Great Throughts Treasury

"Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when the right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing."

"Security is when everything is settled, when nothing can happen to you; security is the denial of life."

"The only causes of regret are laziness, outbursts of temper, hurting others, prejudice, jealousy and envy."

"The essence of pleasure is spontaneity."

"Revolution is the festival of the oppressed."

"Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate."

"Act quickly, think slowly."

"Developing the muscles of the soul demands no competitive spirit, no killer instinct, although it may erect pain barriers that the spiritual athlete must crash through."

"Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it. "

"A full bosom is actually a millstone around a woman's neck... [Breasts] are not parts of a person but lures slung around her neck, to be kneaded and twisted like magic putty, or mumbled and mouthed like lolly ices."

"A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity."

"Above all, for his merciless, contemptuous treatment of Clifford Chatterley, blown to bits in Flanders in 1918, Lawrence can be damned to hell. Damned but not banned."

"A woman might claim to retain some of the child's faculties, although very limited and defused, simply because she has not been encouraged to learn methods of thought and develop a disciplined mind. As long as education remains largely induction ignorance will retain these advantages over learning and it is time that women impudently put them to work."

"A woman's pleasure is not dependent upon the presence of a penis in the vagina; neither is a man's."

"After thirty years of feminism there is vastly more pornography disseminated more widely than ever before."

"After centuries of conditioning of the female into the condition of perpetual girlishness called femininity, we cannot remember what femaleness is. Though feminists have been arguing for years that there is a self-defining female energy, and a female libido that is not expressed merely in response to demands by the male, and a female way of being and of experiencing the world, we are still not close to understanding what it might be. Yet every mother who has held a girl child in her arms has known that she was different from a boy child and that she would approach the reality around her in a different way. She is a female and she will die female, and though many centuries should pass, archaeologists would identify her skeleton as the remains of a female creature."

"All colleges are elitist institutions. Colleges exist in order to form an elite. Single-sex colleges have the unique advantage that the women in them get to control their own environment, make their own rules, establish their own style and laugh at their own jokes."

"All modern warfare is carried out at the expense of civilian populations. Women's place in the conflict in Yugoslavia, in both Serbia and Kosovo, was as victims. And I would include the women soldiers who were carrying out orders that were unjust, and which they themselves did not understand. Any woman who agrees to fire shells tipped with depleted uranium into a country where the fallout will remain within the ecosystem so that generations yet unborn will suffer is a stooge and therefore a victim."

"All men hate some women some of the time and some men hate all women all of the time."

"All societies on the verge of death are masculine. A society can survive with only one man; no society will survive a shortage of women."

"All that remains to the mother in modern consumer society is the role of scapegoat; psychoanalysis uses huge amounts of money and time to persuade analysis and to foist their problems on to the absent mother, who has no opportunity to utter a word in her own defense. Hostility to the mother in our societies is an index of mental health."

"An enema under the influence of Ecstasy would probably feel much like this."

"Anti-apartheid movements have not necessarily got any connection with socialism unless the radicalization of people in them is taken up quite conscientiously by the people who are working in the movement."

"As Angelo discovered in Measure for Measure, nothing corrupts like virtue."

"As long as she is young and personable, every woman may cherish the dream that she may leap up the social ladder and dim the sheen of luxury by sheer natural loveliness; the few examples of such a feat are kept before the eye of the public."

"Australia is a huge rest home, where no unwelcome news is ever wafted on to the pages of the worst newspapers in the world."

"Bras are a ludicrous invention; but if you make bralessness a rule, you're just subjecting yourself to yet another repression."

"Consensus politics means that you cannot afford to give the many-headed beast, the public, anything to vote against, for voting against is what gargantuan pseudodemocracy has to come down to."

"Doctors, lawyers and even accountants have always understood that they would have to stand firm, functioning as a solid group protecting its own expertise and hence its earning capacity, from the tendency of all merchants to buy cheap and sell dear. They made of their special knowledge a rare and valuable commodity, insisted on a mystique and protected each other by an immovable professional code. They were cynical enough to know that if they were once cast in the role of public martyrs, working harder and more generously than most other groups of workers, they would be left with nothing but masochism, exhaustion and despair to show for it. Like successful trade unions, who have always worked on the principle that the job is worth whatever you can force the employer to pay for it and not a penny more or less, they understood that nobody was going to pay them their fees out of gratitude, that if they left it to the man whose life they had saved to pay them what he thought fit, they would wind up with half an old penny."

"Compulsory motherhood is not ennobling, although the friends of the foetus are at pains to point out that most women denied abortions end up loving their issue just the same. Whether they love them just the same as they would have if they had wanted them is of course unverifiable; most women are not so perverse and unjust as to punish their children for the crimes of society (their fathers), but the oppression of their circumstances is real notwithstanding. For the oppressors themselves to take credit for the women's magnanimity is sickeningly smug. The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement."

"Energy is the power that drives every human being. It is not lost by exertion but maintained by it, for it is a faculty of the psyche."

"English culture is basically homosexual in the sense that the men only really care about other men."

"Even crushed against his brother in the Tube the average Englishman pretends desperately that he is alone."

"Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity."

"Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful."

"Even when people write to me and say that they read The Female Eunuch and it changed their lives, they left their husbands, blah blah blah, I always write back to say it was not because of The Female Eunuch at all, it was the state you were in when the book appeared and catalyzed it. The book is the least significant thing about that."

"Every time a woman makes herself laugh at her husband's often-told jokes she betrays him. The man who looks at his woman and says ''What would I do without you?'' is already destroyed."

"Evolution is what it is. The upper classes have always died out; it's one of the most charming things about them."

"For a male child to become a man, he has to reject his mother. It's an essential part of masculinisation."

"Football is an art more central to our culture than anything the Arts Council deigns to recognize."

"Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother."

"Great artists are products of their own time: they do not spring forth fully equipped from the head of Jove, but are formed by the circumstances acting upon them since birth. These circumstances include the ambiance created by the other, lesser artists of their own time, who have all done their part in creating the pressure that forces up an exceptional talent. Unjustly, but unavoidably, the very closeness of a great artist to his colleagues and contemporaries leads to their eclipse."

"Great art, for those who insist upon this rather philistine concept (as if un-great art were unworthy of even their most casual and ill-informed attention), makes us stand back and admire. It rushes upon us pell-mell like the work of Rubens orTintoretto or Delacroix, or towers above us. There is of course another aesthetic: the art of a Vermeer or a Braque seeks not to amaze and appal but to invite the observer to come closer, to close with the painting, peer into it, become intimate with it. Such art reinforces human dignity."

"Gillard is as likeable as Rudd is charmless. She is self-deprecating; he is ludicrously vainglorious. She is a mistress of understatement; he is a ranter."

"I didn't fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover."

"I am interested in the counter culture, in many of its values, and I've gone out to bat for them more times than I can mention. But I'm deeply convinced, from my experience as a teacher and as a groupie and as all sorts of things, that the counter culture has not made any significant difference to the way of life of the working class. The so-called sexual revolution, permissiveness, cunnilingus being practiced in middle-class homes and so on, hasn't touched the working class at all...At all is a bit wrong-very much, maybe. They are still sexually deprived, they're deeply romantic about the family and about monogamy, and they're still deeply sadistic in their expressions of overt sexuality."

"How you answer the question, whether individuals should be persuaded to live their whole lives in a state of chemical dependency, first upon contraceptive steroids and then on replacement therapy, depends upon your regard for the autonomy of the individual. If men would not live their lives this way, why should women?"

"I do think that women could make politics irrelevant; by a kind of spontaneous cooperative action the like of which we have never seen; which is so far from people’s ideas of state structure or viable social structure that it seems to them like total anarchy — when what it really is, is very subtle forms of interrelation that do not follow some hierarchal pattern which is fundamentally patriarchal. The opposite to patriarchy is not matriarchy but fraternity, yet I think its women who are going to have to break this spiral of power and find the trick of cooperation."

"I have always been principally interested in men for sex. I've always thought any sane woman would be a lover of women because loving men is such a mess. I have always wished I'd fall in love with a woman. Damn."

"I have never expected very much of the counter culture. I was not surprised when the Jesus revolution appeared. I never expected anything of the heads, the LSD takers and the drug takers, and Timothy Leary will never be a significant political figure because he really thinks LSD liberates people. The only thing LSD does that might be of value in my terms is that it might make people aware of how oppressed they are, but it certainly won't liberate them."