And sweeter woman ne'er drew breath
Than my sonne's wife, Elizabeth.
Women Quotes
This is a large page and a mixed one. Feminist theory, nineteenth-century verse, comedy and plain contempt sit side by side, and the source line is how you tell them apart. Warren Farrell has the most entries, then Shakespeare, Camille Paglia and Mignon McLaughlin.
Some of the best-sourced entries are the plainest. Betty Friedan, in The Feminine Mystique (1963): “The problem lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of American women.” Shulamith Firestone, in The Dialectic of Sex (1970), argued that women and love are underpinnings, and that examining them threatens the whole structure of a culture. Dorothy Parker, in Enough Rope (1926), observed that men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.
Two statements that are regularly credited to Catharine MacKinnon are flagged here as misattributed. If you are checking one of them, the notes on its page are the place to start.
Where on earth is the truth that may vie
With woman's lone and long constancy?
The happiness of one man and one woman is the greatest thing in all the world.
Many a man isn't as good as his woman, but I never knew a husband who was better than his wife.
No man can bear to live with a woman who speaks nothing but the truth to him.
We read in Rabelais of how the Devil took flight when the woman showed him her vulva.
“I guess I don’t understand women.”
“That’s an understatement.”
The subject of men and women is absolutely fraught with sex, which is as it should be.
Thin women are more sensual; scientific fact — the nerve ends are closer to the surface.