WOMEN QUOTES XVII

quotations about women

A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

U2

"Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World"

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Woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself.

SUSAN B. ANTHONY

speech in San Francisco, July 1871

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We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Advertiser, September 9, 2004

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While a woman is losing confidence in a man she is usually reposing it in another.

LEWIS F. KORNS

Thoughts


Women are women and can't help themselves.

WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE

The Red Planet

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Nymphomaniac: a woman as obsessed with sex as an average man.

MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN

The Neurotic's Notebook

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Woman loves or hates: she knows no middle course.

PUBLILIUS SYRUS

The Moral Sayings of Publilius Syrus


If you're a woman, it's almost impossible to establish a relationship. You're too much for everybody. It's too much. The woman always has to play this role of being fragile and dependent. And if you're not, they're fascinated by you, but only for a little while. And then they want to change you and crush you. And then they leave.

MARINA ABRAMOVIC

The Guardian, May 12, 2014

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Women ... have long been discouraged from the awareness and forthright expression of anger. Sugar and spice are the ingredients from which we are made. We are the nurturers, the soothers, the peacemakers, and the steadiers of rocked boats.

HARRIET LERNER

The Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships

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The Madonna-Whore complex refers to the tendency to make a distinction between good, pure girls or the "Madonnas," and bad, desirable girls or the "Whores." This idea, however, requires there be a distinction between women you respect and women you desire while insisting they can't be both. Somehow, people still can't shake the idea women's respectability is contingent on their adherence to puritan values that equate "goodness" with being quiet, submissive, virginally pure and modest.

JULIA O'DONNELL

"Women are so much more than just sisters, mothers, wives", The Badger Herald, March 14, 2017


Next to God we are indebted to women, first for life itself, and then for making it worth having.

CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE

Intuitions and Summaries of Thought

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There are two kinds of spiritual law, two kinds of conscience, one in man and another, altogether different, in woman. They do not understand each other; but in practical life the woman is judged by man's law, as though she were not a woman but a man.

HENRIK IBSEN

From Ibsen's Workshop

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Woman's great strength lies in being late or absent. Presence immediately reveals the weak points of our beloved; when she is absent she become one of the sylph-like figures of our adolescence whom we endowed with perfection.

ANDRÉ MAUROIS

An Art of Living


Don't tell me about God having made such creatures to be companions for us! I don't say but He might make Eve to be a companion for Adam in Paradise--there was no cooking to be spoilt there, and no other woman to cackle with and make mischief; though you see what mischief she did as soon as she'd an opportunity.

GEORGE ELIOT

Adam Bede


When women express darker emotions, they are told to calm down, that their emotions are simply the result of "their time of the month," or that the emotional frustration they feel is not based in a rational (i.e., masculine) worldview. While men's emotional expression is marginalized as feminine, women's emotional expression is infantilized. It is in this repressed emotional space that the alarming sense of being gaslighted can emerge for women.

MARK GREENE

"Women Are Better At Expressing Emotions, Right? Why It's Not That Simple", Yes Magazine, January 27, 2016


The average woman was firmly convinced, it seemed, that she could not make a man recognize her worth unless every time she opened her legs she did so as if it were a scene in a soap opera.

KOBO ABE

The Woman in the Dunes

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It has been our experience that women usually prefer thin, undernourished, flatchested females, dressed to the teeth, as a concept of "feminine beauty" -- and that men prefer exactly the opposite: voluptuous, well-rounded and undressed. The women's idealization of woman is actually a male counterpart, competing with man in society; man's view of women is far more truly feminine.

HUGH HEFNER

The Realist, May, 1961

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Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one's life to women than to postage stamps or old snuff-boxes, even to pictures or statues. But the example of other collections should be a warning to us to diversify, to have not one woman only but several.

MARCEL PROUST

The Guermantes Way

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A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.

COCO CHANEL

The Gospel According to Coco Chanel

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Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly.

DORIS LESSING

The Golden Notebook

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