She in beauty, education, blood,
Holds hand with any princess of the world.
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.
There is a tide in the affairs of women,
Which, taken at the flood, leads—God knows where.
Next to God, we are indebted to women, first for life itself, and then for making it worth having.
Ladies of fashion starve their happiness to feed their vanity, and their love to feed their pride.
To cheat a man is nothing; but the woman must have fine parts indeed who cheats a woman!
Behold! her bosom and half her side—
A sight to dream of, not to tell!
One can run away from women, turn them out, or give in to them. No fourth course.
No thyng ys to man so dere
As wommanys love yn gode manere.
A gode womman is mannys blys.
Women are like teeth. Some tremble and never fall and some fall and never tremble.
For in women and in cookshop pasties there is a great deal of bone.