"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."

"The housewife is an unpaid worker in her husband's house in return for the security of being a permanent employee: hers is the reductio ad absurdum of the employee who accepts a lower wage in return for permanence of his employment. But the lowest paid employees can be and are laid off, and so are wives. They have no savings, no skills which they can bargain with elsewhere, and they must bear the stigma of having been sacked."

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

"The point of an organi family is to release the children from the disadvantages of being extensions of their parents so that they can belong primarily to themselves. They may accept the services that adults perform for them naturally without establishing dependencies."

"A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity."

"Evolution is what it is. The upper classes have always died out; it's one of the most charming things about them."

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

"We can only afford two children' is a squalid argument, but more acceptable in our society than 'we don't like children'."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Guilt is one side of a nasty triangle, the other two are shame and stigma. This grim coalition combines to inculpate women themselves of the crimes committed against them."

"Developing the muscles of the soul demands no competitive spirit, no killer instinct, although it may erect pain barriers that the spiritual athlete must crash through."

"The problem of the survival of humanity is not a matter of ensuring the birth of future generations but of limiting it. The immediate danger to humanity is that of total annihilation within a generation or two, not the failure of mankind to breed. A woman seeking alternative modes of life is no longer morally bound to pay her debt to nature."

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

"Every wife who slaves to keep herself pretty, to cook her husband's favourite meals, to build up his pride and confidence in himself at the expense of his sense of reality, to be his closest and effectively his only friend, to encourage him to rejectthe consensus of opinionand find reassurance only in her arms is binding her mate to her with hoops of steel that will strangle them both."

"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."

"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 occupational hazard of being a Playboy Bunny is the aching facial muscles brought on by obligatory smiles."

"If a person loves only one other person, and is indifferent to his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism."

"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 only causes of regret are laziness outbursts of temper hurting others prejudice jealousy and envy."

"Psychoanalysis is the confession without absolution."

"Marriage cannot be a job as it has become."

"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."

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

"The Poison Maiden has conceived by him, and is plumb ready to enter the divine category of mother, only one last fiend clubs her to death. The final clinch of male romanticism is that each man kills the thing he loves; whether she be Catharine in A Farewell to Arms, or the Grecian Urn, the 'tension that she be perfect' means that she must die, leavinf the hero's status as a great lover unchallenged. The pattern is still commonplace: the hero cannot marry. The sexual exploit must be conquest, not cohabitation and mutual tolerance."

"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."

"In the popular imagination hairiness is like furriness, an index of bestiality, and as such an indication of aggressive sexuality. Men cultivate it, just as they are encouraged to develop competitive and aggressive instincts, women suppress it, just as they suppress all the aspects of their vigour and libido."

"Most women still need a room of their own and the only way to find it may be outside their own home."

"When abandoned women follow their fleeing males with tear-stained faces, screaming you can't do this to me, they reveal that all that they have offered in the name of generosity and altruism has been part of an assumed transaction, in which they were entitled to a certain payoff."

"Properly speaking, altruism is an absurdity. Women are self-sacrificing in direct proportion to their incapacity to offer anything but this sacrifice. They sacrifice what they never had: a self. The cry of the deserted woman, 'What have I done to deserve this?' reveals at once the false emotional economy that she has been following."

"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."

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

"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."

"Liberty is terrifying but it is also exhilarating."

"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."

"A child must have care and attention, but that care and attention need not emanate from a single, permanently present individual. Children are more disturbed by changes of place than by changes in personnel around them, and more distressed by friction and ill-feeling between the adults in their environment than by unfamiliarity."

"Thirty years on, femininity is still compulsory for women-and has become an option for men-while genuine femaleness remains grotesque to the point of obscenity. Meanwhile, the price of the small advances we have made towards sexual equality has been the denial of femaleness as any kind of a distinguishing character."

"If female liberation is to happen, if the reservoir of real female love is to be tapped, this sterile self-deception must be counteracted. The only literary form which could outsell romantic trash on the female market is hard-core pornography."

"If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role then we are lost indeed. If women can supply no counterbalance to the blindness of male drive the aggressive society will run to its lunatic extremes at ever-escalating speed. Who will safeguard the despised animal faculties of compassion, empathy, innocence and sensuality?"

"Australia is a huge rest home, where no unwelcome news is ever wafted on to the pages of the worst newspapers in the world."

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

"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."

"Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful."

"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."

"English culture is basically homosexual in the sense that the men only really care about other men."

"Abandonment of slavery is also the banishment of the chimera of security. The world will not change overnight, and liberation will not happen unless individual women agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts, and whatever the powers-that-be choose to call them."

"Rather than seek to be squired and dated by their rivals why should it not be possible for women to find relaxation and pleasure in the company of their 'inferiors'? They would need to shed their desperate need to admire a man, and accept the gentler role of loving him. A learned woman cannot castrate a truck-driver like she can her intellectual rival, because he has no exaggerated respect for her bookish capacities. The alternative to conventional education is not stupidity, and many a clever girl needs the corrective of a humbler soul's genuine wisdom."