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.
It is delightful to be a woman; but every man thanks the Lord devoutly that he isn’t one.
After all, women feign interest in men all the time to better their positions.
I have never known why women believe the things men tell them – or vice versa.
“I think it is women who feel inadequate in a man’s world more than men creating obstacles.”
A pessimist is a man who thinks all women are bad. An optimist is a man who hopes they are.
Women want mediocre men, and men are working hard to be as mediocre as possible.
In their first passion, women love their lovers; in all the others, they love love.
A man must know how to fly in the face of opinion; a woman to submit to it.