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Gender Quotes


"When ready to settle down: women are more interested in where the man is going, men are more interested in where the woman has been."


"Amy's lecture did Laurie good, though, of course, he did not own it till long afterward. Men seldom do, for when women are the advisers, the lords of creation don't take the advice till they have persuaded themselves that it is just what they intended to do. Then they act upon it, and, if it succeeds, they give the weaker vessel half the credit of it. If it fails, they generously give her the whole."


"Many women do not join organized resistance against sexism precisely because sexism has not meant an absolute lack of choices. They may know they are discriminated against on the basis of sex, but they do not equate this with oppression. Under capitalism, patriarchy is structured so that sexism restricts women's behavior in some realms even as freedom from limitations is allowed in other spheres. The absence of extreme restrictions leads many women to ignore the areas in which they are exploited or discriminated against; it may even lead them to imagine that no women are oppressed."


"There is another version of the tale. That is the tale the women tell each other, in their private language that the men-children are not taught, and that the old men are too wise to learn. And in that version of the tale perhaps things happened differently. But then, that is a women's tale, and it is never told to men."


"Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue."


"The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should' be rather than recognizing how we are."


"Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event."


"There seems to be a fear that if men are raised to be people of integrity, people who can love, they will be unable to be forceful and act violently if needed.... We see that females that are raised with the traits any person of integrity embodies can act with tenderness, with assertiveness, and with aggression if and when aggression is needed."


"We must dare to face the way in which patriarchal thinking blinds everyone so that we cannot see that the emotional lives of boys cannot be fully honored as long as notions of patriarchal masculinity prevail. We cannot teach boys that "real men" either do not feel or do not express feelings, then expect boys to feel comfortable getting in touch with their feelings."


"Galileo, yet men turn around women!"


"It is quite certain that the skirt means female dignity, not female submission; it can be proved by the simplest of all tests. No ruler would deliberately dress up in the recognized fetters of a slave; no judge would would appear covered with broad arrows. But when men wish to be safely impressive, as judges, priests or kings, they do wear skirts, the long, trailing robes of female dignity. The whole world is under petticoat government; for even men wear petticoats when they wish to govern."



"Oh, I am so sick of the young men of the present day! exclaimed she, rattling away at the instrument. "Poor, puny things, not fit to stir a step beyond papa's park gates: nor to go even so far without mama's permission and guardianship! Creatures so absorbed in care about their pretty faces, and their white hands, and their small feet; as if a man had anything to do with beauty! As if loveliness were not the special prerogative of woman-her legitimate appanage and heritage! I grant an ugly woman is a blot on the fair face of creation; but as to the gentlemen, let them be solicitous to possess only strength and valour: let their motto be:-Hunt, shoot, and fight: the rest is not worth a fillip. Such should be my device, were I a man."


"The origin of the word gender means to bring forth and to sort or class. Somewhere along the way it was decided that a baby girl was second-class to a baby boy. That's just not true or right. By Divine design one gender cannot exist without the other. We are partners in life. When can we start acting like we can't live without each other because we can't?"


"I expect it will turn out that sexual intercourse is possible between Gethenian double-sexed and Hainish-norm one-sexed human beings, though such intercourse will inevitably be sterile. It remains to be proved; Estraven and I proved nothing except perhaps a rather subtler point."


"Women rescue men just as much as, if not more than, men rescue women."



"When women agree with me I always do the other thing."


"Not Eve:Under any condition, in any situation, a mature woman does not need to be checked by her man. She is not childish, but fully capable of [a] self check if she respects the wisdom given to her by The Most High; her name ain't Eve."


"And a woman by herself is missing a man, while a man by himself is his own master. Trousers. That's the secret. Trousers and a pair of socks. I never dreamed it was like this. Put on trousers and the world changes. We walk different. We act different. I see these girls and I think: Idiot's Get yourself some trousers!"


"Women are binding and men are commanding."


"When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women."


"Women can always put things in fewest words. Except when it's blowing up, and then they lengthens it out."


"A man's shortcoming lies in the belief that he must always assert his manliness. A woman's shortcoming lies in the belief that she must always repress it."


"The more clamour we make about 'the women's point of view', the more we rub it into people that the women's point of view is different, and frankly I do not think it is -- at least in my job. The line I always want to take is, that there is the 'point of view' of the reasonably enlightened human brain, and that this is the aspect of the matter which I am best fitted to uphold."


"In the Bible, a woman was made from a man. In real life, a man is made from a woman."


"To a misogynist: To err is woman."


"Women think they can act like evil monsters from hell and be loved like a princess. It's as if the dragon and the witch was in them and not in the world."


"What a hundred caring, courageous and conscientious women can achieve in ten years, would take a thousand men a hundred years."


"You see only the cat's paw, Signor Tartini, whereas I see the sharp claws hidden in that paw!.. Women are like fire; they warm you from afar, and when you enter into them they burn you to ashes!"


"Women most often have a difficult enemy and she is a woman and not a man."


"Some men are so indoctrinated that they sincerely believe that other than cooking and cleaning the only thing that a woman can do better than them is being a woman."
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