quotations about women
Everywhere there is pleasure you will find a woman in disguise.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
It is possible, reading standard histories, to forget half the population of the country. The explorers were men, the landholders and merchants men, the political leaders men, the military figures men. The very invisibility of women, the overlooking of women, is a sign of their submerged status.
HOWARD ZINN
A People's History of the United States
For one to admire a woman merely for her beauty, is to love the building for its exterior; but to love one for the greatness of her soul, is to appreciate the tenement for its intrinsic value.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
Affection with some women amounts almost to disease.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
A woman's heart is much like the moon, always changing but always has a man in it.
GRENVILLE KLEISER
Dictionary of Proverbs
The change needed to restore good feeling cannot be reached by remanding women to the spinning wheel, and the contentment of her grandmother, but by conceding to her every right which the spirit of the age demands. Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY
introduction, History of Woman Suffrage
A woman does not spend all her time in buying things; she spends part of it in taking them back.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
Ah! What pleasure it must be to a woman to suffer for the one she loves!
HONORE DE BALZAC
Père Goriot
Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for survival and can scarcely be convicted of such manmade crimes as "cruelty."
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Tender Is the Night
With other women he had not been able to touch their flesh without experiencing the desire to devour it, as though ravenous with an abominable hunger to butcher them. But this one, could he then love her, and not kill her?
ÉMILE ZOLA
La Bête Humaine
Brother, do you know a nicer occupation,
Matter of fact, neither do I,
Than standing on the corner
Watching all the girls go by?
FRANK LOESSER
"Standing on the Corner"
Frailty, thy name is woman.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
The burning gaze of a young woman, such as hath tasted man, shall not escape me; for I have a spirit keen to mark these things.
AESCHYLUS
fragment, Toxotides
You all know that even when women have full rights, they still remain fatally downtrodden because all housework is left to them. In most cases housework is the most unproductive, the most barbarous and the most arduous work a woman can do. It is exceptionally petty and does not include anything that would in any way promote the development of the woman.
VLADIMIR LENIN
"The Tasks of the Working Women's Movement in the Soviet Republic", Collected Works
Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated.
JOHN BERGER
Ways of Seeing
A good woman's arms round a man's neck is a lifebelt thrown out to him from heaven.
JEROME K. JEROME
"A Charming Woman"
An artful or false woman shall set thy pillow with thorns.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
I have often felt that I would find it more complicated, troublesome and unpleasant to ascertain the feelings by which a woman lives than to plumb the innermost thoughts of an earthworm.
OSAMU DAZAI
No Longer Human
The original oppression of Woman was based on crude denigration. She caused Man to fall, so she became a scapegoat. No, not a scapegoat which might be blameless but a culprit richly deserving of whatever suffering Man chose thereafter to heap on her. That is Woman in the Book of Genesis. Out here, our ancestors, without the benefit of hearing about the Old Testament, made the very same story differing only in local color. At first the Sky was very close to the Earth. But every evening Woman cut off a piece of the Sky to put in her soup pot, or in another version, she repeatedly banged the top end of her pestle carelessly against the Sky whenever she pounded millet or, as in yet another rendering -- so prodigious is Man's inventiveness, she wiped her kitchen hands in the Sky's face. Whatever the detail of Woman's provocation, the Sky moved away in anger, and God with it.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Anthills of the Savannah
No man with any sense assumes that a woman's words mean to her exactly what they mean to him.
REX STOUT
The Mother Hunt