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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.

Random quote on Women

Most quoted on women:

The struggle of the Kurdish woman is the struggle of all the women of the world

Abdullah Öcalan

The century of women's freedom is the century of women's freedom

Abdullah Öcalan

Shakespeare's relations with men and women of the court involved him at the outset in emotional conflicts, which form the subject-matter of his 'Sonnets'

Sidney Lee

the rest of us shouldn’t be compelled to participate in the fantasy and pretend that men can become women and women can become men. They can’t.

Pat Condell

It would be like this when you were really old-a city full of imaginary houses and women, rooms and girls. (Page 125)

Cees Nooteboom Rituals (1980)

These were all the women whom Bluebeard had married, and whose throats he had cut one after the other.

Charles Perrault

We all make mistakes - we fall in love with tenors and sopranoes even though tenors are as dumb as quarrelsome women, because high tones damage their brains.

Waldemar Łysiak Kielich (2002)

When I was in the advertising game, we used to use nude women. Now I use the swastika and storm troopers. You use what brings them in.

George Lincoln Rockwell

All women like a beating.

Nelson Rodrigues

I think any woman can be the ideal woman.

Luis Miguel

One woman told us doctors believe she has endometriosis, but it can’t be proven without surgery, so the insurance hasn’t been willing to cover her medication.

Sandra Fluke U.S. Congressional testimony (2012)

When I came to think as a writer, it was because I had begun to live among women.

Grace Paley Of Poetry and Women and the World (1986)

Live morally, do not aspire for other's Wealth, Women and God.

Basava

...tribute to her unflinching zeal towards the betterment of women in society.

Ela Bhatt

'If a woman is worth remembering,' said my grandmother, 'there is no need to have her name carved in letters.' (p165)

Edwidge Danticat Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994)

Women sleep so soundly they seem to be dead. Who knows? Women may live in order to sleep.

Osamu Dazai

Long personal experience had taught me that when a woman suddenly bursts into hysterics, the way to restore her sprits is to give her something sweet.

Osamu Dazai

What I was learning in graduate school did not so much leave out continents and their people as it left out half the human race, women.

Gerda Lerner The majority finds its past (1979)

If a woman is going to write a Book of Peace, it is given her to know devastation. ("Fire" opening line)

Maxine Hong Kingston The Fifth Book of Peace (2003)

I'm a big fan of the black woman and so I'm always looking at aspects of the black woman--what she's doing and how she does it.

Nikki Giovanni The Authority of a Writer (2024)

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