Melissa Class > Melissa's Quotes

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

“A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

“Sadly, the signals that allow men and women to find the partners who most please them are scrambled by the sexual insecurity initiated by beauty thinking. A woman who is self-conscious can't relax to let her sensuality come into play. If she is hungry she will be tense. If she is "done up" she will be on the alert for her reflection in his eyes. If she is ashamed of her body, its movement will be stilled. If she does not feel entitled to claim attention, she will not demand that airspace to shine in. If his field of vision has been boxed in by "beauty"--a box continually shrinking--he simply will not see her, his real love, standing right before him.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

“Radical simply means "grasping things at the root.”
― Angela Davis

“The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?”
― Angela Y. Davis

“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.”
― Angela Davis

“In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.”
― Angela Y. Davis

“Everyone is familiar with the slogan "The personal is political" -- not only that what we experience on a personal level has profound political implications, but that our interior lives, our emotional lives are very much informed by ideology. We oftentimes do the work of the state in and through our interior lives. What we often assume belongs most intimately to ourselves and to our emotional life has been produced elsewhere and has been recruited to do the work of racism and repression.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“I was ashamed of myself when I realised life was a costume party and I attended with my real face”
― Franz Kafka