Great Throughts Treasury

"Perhaps catastrophe is the natural human environment, and even though we spend a good deal of energy trying to get away from it, we are programmed for survival amid catastrophe."

"Perhaps... women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism."

"Reading was my first solitary vice (and led to all others). I read while I ate, I read in the loo, I read in the bath. When I was supposed to be sleeping, I was reading."

"Perhaps women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism."

"Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release. The problem of recidivism ought to have shown young men like John Greenaway just what sort of a notion security is, but there is no indication that he would understand it. Security is when everything is settled, when nothing can happen to you; security is the denial of life. Human beings are better equipped to cope with disaster and hardship than they are with unvarying security, but as long as security is the highest value in a community they can have little opportunity to decide this for themselves."

"Psychoanalysis is the confession without absolution."

"Regardless of the dutiful pushing of condoms in the girls' press, the exposure of baby vaginas and cervixes to the penis is more likely to result in pregnancy and infection than orgasm."

"Sadism is the necessary outcome of the belief that one sex is passive and suffers sex at the hands of another. If we are to escape any of the hideous effects of this mythology, effects which include war and capital punishment, we must regain the power of the cunt."

"She became the character she was playing in an Ibsen play; she'd stalk around with grey hair. She was also the meanest woman in the world."

"Security is the denial of life."

"Status ought not to be measured by a woman's ability to attract and snare a man."

"Sadness is the matrix from which wit and irony spring; sadness is uncomfortable and creative, which is why consumer society cannot tolerate it."

"Sylvia Plath's greatest poetry was sometimes conceived while she was baking bread, she was such a perfectionist and ultimately such a fool. The trouble is, of course, that the role of the goddess, the role of the glory and the grandeur of the female in the universe exists in the fantasy of the male artist and no woman can ever draw it to her heart for comfort, but the role of menial, unfortunately, is real and that she knows because she tastes it every day. So the barbaric yoke of utter adoration for the power and the glory and the grandeur of the female in the universe is uttered at the expense of the particular living woman every time. And because we can be neither one nor the other with any piece of mind, because we are unfortunately improper goddesses and unwilling menials, there is a battle waged between us. And after all, in the description of this battle, maybe I find the justification of my idea that the achievement of the male artistic ego is at my expense for I find that the battle is dearer to him than the peace would ever be. The eternal battle with women, he boasts, sharpens our resistance, develops our strength, enlarges the scope of our cultural achievements. So is the scope after all worth it? Again, the same question, just as if we were talking of the income of a thousand families for a whole year. You see, I strongly suspect that when this revolution takes place, art will no longer be distinguished by its rarity, or its expense, or its inaccessibility, or the extraordinary way which in it is marketed, it will be the prerogative of all of us and we will do it as those artists did whom Freud understood not at all, the artists who made the Cathedral of Chartres or the mosaics of Byzantine, the artist who had no ego and no name."

"Super-groupies don't have to hang around hotel corridors. When you are one, as I have been, you get invited backstage."

"The blind conviction that we have to do something about other people's reproductive behavior, and that we may have to do it whether they like it or not, derives from the assumption that the world belongs to us, who have so expertly depleted its resources, rather than to them, who have not."

"The climacteric marks the end of apologizing. The chrysalis of conditioning has once for all to break and the female woman finally to emerge."

"The consequences of militancy do not disappear when the need for militancy is over. Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it."

"The compelled mother loves her child as the caged bird sings. The song does not justify the cage nor the love the enforcement."

"The distinction between work and play is wrong anyway. I mean, the natural state of human beings is to be active, and I would call that work regardless of whether they're playing hopscotch or producing boots."

"The element of heroic maleness had always been present in the concept of the artist as one who rides the winged horse above the clouds beyond the sight of lesser men, a concept seldom applied to those who worked with colors until the nineteenth century. When the inevitable question is asked, Why are there no great women artists? it is this dimension of art that is implied. The askers know little of art, but they know the seven wonders of the painting world."

"The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well. It is unlikely that the techniques of liberation spontaneously adopted by women will be in such fierce conflict as exists between warring self-interests and conflicting dogmas, for they will not seek to eliminate all systems but their own. However diverse they may be, they need not be utterly irreconcilable, because they will not be conquistatorial."

"The female eunuch is the woman who has been castrated in order to function as the feminine stereotype. That is, the glamorous, super-menial who is expected to be all things to all men, and nothing to herself."

"The house wife is an unpaid employee in her husband's house in return for the security of being a permanent employee."

"The few men who do a hand's turn around the house expect gratitude and recognition, so sure are they that, though it is their dirt, it is not their job."

"The housewife is only the greatest polluter in the community because she has to buy goods produced under monopoly conditions. She has to buy biscuits in bloody plastic containers that can't be destroyed."

"The love object occupies the thoughts of the person diagnosed as 'in love' all the time despite the probability that very little is actually known about it. To it are ascribed all qualities considered by the obsessed as good, regardless of whether the object in question possesses those qualities in any degree. Expectations are set up which no human being could fulfill. Thus the object chosen plays a special role in relation to the go of the obsessed, who decided that he or she is the right or the only person for him. In the case of a male this notion may sanction a degree of directly aggressive behavior either in pursuing the object or driving off competition."

"The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood."

"The libertarians may have a good deal of intellectual prestige in Sydney, but seeing that they speak in self-evident truths and tautologies most of the time it's not difficult for them to get intellectual recognition."

"The most cursory examination of even the most progressive organs of information reveals a curious inability to recognize women as newsmakers, unless they are young or married to a head of state or naked or pregnant by some triumph of technology or perpetrators or victims of some hideous crime or any combination of the above. Women's issues are often disguised as people issues, unless they are relegated to the women's pages which amazingly still survive. Senior figures are all male; even the few women who are deemed worthy of obituaries are shown in images from their youth, as if the last forty years of their lives have been without achievement of any kind. If you analyze the by-lines in your morning paper, you will see that the senior editorial staff are all older men, supported by a rabble of junior females, the infinitely replaceable 'hackettes'."

"The misery of the middle-aged woman is a gray and hopeless thing, born of having nothing to live for, of disappointment and resentment at having been gypped by consumer society, and surviving merely to be the butt of its unthinking scorn."

"The most powerful entities on earth are not governments but the multi-national corporations that see women as their territory, indoctrinating them with their versions of beauty, health and hygiene, medicating them and cultivating their dependency in order to medicate them some more."

"The most threatened group in human societies as in animal societies is the unmated male: the unmated male is more likely to wind up in prison or in an asylum or dead than his mated counterpart. He is less likely to be promoted at work and he is considered a poor credit risk."

"The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy; nowadays it means rank subversion."

"The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed."

"The term eunuchs was used by Eldridge Cleaver to describe blacks. It occurred to me that women were in a somewhat similar position. Blacks had been emancipated from slavery but never given any kind of meaningful freedom, while women were given the vote but denied sexual freedom. In the final analysis, women aren't really free until their libidos are recognized as separate entities. Some of the suffragettes understood this. They could see the connection among the vote, political power, independence and being able to express their sexuality according to their own experience, instead of in reference to a demand by somebody else. But they were regarded as crazy and were virtually crucified. Thinking about them, I suddenly realized, Christ, we've been castrated and that's what it's all about. You see, it's all very well to let a bullock out into the field when you've already cut his balls off, because you know he's not going to do anything. That's exactly what happened to women."

"The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough."

"The older woman's love is not love of herself, nor of herself mirrored in a lover's eyes, nor is it corrupted by need. It is a feeling of tenderness so still and deep and warm that it gilds every grass blade and blesses every fly. It includes the ones who have a claim on it, and a great deal else besides. I wouldn't have missed it for the world."

"The most unpardonable privilege that men enjoy is their magnanimity."

"The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love. This is not to say that fathers have no place, for father-love, with its driving for self-improvement and discipline, is also essential to survival, but that uncorrected father-love, father-love as it were practiced by both parents, is a way to annihilation."

"The principle of the brotherhood of man is ... narcissistic ... for the grounds for that love have always been the assumption that we ought to realize that we are the same the whole world over."

"The pain of sexual frustration, of repressed tenderness, of denied curiosity, of isolation in the ego, of greed, suppressed rebellion, of hatred poisoning all love and generosity, permeates our sexuality. What we love we destroy."

"The real theater of the sex war is the domestic hearth"

"There has come into existence, chiefly in America, a breed of men who claim to be feminists. They imagine that they have understood ''what women want'' and that they are capable of giving it to them. They help with the dishes at home and make their own coffee in the office, basking the while in the refulgent consciousness of virtue. Such men are apt to think of the true male feminists as utterly chauvinistic."

"There have been women in the past far more daring than we would need to be now, who ventured all and gained a little, but survived after all"

"There is no such thing as security. There never has been."

"They still say fuck you as a venomous insult; they still find cunt the most degrading epithet outside the dictionary."

"We can put women on Prozac and they will think they are happy, even though they are not. Disturbed animals in the zoo are given Prozac too, which rather suggests that misery is a response to unbearable circumstances rather than constitutional."

"We in the West do not refrain from childbirth because we are concerned about the population explosion or because we feel we cannot afford children, but because we do not like children."

"The treatment for jaded sensibilities is not to shatter them, after all."

"We still make love to organs and not people; that so far from realizing that people are never more idiosyncratic, never more totally there when they make love, we’re never more incommunicative, never more alone."