Feminism Quotes

“You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation.”
― Brigham Young

“When a man gives his opinion, he's a man. When a woman gives her opinion, she's a bitch.”
― Bette Davis

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
― Margaret Atwood

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

“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”
― Rebecca West

“I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“A friend said to me, “Hey you need to grow a pair. Grow a pair, Bro.” It’s when someone calls you weak, but they associate it with a lack of testicles. Which is weird, because testicles are the most sensitive things in the world. If you suddenly just grew a pair, you’d be a lot more vulnerable. If you want to be tough, you should lose a pair. If you want to be real tough, you should grow a vagina. Those things can take a pounding.”
― Sheng Wang

“I hate men who are afraid of women's strength.”
― Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1932

“Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.”
― Cheris Kramarae

“As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

“I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.”
― Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters

“It's not my responsibility to be beautiful. I'm not alive for that purpose. My existence is not about how desirable you find me.”
― Warsan Shire

“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“What’s the worst possible thing you can call a woman? Don’t hold back, now.
You’re probably thinking of words like slut, whore, bitch, cunt (I told you not to hold back!), skank.
Okay, now, what are the worst things you can call a guy? Fag, girl, bitch, pussy. I’ve even heard the term “mangina.”
Notice anything? The worst thing you can call a girl is a girl. The worst thing you can call a guy is a girl. Being a woman is the ultimate insult. Now tell me that’s not royally fucked up.”
― Jessica Valenti, Full Frontal Feminism

“Men are from Earth, women are from Earth. Deal with it.”
― George Carlin

“The thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power. You just take it. ”
― Roseanne Barr

“A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.”
― Gloria Steinem

“He - and if there is a God, I am convinced he is a he, because no woman could or would ever fuck things up this badly.”
― George Carlin

“She is free in her wildness, she is a wanderess, a drop of free water. She knows nothing of borders and cares nothing for rules or customs. 'Time' for her isn’t something to fight against. Her life flows clean, with passion, like fresh water.”
― Roman Payne

“Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Often father and daughter look down on mother (woman) together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother’s fate.”
― Bonnie Burstow, Radical Feminist Therapy: Working in the Context of Violence

“She was free in her wildness. She was a wanderess, a drop of free water. She belonged to no man and to no city”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
― Abigail Adams, The Letters of John and Abigail Adams

“To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation—is that good for the world?”
― Christopher Hitchens

“A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you...it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre: "I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.

Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions--predigested books and ideas...marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short...and this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be "different"...The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.”
― Adrienne Rich

“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”
― audre lorde

“He is a gentleman, and I am a gentleman's daughter. So far we are equal.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him -- or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night