Great Throughts Treasury

"I mean, in Britain its two women a week killed by their partner. That's a shocking statistic."

"I think that testosterone is a rare poison"

"I think these things are so political you can't trust them at all. It's madness that I am on the list. It's absurd and completely unjustifiable. Their problem was they had to put an Australian on it. These lists are always so right-wing. It's like the Nobel prize, it is always 'people we can do business with'."

"If she'd been a man, I would have kicked her in the..."

"If the next time our governments propose to make war on a helpless civilian population we were to uncover our grief and guilt instead of our anger, how much difference might we make?"

"If a person loves only one other person, and is indifferent to his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism."

"If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your menstrual blood—if it makes you sick, you've a long way to go, baby."

"In the nuclear family the child is confronted by only two adults contrasted by sex. The tendency towards polarization is unavoidable. The duplication of effort in the nuclear family is directly connected to the family's role as the principal unit of consumption in consumer society. Each household is destined to acquire a complete set of all the consumer durables considered necessary for the good life and per caput consumption is therefore maintained at its highest level. In sex, as in consumption, the nuclear family emphasizes possession and exclusivity at the expense of the kinds of emotional relationships that work for co-operation and solidarity."

"In the struggle to remain a complete person and to love from her fullness instead of her inadequacy a woman may appear hard. She may feel her early conditioning tugging her in the direction of surrender, but she ought to remember that she was originally loved for herself; she ought to hang on to herself and not find herself nagging, helpless, irritable and trapped. Perhaps I am not old enough yet to promise that the self-reliant woman is always loved, but she cannot be lonely as long as there are people in the world who need her joy and her strength, but certainly in my experience it has always been so. Lovers who are free to go when they are restless always come back; lovers who are free to change remain interesting. The bitter animosity and obscenity of divorce is unknown where individuals have not become Siamese twins. A lover who comes to your bed of his own accord is more likely to sleep with his arms around you all night than a lover who has nowhere else to sleep."

"Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a sub-humanly ugly mate?"

"It has occurred to me as a feminist that Marx and Engels did not give adequate descriptions of sexual politics, that it is not enough to say that women must be incorporated in the productive process, because I can think of twenty countries where they have been essential to the productive process and they're still not given any kind of rights…Sexual politics is something upon which traditional Marxists seem to me to be deficient. Perhaps cultural politics, too, given the extraordinary power that the cultural media have now got."

"It is agreed that little girls should have a different physical education than little boys, but it is not admitted how much of the difference is counseled by the conviction that little girls should not look like little boys."

"It is fatally easy for Western folk, who have discarded chastity as a value for themselves, to suppose that it can have no value for anyone else. At the same time as Californians try to re-invent ''celibacy,'' by which they seem to mean perverse restraint, the rest of us call societies which place a high value on chastity ''backward.''"

"I'm not keen on definitions, because definitions build walls around the subject when what you want is for the subject to run free. In my version, a feminist is one who identifies herself as a woman before she identifies herself as belonging to any race or color or creed or class."

"In our society, the pre-adolescent girl, the nubile virgin, the sexually active woman, the mother and the grandmother are all expected to look and behave in the same way. The correct body outline for them all is girlish; their voices should remain sweet and low, their manner accommodating... Kicking off leg-lengthening high-heeled shoes, wiping the colored grease off your lips, raising your voice, letting the grey come through your hair, ceasing the simper that lifts your cheeks and letting your jowls settle into disapproving shapes is seen as letting yourself go."

"In Australia I think the problem is not that we have affluence but that we are brainwashed by an image of affluence, which doesn't really reflect the conditions of life of the majority if the people."

"In a sane society no woman would be left to struggle on her own with the huge transformation that is motherhood, when a single individual finds herself joined by an invisible umbilical cord to another person from whom she will never be separated, even by death."

"It is in our interests to let the police and their employers go on believing that the Underground is a conspiracy, because it increases their paranoia and their inability to deal with what is really happening. As long as they look for ringleaders and documents they will miss their mark, which is that proportion of every personality which belongs in the Underground."

"It is often falsely assumed, even by feminists, that sexuality is the enemy of the female who really wants to develop these aspects of her personality, and this is perhaps the most misleading aspect of movements like the National Organization of Women. It was not the insistence upon her sex that weakened the American woman student's desire to make something of her education, but the insistence upon a passive sexual role."

"It strikes me as very strange that whereas Tennyson could support most of Mr. Buckley's propositions about free trade, and the private sector, and private enterprise, Tennyson found no difficulty also in lending intellectual support to the idea of Women's Liberation."

"It was as if we were playing Manhunt. It was a kind of lethal darts match."

"It's absolutely philistine not to recognize what a great book 'An American Dream' is. Norman Mailer is his own worst enemy, and if you don't catch him in a defensive position, he'll admit it. I'd really like to help that man."

"It's also an oxymoron because what we see is not real,"

"It's much more important to radicalize the working class than to conduct a sort of Jesus campaign giving away your riches and climbing through the eye of a needle."

"Kinkiness comes from low energy. It's the substitution of lechery for lust."

"Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep and long-lasting. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed."

"Love, love, love -- all the wretched can't of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness."

"Man is jealous because of his amour propre; woman is jealous because of her lack of it."

"Man made one grave mistake: in answer to vaguely reformist and humanitarian agitation he admitted women to politics and the professions. The conservatives who saw this as the undermining of our civilization and the end of the state and marriage were right after all; it is time for the demolition to begin."

"Many a housewife staring at the back of her husband's newspaper, or listening to his breathing in bed is lonelier than any spinster in a rented room."

"Maybe I couldn’t make it. Maybe I don’t have a pretty smile, good teeth, nice tits, long legs, a cheeky arse, a sexy voice. Maybe I don’t know how to handle men and increase my market value, so that the rewards due to the feminine will accrue to me. Then again, maybe I’m sick of the masquerade. I’m sick of pretending eternal youth. I’m sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex. I’m sick of peering at the world through false eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs; I’m sick of weighting my head with a dead mane, unable to move my neck freely, terrified of rain, of wind, of dancing too vigorously in case I sweat into my lacquered curls. I’m sick of the Powder Room. I’m sick of pretending that some fatuous male’s self-important pronouncements are the objects of my undivided attention, I’m sick of going to films and plays when someone else wants to, and sick of having no opinions of my own about either. I’m sick of being a transvestite. I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate."

"Men have still not realized that letting women do so much of the work for so little reward makes a man in the house an expensive luxury rather than a necessity."

"Military mythology has to pretend that real men are in the majority; cowards can never be allowed to feel that they might be the normal ones and the heroes are insane."

"Monopoly capitalism and state capitalism don't look very different. I mean, General Motors employs more people than the population of many European states. Totalitarianism has many forms and monopoly capitalism seems to be one of them, especially when you look at the kind of ideological conformity demanded of the American employee."

"Mother is the dead heart of the family, spending father's earnings on consumer goods to enhance the environment in which he eats, sleeps and watches the television."

"Never advise anyone to go to war or to get married. Write down the advice of him who loves you, though you like it not at present. He that has no children brings them up well."

"Next time round Hitler will be a machine."

"No one goes to the toilet in novels. You'd think none of us had bladders."

"Nobody wants a girl whose beauty is imperceptible to all but him."

"Most women still need a room of their own and the only way to find it may be outside their own home."

"Marriage made more sense when it was indissoluble. It's the woman trying to cope with the strains of a one-parent family who will suffer most from the relaxation of the divorce laws."

"Most people die in improvised circumstances of harassment and confusion, whether in hospital or out of it."

"Older women can afford to agree that femininity is a charade, a matter of colored hair, écru lace and whalebones, the kind of slap and tat that transvestites are in love with, and no more."

"Once a paper admits any principle of censorship for survival, the we-don't-want-to-do-it-but-we-don't-want-to-lose-the-printer kind of censorship, it jeopardizes the integrity of its editorial principle. It's better to print and be damned, because you'll be damned anyway."

"One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night."

"One of my greatest struggles over the last 30 years has been to persuade women that they should be victims no longer -- in particular, when it comes to rape. Insofar as rape is the assault via the penis, it's one of the least destructive assaults. And it bugs me that women are still so impressed by the penis that they think it can destroy their personality and their life. Also, I wish that women were not so easily frightened by poor medical research, by sensationalist health journalism, whether about the risks to the fetus or the penalties for not using replacement estrogen, or about breast implants or about not having big-enough tits."

"Oh, because falling in love turns you into an immediate bore. And it's dreadful."

"Often paraphrased as: women have no idea how much men hate them."

"Only one thing is certain: if pot is legalized, it won't be for our benefit but for the authorities. To have it legalized will also be to lose control of it."

"Our whole lives are lived in a tangle of telling, not telling, misleading, allowing to know, concealing, eavesdropping and collusion. When Washington said he could not tell a lie, his father must have answered, 'You had better learn."