Marilyn French Quotes
To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.
Fear is a question. What are you afraid of and why? Our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.
The same men who are blind and deaf to feminism are acutely sensitive to what threatens their dominance and privilege.
My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of western civilization, to make it a feminist world.
The view of life as a struggle for power generates a language in which life has no significance and only power matters.
It's strange how men feel they have the right to criticize a woman's appearance to her face.
'I hate discussions of feminism that end up with who does the dishes,' she said. So do I. But at the end, there are always the damned dishes.
Control over a woman is the only form of dominance most men possess, for most men are merely subjects of more powerful men.
I have opened all the doors in my head. I have opened all the pores in my body. But only the tide rolls in.
Anyone determined to find another person or group inferior can always find whole lists of grounds that demonstrate inferiority because we are all inferior to the ideals of humanness we have erected.
Men's need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness; we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it.
When they kept you out it was because you were black; when they let you in, it is because you are black. That's progress?
Even disasters -- there are always disasters when you travel -- can be turned into adventures.
Nothing is ever simple. What do you do when you discover you like parts of the role you're trying to escape?
Habit is a good thing for the human race. ... You have to spend so much energy just getting through the day when you have no habits that you don't have any left for productive labor.
I believe that all human beings are equal. I believe that no one has the right to authority over anyone else.
It isn't success after all, is it, if it isn't an expression of your deepest energies?
Survival is an art. It requires the dulling of the mind and the senses, and a delicate attunement to waiting, without insisting on precision about just what it is you are waiting for.
in a way it doesn't matter whether you open doors or close them, you still end up in a box.
The very notion of superiority of one kind over another will have to disappear, although differences among kind will remain.
you can't equate passive dependent power with assertive power because the dependent kind isn't fun, it doesn't give you a kick, it just allows you to survive.
Desire consumes you, it takes you over. You forget yourself completely. All you can think about is the other, the one you desire, your self is just a fire.
In a great gasp, puts her head in her hands again and cries as if her throat were a cave, as if the howling winds came from her belly, she cries like a storm that will never end.
I'd discovered you never know yourself until you're tested and that you don't even know you're being tested until afterwards, and that in fact there isn't anyone giving the test except yourself.
There's power to: and everyone should have that, but everyone doesn't. Power to play Bach, or tennis, or boccie if you like. And there's power over; and no one should have that, but people do.
To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time any place more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.
All men are rapists, and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, their codes.