quotations about women
The prolonged slavery of woman is the darkest page in human history.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY
introduction, History of Woman Suffrage
No man was ever taken to hell by a woman unless he already had a ticket in his pocket.
REX STOUT
Some Buried Caesar
A lovely woman rolls up
The delicate bamboo blind.
She sits deep within,
Twitching her moth eyebrows.
Who may it be
That grieves her heart?
On her face one sees
Only the wet traces of tears.
LI BAI
"The Night of Sorrow"
Affection with some women amounts almost to disease.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
While a woman is losing confidence in a man she is usually reposing it in another.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
The world is full of women, and the women full of wile; so that a man, if he goeth not warily withal, shall surely fall a prey thereunto.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah
If thou makest a statement concerning women, lo, she shall immediately try to disprove it straightway. She goeth by contraries.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah
I've always felt there are two things a woman should never do after the age of thirty-five: stand in natural light and have a baby.
ERMA BOMBECK
Family: The Ties that Bind ... and Gag!
I tell you the women who make fervent wives
And sweet tender mothers, had Fate been less fair,
Are the women who might have abandoned their lives
To the madness that springs from and ends in despair.
As the fire on the hearth which sheds brightness around,
Neglected, may level the walls to the ground.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Angel or Demon"
Next to God we are indebted to women, first for life itself, and then for making it worth having.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
The wings of high-flying women are still being clipped by sexist stereotypes.
CAROLINE CRIADO-PEREZ
The Guardian, February 10, 2016
To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men.
JOHN BERGER
Ways of Seeing
There are two kinds of spiritual law, two kinds of conscience, one in man and another, altogether different, in woman. They do not understand each other; but in practical life the woman is judged by man's law, as though she were not a woman but a man.
HENRIK IBSEN
From Ibsen's Workshop
Women ... have long been discouraged from the awareness and forthright expression of anger. Sugar and spice are the ingredients from which we are made. We are the nurturers, the soothers, the peacemakers, and the steadiers of rocked boats.
HARRIET LERNER
The Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships
A woman's lot is made for her by the love she accepts.
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt
The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
The Philanderer
They often say woman cannot keep a secret, but every woman in the world, like every man, has a hundred secrets in her own soul which she hides from even herself. The more respectable she is, the more certain it is the secrets exist.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Prejudice, in which there is truth, does cast, throughout the world but especially in France, a great stigma on the woman with whom no man has been willing to share the blessings or endure the ills of life. Now, there comes to all unmarried women a period when the world, be it right or wrong, condemns them on the fact of this contempt, this rejection. If they are ugly, the goodness of their characters ought to have compensated for their natural imperfections; if, on the contrary, they are handsome, that fact argues that their misfortune has some serious cause. It is impossible to say which of the two classes is most deserving of rejection. If, on the other hand, their celibacy is deliberate, if it proceeds from a desire for independence, neither men nor mothers will forgive their disloyalty to womanly devotion, evidenced in their refusal to feed those passions which render their sex so affecting. To renounce the pangs of womanhood is to abjure its poetry and cease to merit the consolations to which mothers have inalienable rights.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
A woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view.
HENRIK IBSEN
From Ibsen's Workshop
My son, beware of a plain damsel who charmeth thee, for she needeth much wile, and useth diverse weapons.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah