You’re only young once, but you can be immature forever
…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.
Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful.
A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.
Half the point in reading novels and seeing plays and films is to exercise the faculty of sympathy with our own kind, so often obliterated in the multifarious controls and compulsions of actual social existence.
Liberty is terrifying but it is also exhilarating.
The woman who realizes that she is bound by a million Lilliputian threads in an attitude of impotence and hatred masquerading as tranquility and love has no option but to run away, if she is not to be corrupted and extinguished utterly.
The second class status of marriage became one of the principal issues in the Reformation. Martin Luther, the Augustinian friar, had barely posted his ninety-five theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg when he took himself a wife.
Now as before, women must refuse to be meek and guileful, for truth cannot be served by dissimulation. Women who fancy that they manipulate the world by pussy power and gentle cajolery are fools. It is slavery to have to adopt such tactics.
If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role then we are lost indeed.
Psychologists cannot fix the world so they fix women.
The vagina is obliterated from the imagery of femininity in the same way that the signs of independence and vigor in the rest of her body are suppressed.
The stereotype is the Eternal Feminine. She is the Sexual Object sought by all men, and by all woman. She is of neither sex, for she has herself no sex at all. Her value is solely attested by the demand she excites in others.
A housewife’s work has no results: it simply has to be done again. Bringing up children is not a real occupation, because children come up just the same, brought up or not.
If she is efficient and capable or ambitious, it is assumed that she has failed to find satisfaction as a normal woman, even to the extent of implying a glandular abnormality or sexual perversion.
Men are the enemy in much the same way that some crazed boy in uniform was the enemy of another like him in most respects except the uniform. One possible tactic is to try to get the uniforms off.
Those miserable women who blame the men who let them down for their misery and isolation enact every day the initial mistake of sacrificing their personal responsibility for themselves.
Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women’s bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them.
The occupational hazard of being a Playboy Bunny is the aching facial muscles brought on by obligatory smiles.
It is agreed that ‘girls take more bringing up’ than boys: what that really means is that girls must be more relentlessly supervised and repressed if the desired result is to ensue.
It [childbearing] was never intended to be as time-consuming and self-conscious a process as it is. One of the deepest evils in our society is tyrannical nurturance.
We can only afford two children’ is a squalid argument, but more acceptable in our society than ‘we don’t like children’.
If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood – if it makes you sick, you’ve got a long way to go, baby.
Sorrow is not itself evidence of maladjustment but of the adjustment process itself.
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 … In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and abso
Human beings love, despite their compulsions to limit it and exploit it chaotically. Their love persuades them to make vows, build houses and turn their passion ultimately to duty.
It was not until much later when, after a deep and satisfying orgasm, I suddenly realised the true meaning of the fairy tale and the nature of the magic kiss of which it speaks.
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.
The only causes of regret are laziness outbursts of temper hurting others prejudice jealousy and envy.
Most women still need a room of their own and the only way to find it may be outside their own home.
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.
Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity.
Until women themselves reject stigma and refuse to feel shame for the way others treat them, they have no hope of achieving full human stature.
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.
The real theater of the sex war is the domestic hearth.
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.
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.
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.
The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy nowadays it means rank subversion.
I didn’t fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover.
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.
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.
Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.
Man is jealous because of his amour propre woman is jealous because of her lack of it.
Women are reputed never to be disgusted. The sad fact is that they often are, but not with men; following the lead of men, they are most often disgusted with themselves.
Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.