Kate Millett > Quotes

“To love is simply to allow another to be, live, grow, expand, become. An appreciation that demands and expects nothing in return.”
― Kate Millett, Sita

“Patriarchy, reformed or unreformed, is patriarchy still: its worst abuses purged or foresworn, it might actually be more stable and secure than before.”
― Kate Millett, Sexual Politics

“I don't believe in monogamy, possessing people, the rightness or inevitability of jealousy.”
― Kate Millett, Sita

“It is interesting that many women do not recognize themselves as discriminated against; no better proof could be found of the totality of their conditioning.”
― Kate Millett, Sexual Politics

“And what is boredom? Perhaps the inability to find meaning, to complete a perception, to arrive at an understanding: partly grasped, but forever just out of reach. It is not lack of interest, but interest frustrated, cut off, imperfectly held. So says the Chronicle today. But for me it is the fear of emptiness.”
― Kate Millett, Sita

“But madness? That small remnant of altered consciousness, pure or in response to circumstances. Circumstances of life, even those of the body itself and its chemistry. How cruel and stupid to punish this as we do with ostracism and fear, to have forged a network of fear, strong as the locks and bars of a back ward. This is the jail we could all end up in. And we know it. And watch our step. For a lifetime. We behave. A fantastic and entire system of social control, by the threat of example as effective over the general population as detention centers in dictatorships, the image of the madhouse floats through every mind for the course of its lifetime.”
― Kate Millett

“Whatever the “real” differences between the sexes may be, we are not likely to know them until the sexes are treated differently, that is alike.”
― Kate Millett, Sexual Politics

“Hell, I don't want to grow old at all. I never want to die.”
― Kate Millett, Sita

“If knowledge is power, power is also knowledge, and a large factor in their subordinate position is the fairly systematic ignorance patriarchy imposes upon women.”
― Kate Millett, Sexual Politics

“Let's always be having an affair. Wherever we meet, however many times a year - let it always be an affair.”
― Kate Millett, Sita

“Writing is so much more problematic than drawing, full of moral pitfalls, ambiguity, public responsibility. If you record a day of your life, does the decision to do so change the shape of the day? One of Doris Lessing's days in The Golden Notebook is fifty-four pages long. It's complete; the rest are summaries - the "impression" of a day foisted artfully upon the reader by providing a few details. Fiction is made this way - as lineal perspective gives the illusion of three dimensions in drawing. But does the selection of a day - that you begin by knowing you must remember and observe - really affect it? Do you change the balance, distort the truth? The period itself, its choice and selection, does that not in itself constitute a kind of misconstruction, and the rest follow subconsciously?”
― Kate Millett, Sita

“Coitus can scarcely be said to take place in a vacuum; although of itself it appears a biological and physical activity, it is set so deeply within the larger context of human affairs that it serves as a charged microcosm of the variety of attitudes and values to which culture subscribes. Among other things, it may serve as a model of sexual politics on an individual or personal plane.”
― Kate Millett, Sexual Politics

“Governments who manipulate population growth have two choices: making maternity pleasant, or making it inescapable.”
― Kate Millett, Sexual Politics

“It is necessary to realize that the most sacrosanct article of sexual politics in the period, the Victorian doctrine of chivalrous protection and its familiar protestations of respect, rests upon the tacit assumption, a cleverly expeditious bit of humbug, that all women were "ladies"—namely members of that fraction of the upper classes and bourgeoisie which treated women to expressions of elaborate concern, while permitting them no legal or personal freedom. The psycho-political tacit here is a pretense that the indolence and luxury of the upper-class woman’s role in what Veblen called “vicarious consumption” was the happy lot of all women. The efficacy of this maneuver depends on dividing women by class and persuading the privileged that they live in an indulgence they scarcely deserve... To succeed, both the sexual revolution and the Woman's Movement which led it would have to unmask chivalry and expose its courtesies as subtle manipulation.”
― Kate Millett, Sexual Politics

“Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different—and this is crucial. Implicit”
― Kate Millett, Sexual Politics

“Under patriarchy the female did not herself develop the symbols by which she is described. As”
― Kate Millett, Sexual Politics

“Listening to the sound of the water, her sound, her lovely body glistening through the room a moment from now. There are only moments. Live in this one. The happiness of these days.”
― Kate Millett, Sita

“There are only moments. Live in this one. The happiness of these days.”
― Kate Millett, Sita

“Come here." I stop like a thief in a pantomime. And then dive into the warmth next to her. "Snuggling" - surely the most pleasant thing in the world. Scrunching further and further into the mattress as we struggle closer and closer warmer and warmer nearer and nearer, our bodies like a letter fitting into an envelope, my legs over her legs, our hips sliding against each other, her arm tighter and tighter around my shoulders, my face nestled more and more firmly into her collarbone. It is bliss. The simplest and most primitive bliss. A childlike, sexual, friendly, animal bliss.”
― Kate Millett, Sita

“For it is precisely because certain groups have no representation in a number of recognized political structures that their position tends to be so stable, their oppression so continuous.”
― Kate Millett, Sexual Politics

“Their chattel status continues in their loss of name, their obligation to adopt the husband’s domicile, and the general legal assumption that marriage involves an exchange of the female’s domestic service and (sexual) consortium in return for financial support.31”
― Kate Millett, Sexual Politics

“However muted its present appearance may be, sexual dominion obtains nevertheless as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power.”
― Kate Millett, Sexual Politics

“The term “politics” shall refer to power-structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another. By”
― Kate Millett, Sexual Politics

“There are moments in friendship, Fred had said, when the thing spreads beyond the ordinary margins, when something is said that carries you beyond the little guidemarks of restraint or indifference, like watercolours merging on a page, a moment when you survey a relationship from som transcendent point and see its beauty, the beauty of persons, of friendship itself.”
― Kate Millett, Flying

“The derogation of feminine status in lesser males is a consistent patriarchal trait. Like”
― Kate Millett, Sexual Politics

“In sex one wants or does not want. And the grief, the sorrow of life is that one cannot make or coerce or persuade the wanting, cannot command it, cannot request it by mail order or finagle it through bureaucratic channels.”
― Kate Millett, Sita

“As patriarchy enforces a temperamental imbalance of personality traits between the sexes, its educational institutions, segregated or co-educational, accept a cultural programing toward the generally operative division between “masculine” and “feminine” subject matter, assigning the humanities and certain social sciences (at least in their lower or marginal branches) to the female—and science and technology, the professions, business and engineering to the male. Of”
― Kate Millett, Sexual Politics

“Ataerkik düzendeki sınıfın başlıca etkilerinden biri, bir kadını bir diğerinin karşısına koymaktır. Geçmişte fahişelerle namuslu kadınlar karşılaştırılırken, günümüzde de çalışan kadınlarla ev kadınları karşı karşıya getirilmektedir. Bu kadınlardan birincisi ötekinin sahip olduğu "güvenlik" ve saygınlığa gıpta ederken, ikincisi de kendisine saygınlık kazandıran sınırlamaların ötesinde, özgürlük, serüven, dünyayı tanımak diye adlandırdığı birinci kadının yaşantısına özlem duyar. İkili düzen standardının çeşitli elverişliliklerinden yararlanan erkek, her iki kadının da dünyasını paylaşır ve üstün toplumsal ve ekonomik gücü ile de birbirlerine yabancılaşmış bu kadınları birbirlerine rakip duruma getirir.”
― Kate Millett, Cinsel Politika

“Yeterince erkeksi ya da kadınsı olmamak, doğal yapıya aykırı düşmek gibi gösteriliyor. Ve hepimiz kadın ya da erkek olarark doğduğumuz için, cinsel kişiliğimizi yitirirsek yok olacağımız gibi bir düşünceye uyarlanmak isteniyoruz.”
― Kate Millett, Cinsel Politika

“Lady," we always call each other, partly a joke, partly in earnest, using still the old word, in its full flavor a kind of exorcism against "saleslady," "old lady," "ladylike." Relishing the anachronism, even the formality a type of aphrodisiac, a contrast to our delight in the horny, the vulgar, the vernacular which we cultivate just as ardently.”
― Kate Millett, Sita