“The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.”
“Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.”
“Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.”
“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 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.”
“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.”
“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 themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.”
“There is no such thing as security. There never has been.”
“The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough.”
“Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity.”
“I didn't fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover.”
“The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy; nowadays it means rank subversion.”
“Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you. Security is the denial of life.”
“Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.”
“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.”
“What we ought to see in the agonies of puberty is the result of the conditioning that maims the female personality in creating the feminine.”
“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.”
“Only one thing is certain: if pot is legalized, it won't be for our benefit but for the authorities . To have it legalized will also be to lose control of it.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Every time a woman makes herself laugh at her husband's often-told jokes she betrays him. The man who looks at his woman and says ''What would I do without you?'' is already destroyed.”
“Older women can afford to agree that femininity is a charade, a matter of colored hair, ecru lace and whalebones, the kind of slap and tat that transvestites are in love with, and no more.”
“Yet if a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got? If she never takes off her high-heeled shoes, how will she ever know how far she could walk or how fast she could run?”
“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.”
“Women's liberation, if it abolishes the patriarchal family, will abolish a necessary substructure of the authoritarian state, and once that withers away Marx will have come true willy-nilly, so let's get on with it.”
“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 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.”
“Man made one grave mistake: in answer to vaguely reformist and humanitarian agitation he admitted women to politics and the professions. The conservatives who saw this as the undermining of our civilization and the end of the state and marriage were right after all; it is time for the demolition to begin.”
“Woman cannot be content with health and agility: she must make exorbitant efforts to appear something that never could exist without a diligent perversion of nature. Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate?”
“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, unorgastic, reliable, deep and long-lasting. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed.”