (Amelia Peabody)

Roman Payne

I was an adventurer, but she was not an adventuress. She was a 'wanderess.' Thus, she didn’t care about money, only experiences - whether they came from wealth or from poverty, it was all the same to her.

Jeanne D'Arc

One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.

Moderata Fonte

Do you really believe ... that everything historians tell us about men – or about women – is actually true? You ought to consider the fact that these histories have been written by men, who never tell the truth except by accident.

Audre Lorde

My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.

David Rovics

They'll say you are bad
or perhaps you are mad
or at least you
should stay undercover.
Your mind must be bare
if you would dare
to think you can love
more than one lover.

Laura Cereta

The free mind, unafraid of labor, presses on to attain the good.

Simone De Beauvoir

Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.

Roman Payne

She called herself Europa, and wandered the world from girlhood till death. She believed only in her life and in her dreams. She called herself Europa, and her god was Beauty.

C.J. Redwine

There are much more important qualities to have than a docile disposition.

Gloria Steinem

Men should think twice before making widowhood women's only path to power.

Gavin De Becker

Most men fear getting laughed at or humiliated by a romantic prospect while most women fear rape and death.

Virginia Woolf

A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment,
A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.

Joanna Russ

Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.

Hélène Cixous

When I write, it's everything that we don't know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love. In one another we will never be lacking.

Marie Brennan

Matriarchy is a time-honored staple for any writer looking to invent an exotic society.

Toni Morrison

I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that.

Joanna Russ

And middle-class women, although taught to value established forms, are in the same position as the working class: neither can use established forms to express what the forms were never intended to express (and may very well operate to conceal).

Hélène Cixous

To fly/steal is woman’s gesture, to steal into language to make it fly.

Florence Converse

And her work! Oh, the thought of being deprived of that! With only his love in return, his love and his amiable domestic tyranny!

Barbra Streisand

Men are allowed to have passion and commitment for their work ... a woman is allowed that feeling for a man, but not her work.

Nenia Campbell

If a woman defined herself solely by the man she was with - and vice versa - the world would be a very shallow and insipid place, indeed.

Emily Matchar

American culture at large has failed working mothers.

Emily Matchar

When we combine very real workplace inequalities with these romantic opt-out stories, the idea that "having it all" is a laughable goal becomes enshrined as immutable truth. And when we portray opting out as a simple matter of "choice," we ignore the systematic problems that make combining work and motherhood so difficult.

Louisa May Alcott

Mother Atkinson thought that every one should have a trade, or something to make a living out of , for rich people may grow poor, you know, and poor people have to work.... so when I saw how happy and independent those young ladies were, I wanted to have a trade, and then it wouldn't matter about money, though I like to have it well enough.

Sheryl Sandberg

Our culture needs to find a robust image of female success that is first, not male, and second, not a white woman on the phone, holding a crying baby,

Simone De Beauvoir

Two separate beings, in different circumstances, face to face in freedom and seeking justification of their existence through one another, will always live an adventure full of risk and promise." (p. 248)

Helen Gurley Brown

good girls go to heaven and bad girls go everywhere

Rita Mae Brown

When God made man she was practicing.

Jim Butcher

I think that men ought to treat women like something other than weaker men with breasts.

Audre Lorde

There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.

Mary Daly

The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es-,’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a [person] trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin'.

Betty Friedan

Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question- 'Is this all?

Virginia Woolf

By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream

Dolly Parton

I'm not going to limit myself just because people won't accept the fact that I can do something else.

Anaïs Nin

For too many centuries women have been being muses to artists. I wanted to be the muse, I wanted to be the wife of the artist, but I was really trying to avoid the final issue - that I had to do the job myself.

Donna J. Haraway

From this point of view, science - the real game in town - is rhetoric, a series of efforts to persuade relevant social actors that one's manufactured knowledge is a route to a desired form of very objective power.

Simone De Beauvoir

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

Mary Wortley Montagu

Philosophy is the toil which can never tire persons engaged in it. All ways are strewn with roses, and the farther you go, the more enchanting objects appear before you and invite you on.

Henry James

I don't need the aid of a clever man to teach me how to live. I can find it out for myself.

George Carlin

He - and if there is a God, I am convinced he is a he, because no woman could or would ever fuck things up this badly.

Taylor Swift

My hope for the future, not just in the music industry, but in every young girl I meet…is that they all realize their worth and ask for it.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Though we tremble before uncertain futures
may we meet illness, death and adversity with strength
may we dance in the face of our fears.

Anne Bradstreet

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue/ Who says my hand a needle better fits./ A poet's pen all scorn I should thus wrong/ For such despite they cast on female wits;/ If what I do prove well, it won't advance,/ They'll say it's stolen, or else, it was by chance.

Abigail Adams

Well, knowledge is a fine thing, and mother Eve thought so; but she smarted so severely for hers, that most of her daughters have been afraid of it since.

Brigham Young

You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation.

Bell Hooks

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

Kate Atkinson

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.

Christopher Hitchens

To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation - is that good for the world?

M.E. Thomas

When you grow up as a girl, it is like there are faint chalk lines traced approximately three inches around your entire body at all times, drawn by society and often religion and family and particularly other women, who somehow feel invested in how you behave, as if your actions reflect directly on all womanhood.

Christopher Hitchens

Who are your favorite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi as their ideal feminine model.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

As for mother Eve - I wasn't there and can't deny the story, but I will say this. If she brought evil into the world, we men have had the lion's share of keeping it going ever since.

Marguerite Porete

Theologians and other clerks,
You won't understand this book,
- However bright your wits -
If you do not meet it humbly,
And in this way, Love and Faith
Make you surmount Reason, for
They are the protectors of Reason's house.

Robert Alley

The Bible is not absurd for the people who wrote it; it becomes absurd when people in our day insist on taking it literally. The Bible does not present us with material that is ridiculous in the context from which it came. The Bible springs from the context in which people then were thinking, searching, and trying to find answers .

Maggie Young

It is not your job to convince men to like you.

Maggie Young

Your true passion in life is what you’d be doing if somebody handed you 100 million dollars.

Zack Love

Isn’t it better just to make your own money, and then spend it how and when you want, and with dignity?

Siobhan Vivian

It's as if our girls don't understand that they can be recognized for other things-their goals, their brains. Not just their bodies.

Shahla Khan

I find it easier to claim that I am friends with a monkey rather than with a man.

Lori Ziganto

The rest of us have never embraced your victim mentality; we are not victims. We are people, the same way that men are. We are equal, yet different. We, unlike you, realize that is not mutually exclusive.

Caitlin Moran

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.

J. Richard Singleton

No man wants his daughter to be the kind of girl whom he liked in high school.

George Gordon Byron

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

Doris Lessing

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

Ram Mohan

Every woman is well aware of the deadly ingredients of her soul which is why they all detest each other.

Nenia Campbell

A woman isn't a whore for wanting pleasure. If it were unnatural, we would not be born with such drives.

Nicholas D. Kristof

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.

Christyl Rivers

Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings and Ecopsychology tells us that human beings are Earthlings. We are all related, so cooperation rather than exploitation is the only true choice we have been given.

Efrat Israeli

A day will come when a woman will be elected to the top of the pyramid, to be a prime minister or a president, and the whole world will know her and hear about her. She may be sitting here amongst us.

Virginia Woolf

As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.

Dorothy L. Sayers

What'll Geoffrey do when you pull off your First, my child?" demanded Miss Haydock.

"Well, Eve - it will be awkward if I do that. Poor lamb! I shall have to make him believe I only did it by looking fragile and pathetic at the viva.

Adelle Waldman

People expect girls from good middle-class families to be smart - but what they mean by smart for a girl is to have nice handwriting and a neat locker and to do her homework on time. They don't expect ideas or much in the way of real thought.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Let their faculties have room to unfold, and their virtues to gain strength, and then determine where the whole sex must stand in the intellectual scale.

Gloria Steinem

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

Caitlin Moran

I want a Zero Tolerance policy on All The Patriarchal Bullshit.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

At some point I was a Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men and Who Likes to Wear Lip Gloss and High Heels for Herself and Not For Men.

Mitchell Rhodes

If Beyoncé Knowles and Miley Cyrus represent the latest branch of feminism, then surely the male-dominated power elite must be aroused with concern.

Alice Walker

Sofia the kind of woman no matter what she have in her hand she make it look like a weapon.

Roman Payne

With her enchanting songs, her rare beauty, and clever tricks, this wild 'wanderess' ensnared my soul like a gypsy-thief, and led me foolish and blind to where you find me now. The first time I saw her, fires were alight. It was a spicy night in Barcelona. The air was fragrant and free.

Sara Sheridan

I'm not sure how much easier it is for a mother to balance her life now - have we simply swapped one set of restrictions for another?

Sara Sheridan

In the 1950s at least less was expected of women. Now we're supposed to build a career, build a home, be the supermum that every child deserves, the perfect wife, meet the demands of elderly parents, and still stay sane.

Anaïs Nin

I hate men who are afraid of women's strength.

Roxane Gay

I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all.

Vera Nazarian

A woman is human.

She is not better, wiser, stronger, more intelligent, more creative, or more responsible than a man.

Likewise, she is never less.

Equality is a given.

A woman is human.

Julia Serano

In trans women's eyes, I see a wisdom that can only come from having to fight for your right to be recognized as female, a raw strength that only comes fro unabashedly asserting your right to be feminine in an inhospitable world.

Hannah Ashworth

I’m just a girl, Mom.”
“You are a woman, Andria. You are wise. You are gentle. You are bold. You are both a guiding light and a source of raging fire. That is what women are. How is our kingdom supposed to understand that, before you do?

Whitney Otto

Read "The Story of O." Convince yourself that it was in fact written by a woman or someone who thinks like a woman.

Nicola Griffith

I don’t belong to anyone! I’m not a thing, to be kept or ordered or driven to such despair that I open my own veins. Look at me, Aoife. Look at me! I’m a woman.

Miya Yamanouchi

I define me. You don't.

Greg Gutfeld

In the old days feminists would mock women who depended so much on a man. Today if the man is the government, not so much. A man who opens the door for you is a Neanderthal; a bureaucrat who pays for your pills? A hero.

Sylvia Plath

Seré una de las pocas poetisas en el mundo completamente feliz de ser mujer, no una de esas amargadas y frustradas, retorcidas imitadoras de hombres, que en su mayoría acaban destrozadas

Christina Dodd

The way to fight a woman is with your hat. Grab it and run.
The guy who said that was a wise man. He knew what most men don't - Women are powerful creatures who should be handled with care, or they can become very, very dangerous.

Gloria Ng

For my relationships with men to change, I needed to change my relationship to myself as a woman.

Share Page