For me, there are only two kinds of women — goddesses and doormats.
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.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
Ladies, like variegated tulips, show
'Tis to their changes half their charms we owe.
Offend her, and she knows not to forgive;
Oblige her, and she'll hate you while you live.
Like tapers on the altar shine her eyes;
Her breath is the perfume of sacrifice.
In those rare individual cases where women approach genius they also approach masculinity.
If ladies be but young and fair,
They have the gift to know it.
Women are soft, mild, pitiful and flexible;
Thou stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, remorseless.
Proper deformity seems not in the fiend
So horrid as in woman.
You should be women,
And yet your beards forbid me to interpret
That you are so.
A woman mov'd is like a fountain troubled,
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty.
I am ashamed that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace.
Women are as roses; whose fair flower,
Being once display’d, doth fall that very hour.
What wilt not woman, gentle woman, dare
When strong affection stirs her spirit up?
With prudes for proctors, dowagers for deans,
And sweet girl-graduates in their golden hair.