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 are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly.
From the first dawn of Life, unto the Grave,
Poor Womankind's in every State, a Slave.
You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women. Women made me sick.
Women are the right age for just a few years; men, for most of their lives.
All women are basically in competition with each other for a handful of eligible men.
Good-looking girls break hearts, and good-hearted girls mend them.
Women usually love what they buy, yet hate two-thirds of what is in their closets.
A woman asks little of love: only that she be able to feel like a heroine.
Some women love only what they can hold in their arms; others, only what they can't.
That if weak women went astray,
Their stars were more in fault than they.
The world was sad, the garden was a wild,
And man the hermit sigh'd — till woman smiled.