quotations about women
The woman born to physical subjection and degradation can never seek or use knowledge as her birthright. Never till she holds her sex in honor, as man holds his, can she be his equal, even in her own realm.
MARY CLEMMER AMES
Outlines of Men, Women, and Things
The most important thing in knowing that women are necessary is knowing that men are necessary too.
TAMARA ANGELA GRANT
"Women Are Necessary...", Huffington Post, March 9, 2017
What man can pretend to know the riddle of a woman's mind?
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
I expect that Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man.
GEORGE MEREDITH
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
I have often wondered that learning is not thought a proper ingredient in the education of a woman of quality or fortune. Since they have the same improvable minds as the male part of their species.
JOSEPH ADDISON
The Guardian, September 8, 1713
The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
letter to "Scottie" Fitzgerald, October 5, 1940
I tell you the women who make fervent wives
And sweet tender mothers, had Fate been less fair,
Are the women who might have abandoned their lives
To the madness that springs from and ends in despair.
As the fire on the hearth which sheds brightness around,
Neglected, may level the walls to the ground.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Angel or Demon"
For men have marble, women waxen, minds,
And therefore are they form'd as marble will;
The weak oppress'd, the impression of strange kinds
Is form'd in them by force, by fraud, or skill:
Then call them not the authors of their ill,
No more than wax shall be accounted evil
Wherein is stamp'd the semblance of a devil.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The Rape of Lucrece
Love is wont to visit Man in the company of Desire; but Woman by himself.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men.
JOHN BERGER
Ways of Seeing
The really clever thing, in affairs of this sort, is not to win a woman already desired by everyone, but to discover such a prize while she is still unknown.
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living, October 7, 1940
Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
It would take a hell of a wife to beat no wife at all.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
The Crossing
That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can.
J. D. SALINGER
The Catcher in the Rye
We don't really have to go out of our way as parents to teach our kids how to respect men in the same way we do women because they're already growing up in a world where men are people and women are pretty toys.
CHRISSY BOBIC
"10 Ways Millennial Feminists Are Raising Sons Who Respect Women", Romper, February 9, 2016
If I could remake the world, I'd banish women, send them away with all their trouble. Then children would come from a purer source.
EURIPIDES
Medea
It is often asserted that as woman has always been man's slave--subject--inferior--dependent, under all forms of government and religion, slavery must be her normal condition. This might have some weight had not the vast majority of men also been enslaved for centuries to kings and popes, and orders of nobility, who, in the progress of civilization, have reached complete equality.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY
introduction, History of Woman Suffrage
Women are not waiting around for lovers, they're living their lives. And believe it or not, having the morning to yourself is very zen.
KAITLYN WILDE
"Comic Artist Depicts Single Women They Way They Really Are -- Quite Content, Thank You Very Much", Bustle, February 9, 2016
These women are always the same; they will, and they will not; their Yes so often merely a cowardly sort of a No; and their No, a coy sort of a Yes. One should be a diplomatist to understand them.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
Altavona: Fact and Fiction From My Life in the Highlands
No man ever reaches manhood
till a woman's tenderness
is a part of his possession.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"The Conquerors"