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.
The beginning and the end—for us men anyhow. In relationship to one another they are nothing.
And that one hunting, which the Devil design'd
For one fair female, lost him half the kind.
When a man comes to love a woman exactly as she had dreamed, she decides he is a weakling.
Few women care what a man looks like, and a good thing, too.
Women are never landlocked: they’re always mere minutes away from the briny deep of tears.
A young woman can live off the folly of men; a man of any age can live off the folly of women.
Any woman can talk herself into being in love with any man, for a while anyway.
This Englishwoman is so refined
She has no bosom and no behind.
Follow your Saint, follow with accents sweet;
Haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet.
That, let us rail at women, scorn and flout 'em,
We may live with, but cannot live without 'em.
Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.
'Tis a credit to any good girl to be neat,
But quite a disgrace to be fine.