Selected Marilyn French Quotations
• My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of western civilization, to make it a feminist world.
• Feminism isn't a question of what kind of genitals you possess, it's a kind of moral view. It's what you think with your head and feel with your heart.
• (Feminism defined): the belief that women matter as much as men do.
• "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.
• 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.
• 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 seem unable to feel equal to women: they must be superior or they are inferior.
• 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.
• Men stumble over pebbles, never over mountains.
• Everywhere in the world, men place all or most of the burden of raising children and maintaining the home on women, but pretend that this burden is not work; they do not reward it as work or count it as work in global accounting....
• Women are afraid in a world in which almost half the population bears the guise of the predator, in which no factor -- age, dress, or color-distinguishes a man who will harm a woman from one who will not.
• Whatever they may be in public life, whatever their relations with men, in their relations with women, all men are rapists and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, their codes.
• 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?
• Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that. It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion and self-destruction. You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you can't even think straight.
• Nothing is ever simple. What do you do when you discover you like parts of the role you're trying to escape?
• Fear is a question. What are you afraid of and why? Our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.
• Oh, God, why don't I remember that a little chaos is good for the soul?
• One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.
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About These Quotes
Quote collection assembled by Jone Johnson Lewis. Each quotation page in this collection and the entire collection © Jone Johnson Lewis 1997-2009. This is an informal collection assembled over many years. I regret that I am not be able to provide the original source if it is not listed with the quote.
Citation information:
Jone Johnson Lewis. "Marilyn French Quotes." About Women's History. URL: http://womenshistory.about.com/od/quotes/a/marilyn_french.htm . Date accessed: (today). (More on how to cite online sources including this page)
