Josephine > Josephine's Quotes

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
― Buckminster Fuller

“As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation -- either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“You may never know what results come of your actions, but if you do nothing, there will be no results.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“It's the action, not the fruit of the action, that's important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there'll be any fruit. But that doesn't mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“The duty of youth is to challenge corruption.”
― Kurt Cobain

“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”
― Edward Abbey

“Feminism is hated because women are hated. Antifeminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of woman hating.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women

“Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

“She will try to find the nice way to exercise intelligence. But intelligence is not ladylike. Intelligence is full of excesses. Rigorous intelligene abhors sentimentality, and women must be sentimental to value the dreadful silliness of the men around them. Morbid intelligence abhors the cheery sunlight of positive thinking and eternal sweetness; and women must be sunlight and cheery and sweet, or the woman could not bribe her way with smiles through a day. Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized. Any vital intelligence has passionate questions, aggressive answers; but women cannot be explorers; there can be no Lewis or Clark of the female mind.”
― Andrea Dworkin

“The tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognize that they are committing suicide.”
― Andrea Dworkin

“Any violation of a woman's body can become sex for men; this is the essential truth of pornography.”
― Andrea Dworkin

“Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.' (Leviticus 18:22). That means simply that it is foul to do to other men what men habitually, proudly, manfully do to women: use them as inanimate, empty, concave things; fuck them into submission; subordinate them through sex.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women

“It is a tragedy beyond the power of language to convey when what has been imposed on women by force becomes a standard of freedom for women: and all the women say it is so.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse

“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'.”
― Mary Daly

“Every woman who has come to consciousness can recall an almost endless series of oppressive, violating, insulting, assaulting acts against her Self. Every woman is battered by such assaults - is on a psychic level, a battered woman.”
― Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism

“It is impossible to Name and Act against oppression if there are no Nameable oppressors.”
― Mary Daly

“The very word philosophy terrifies many women. In Quintessence I strive to exorcise this patriarchally embedded fear that undermines our intelligence and passion. We were all philosophers when we were five years old. Re-Calling our connections with nature at that age, many women can Re-member our sense of wonder and our urgent need to know. We were always asking “Why?” This state of mind can be called Wonderlust—meaning a strong and unconquerable longing for Elemental adventure and knowledge.

What happened to our Wonderlust? Our visions, dreams, and far-out questions have been stunted by phallocratic society and its institutions. When we come into contact with our own deep and passionate intellectuality, we become intolerably threatening to the patriarchy. This is why there is an overwhelming taboo against women becoming philosophers, that is, seekers of wisdom on our own terms/turf.

Philosophy—of our own kind, for our own kind—is a source of wholeness and power that rightfully belongs to women. Breaking the patriarchal taboo against it—against us—we break out of the state of deception. Moreover, we open gateway after gateway into our own Other-world, our Homeland. From this perspective we can See, Name, and Act to end the atrocities perpetrated against ourSelves and all the Biophilic beings.”
― Mary Daly, Quintessence...Realizing the Archaic Future: A Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto

“We live as we dream--alone....”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“Your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“Never have I dealt with anything more difficult than my own soul, which sometimes helps me and sometimes opposes me.”
― Imam al-Ghazali

“What I've learned is that women suffer from terrible shame and the shame comes from having been complicit in abuse because one wants to live.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

“In her heart she is a mourner for those who have not survived. In her soul she is a warrior for those who are now as she was then. In her life she is both celebrant and proof of women's capacity and will to survive, to become, to act, to change self and society. And each year she is stronger and there are more of her.”
― Andrea Dworkin

“I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself from above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy

“I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“My memory begins with my anger.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“I thought it was unfair, and then I understood that, alone and terrified, anger was my only weapon against the horror”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men