Malini

“Women have been so thoroughly oppressed that they have accepted unconsciously the role that the ruling sex, man, gave to them.
They have even believed in male propaganda, which is very much the same as the propaganda in other wars, wars against colonial people, etc. Women have been considered to be naive:

Freud said that they were narcissistic, unrealistic, cowardly, inferior to man anatomically, intellectually, morally.
The fact is that women are less narcissistic than men, for the simple reason that there is almost nothing that man does which has not some purpose of making an impression.

Women do many, many things without this motive and in fact what you might call women's vanity is only the necessity to please the victors.

As far as the lack of realism in women is concerned, what should we say about male realism in an epoch in which all western governments, consisting of men, are spending their money building atomic bombs, instead of taking care of threatening famine, instead of avoiding the catastrophes which threaten the whole world...”
― Erich Fromm

“What can be more delightful than to have some one to whom you can say everything with the same absolute confidence as to yourself?”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero, Treatises on Friendship and Old Age

“Suddenly, I get this giddy desire to shock these guys a little. I continue, “These baboons really are our relatives. In fact, this baboon is my cousin.” And with that I lean over and give Daniel a loud messy kiss on his big ol’ nose. I get more of a response than I bargained for. The Masai freak and suddenly, they are waving their spears real close to my face, like they mean it. One is yelling, “He is not your cousin, he is not your cousin! A baboon cannot even cook ugali!” (Ugali is the ubiquitous and repulsive maize meal that everyone eats here. I almost respond that I don’t really know how to cook the stuff either, but decide to show some prudence at last.) “He is not your cousin!”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons

“Be, rather than seem”
― Cicero