Ugh > Ugh's Quotes

“[On Jane Austen] She was fully possessed of the idealism which is a necessary ingredient of the great satirist. If she criticized the institutions of earth, it was because she had very definite ideas regarding the institutions of heaven.”
― Rebecca West

“That shows how impossible it is to be a woman. One's whole life depends on one's looks but one mayn't speak of one's own beauty”
― Rebecca West

“When you are a woman, the things you like get used against you. Or, alternatively, the things that get used against you have all been prefigured as things you should like. Sexual availability falls into this category. So does basic kindness, and generosity. Wanting to look good—taking pleasure in trying to look good—does, too.”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror

“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”
― Irina Dunn

“Women are all female impersonators to some degree.”
― Susan Brownmiller

“A world without rape would be a world in which women moved freely without fear of men. That some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation, forever conscious of the knowledge that the biological tool must be held in awe for it may turn to weapon with sudden swiftness borne of harmful intent...Rather than society's abberants or"spoilers of purity," men who rape have serves in effect as front-line masculine shock troops, terrorists guerrillas in the longest sustained battle the world has ever known.”
― Susan Brownmiller

“The consequences of treating
generations of women as economically illiterate are that women have been unable to educate their daughters about money, women have been shut out
from one of the main sources of power in capitalist societies (money), and few girls have grown up believing that finance is a career for them.”
― Annabelle Williams, Why Women Are Poorer Than Men and What We Can Do About It

“The basic distortions in the media are not innocent errors, for they are not random; rather they move in the same overall direction again and again, favoring management over labor, corporatism over anti-corporatism, the affluent over the poor, private enterprise over socialism, Whites over Blacks, males over females, officialdom over protesters, conventional politics over dissidence, anticommunism and arms-race militarism over disarmament, national chauvinism over internationalism, US dominance of the Third World over revolutionary or populist nationalist change. The press does many things and serves many functions but its major role, its irreducible responsibility, is to continually recreate a view of reality supportive of existing social and economic class power.”
― Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media

“If for centuries women have been accused by the Right of being dangerously radical creatures and by the Left of being dangerously conservative ones, it is because the sub-patriarchal reality in which women live is a third politics altogether.”
― Robin Morgan, The Demon Lover

“Hope, to me, is a belief that the future will be brighter, which I continue not to set much store in. But the idea of fighting for a better world—and, equally importantly, fighting against backsliding—is not a belief; it’s a political commitment that I can get on board with.”
― Kate Manne, Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women

“Misogyny is not just hatred enacted on women, but the means of defending stories about what women are in order to entrench male dominance.”
― Victoria Smith, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women

“Beauty, like gender, is relational; women have been obliged to remain forever young so that men can delude themselves that they are not ageing themselves.”
― Victoria Dutchman-Smith, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women

“You may need to witness several false dawns fully to understand that all women are, in patriarchal terms, the losers. That is our role; it is baked into patriarchal understandings of history, progress, success, failure, creativity, genius, what really matters, what doesn’t. Insisting yours is the cohort of women who will finally smash the patriarchy, whereas the one that preceded it represents its last stand, is itself patriarchal.”
― Victoria Smith, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women