'T is woman that seduces all mankind;
By her we first were taught the wheedling arts.
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.
A woman can earn her pardon for a good year of disobedience by a single adroit submission.
His folly has not fellow
Beneath the blue of day
That gives to man or woman
His heart and soul away.
The silliest woman can manage a clever man; but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool!
Show me a nagging woman and I’ll show you one who hasn’t enough to worry about.
Life with women did not just induce strange behavior, it appeared; it induced very strange behavior.
I am increasingly convinced that technological culture is the entire root of women's liberation.
Women tell men things that men are not very likely to find out for themselves.
"Fortune hath somewhat the nature of a woman; if she be too much wooed, she is the farther off."
Women are wiser than men, because they know less and understand more.
Who loves not woman, wine, and song
Remains a fool his whole life long.