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

"I'm actually passionately opposed to double beds, they're probably more responsible for bad sex than any other single piece of furniture."

"This sequel to The Female Eunuch is the book I said I would never write."

"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 princip…"

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

"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 ju…"

"In that mysterious dimension where the body meets the soul the stereotype is born and has her being. She is more body than soul, more soul than mind. To her belongs all that is beautiful, even the ver…"

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

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

"Great art, for those who insist upon this rather philistine concept , makes us stand back and admire. It rushes upon us pell-mell like the work of Rubens or Tintoretto or Delacroix, or towers above us…"

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

"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, dep…"

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

"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 proxim…"

"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?"

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

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

"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 unbearabl…"

"The stereotype is the Eternal Feminine. She is the sexual object sought by all men, and all women. She is of neither sex for she herself has no sex at all. Her value is solely attested by the demand s…"

"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 connec…"

"With them she can discover cooperation, sympathy and love. The end cannot justify the means: if she finds that her revolutionary way leads only to further discipline and continuing incomprehension, wi…"

"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 tend…"

"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 sexual…"

"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, unorgas…"

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

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

"How do we form ourselves into an activity—a force to improve the situation? I don't have the answers. I'm an academic— the most useless people in the world."

"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…"

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

"The failure of women to produce great works of art and all that can be explained in terms of this statement. Insofar as she escapes or rejects her conditioning, the little girl may excel in those kind…"

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

"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."

"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."

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

"Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like them…"

"The blind conviction that we have to do something about other people’s reproductive behaviour, and that we may have to do it whether they like it or not, derives from the assumption that the world bel…"

"Women have very little idea of how much men hate them."

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

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

"Nothing is more chilling than such a spectacle of unremitting self-sacrifice. This is a woman born to be abandoned by her ungrateful husband at the very pinnacle of success she helped to make for him,…"

"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."

"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…"

"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."

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

"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…"

"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, me…"

"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 inclu…"

"While young fools of my generation produced terrifying symptoms by ingesting poisons of various synthetic kinds, I was taken to extraordinary realms by a bacillus carried from human excrement by a fly…"

"The principle of the brotherhood of man is that narcissistic one, 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."

"Next time round Hitler will be a machine."

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

"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."

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

"Women have somehow been separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire, from their sexuality. They've become suspicious about it. Like beasts, for example, who are castrated in farming in o…"

"Women have been charged with deviousness and duplicity since the dawn of civilization so they have never been able to pretend that their masks were anything but masks. It is a slender case but perhaps…"

"You're only young once, but you can be immature forever"