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 only want a man to grant; for of course they always ask.
There is no worse evil than a bad woman; and nothing has ever been produced better than a good one.
There's three things in a Woman's life that should never be empty, her heart, bed and glass.
How bewitched I was! How could there be any good in a woman that everybody spoke ill of?
The most virtuous women have in them something that is never chaste.
The desire to please everything having eyes seems inborn in maidens.
Woman is like a book, which, good or bad, must at first please us by the frontispiece.
It is the sword that women fear and observe more than the gravity of Cato.