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.
Women have a wonderful sense of right and wrong, but little sense of right and left.
Women are not much, but they are the best other sex we have.
A woman, the more curious she is about her face, is commonly the more careless about her house.
From a corrupt and venomed fountain can spring no wholesome water.
A woman only can understand a woman; and it is pleasant to be understood sometimes.
If children cease to be altogether desirable, women cease to be altogether necessary.
Remember, you're fighting for this woman's honor, which is probably more than she ever did.
Wit and woman are two frail things, and both the frailer by concurring.