Feminism Criticism Quotes

For out of it all rose the vague, crude picture of woman as the prey of man. Man was animal, a composite of lust and cruelty, with no aim but that of brutally taking his pleasure: something monstrous, yet to be adored; annihilating, yet to be sought after; something to flee and, at the same time, to entice, with every art at one's disposal. ~ Henry Handel Richardson

Feminism is rooted in racial rights and gender rights, and all of those things intersect, and to say that that's not something you can stand behind - it confuses me. I think it's a really great word. ~ Mackenzie Davis

I would have assumed you understood, despite our vague suggestions otherwise, we do not welcome constructive criticism. ~ David Thorne

In the back of the fridge I checked out some stewed apples destined to fester. I examined them closely and reckoned they had only a day to go, even by my standards. I spooned the apples into tiny bowls, tossed in some dried fruit and sprinkled them with crumble topping. Delicious, they said that night, scraping the bowls so clean they hardly needed to go in the dishwasher. The fools. ~ Helen Brown

If the Constitution doesn't say anything about a woman's right to abortion, I'm damn sure it doesn't say anything about the rights of the unborn. ~ Israel Morrow

You deserve to be here. You deserve to exist. You deserve to take up space in this world of men. ~ Mackenzi Lee

Those who make uncritical observations or fraudulent claims lead us into error and deflect us from the major human goal of understanding how the world works. It is for this reason that playing fast and loose with the truth is a very serious matter. ~ Carl Sagan

Apparently, faith in life is one thing and faith in literature is another. ~ Gerald Weaver

People who quoted the Scriptures in criticism of others were terrible bores and usually they misapplied the text. One could prove anything against anyone from the Bible. ~ Muriel Spark

The Two Towers especially, and the first part of The Return of the King, have a structure reminiscent on a large scale of 'The Council of Elrond' on a small one. The word that describes the structure is 'interlace'. Tolkien certainly knew the word, for it has become a commonplace of Beowulf-criticism, but he may not have liked it much: it is associated also with the structure of French prose romance, in which he took little interest. However, Tolkien certainly also knew that the Icelandic word for a short story is a Þáttr, literally a thread. One could say that several Þaettir, or threads, twisted round each other, make up a saga; and Gandalf comes close to saying something like that when he says to Théoden, 'There are children in your land who, out of the twisted threads of story, could pick the answer to your question' (my emphasis). Tolkien may have felt that there had been all along a native version of the French technique of entrelacement, even if we no longer know the native word for it. But word, or no word, he was going to do it. ~ Tom Shippey

something about the phrase - something about
how i have to be unlike the women
i call sisters in order to be wanted
makes me want to spit your tongue out ~ Rupi Kaur

Women at the top are the ones chosen to be there by men and not eliminated by women, a dual filter that excludes most witches: those with brilliance and originality and those capable of disturbing the status quo. ~ Heather Marsh

Criticism is the art of appraising others at one's own value. ~ George Jean Nathan

Women, for their part, are always complaining that we raise them only to be vain and coquettish, that we keep them amused with trifles so that we may more easily remain their masters; they blame us for the faults we attribute to them. What stupidity! And since when is it men who concern themselves with the education of girls? Who is preventing the mothers from raising them as they please? There are no schools for girls - what a tragedy! Would God, there were none for boys! They would be raised more sensibly and more straightforwardly. Is anyone forcing your daughters to waste their time on foolish trifles? Are they forced against their will to spend half their lives on their appearance, following your example? Are you prevented from instructing them, or having them instructed according to your wishes? Is it our fault if they please us when they are beautiful, if their airs and graces seduce us, if the art they learn from you attracts and flatters us, if we like to see them tastefully attired, if we let them display at leisure the weapons with which they subjugate us? Well then, decide to raise them like men; the men will gladly agree; the more women want to resemble them, the less women will govern them, and then men will truly be the masters. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

He who would acquire fame must not show himself afraid of censure. The dread of censure is the death of genius. ~ William Gilmore Simms

Eliza has no use for the foolish romantic tradition that all women love to be mastered, if not actually bullied and beaten. ~ George Bernard Shaw

But Friedan and Greer's movement had passed them by: rape hysteria became fully integrated into mainstream feminism, resulting in such events as the so-called Take Back the Night rallies at colleges around America, which are premised on the idea that when darkness falls over the quad, male students metamorphose, werewolf-like, into potential rapists. ~ Bruce Bawer

I am not sure whether you could call this abuse, but when I was (long ago) abroad in the world of dry men, I saw parents, usually upscale and educated and talented and functional and white, patient and loving and supportive and concerned and involved in their children's lives, profilgate with compliments and diplomatic with constructive criticism, loquacious in their pronouncements of unconditional love for and approval of their children, conforming to every last jot-tittle in any conceivably definition of a good parent, I saw parent after unimpeachable parent who raised kids who were (a) emotionally retarded or (b) lethally self-indulgent or (c) chronically depressed or (d) borderline psychotic or (e) consumed with narcissistic self-loathing or (f) neurotically driven/addicted or (g) variously psychosomatically Disabled or (h) some conjunctive permutation of (a) … (g).

Why is this. Why do many parents who seem relentlessly bent on producing children who feel they are good persons deserving of love produce children who grow to feel they are hideous persons not deserving of love who just happen to have lucked into having parents so marvelous that the parents love them even though they are hideous?

Is it a sign of abuse if a mother produces a child who believes not that he is innately beautiful and lovable and deserving of magnificent maternal treatment but somehow that he is a hideous unlovable child who has somehow lucked in to having a really magnificen ~ David Foster Wallace

By failing to take note of the gifts of modernity, social critics poison voters against responsible custodians and incremental reformers who can consolidate the tremendous progress we have enjoyed and strengthen the conditions that will bring us more. ~ Steven Pinker

Though I did not have the statistics, just observing the number of women on the streets during peak hours dressed for work, it was obvious that a greater percentage of women in Vanni went to work outside the home. There were also more women in civilian clothes riding motorbikes on Vanni roads compared to the rest of the island. Women, both LTTE members as well as civilians, occupied the public space in large numbers. They were very visible on the roads and in the LTTE institutions. This gave Vanni a uniquely pro-woman character, which was absent elsewhere on the island. ...

It was a unique kind of feminism, created by connecting the majority of women living all over Vanni, from all walks of life, for public action regarding women and children in need of help ~ N. Malathy

It never occurs to one to think whether she is pretty or ugly. One just surrenders to her charm. ~ Francois Mauriac

Romantic love as most people understand it in patriarchal culture makes one unaware, renders one powerless and out of control. Feminist thinkers called attention to the way this notion of love served the interests of patriarchal men and women. It supported the notion that one could do anything in the name of love: beat people, restrict their movements, even kill them and call it a "crime of passion," plead, "I love her so much i had to kill her. ~ Bell Hooks

It seems to me that I cannot afford, as a self-respecting individual, to refuse to do a thing merely because it will make me disliked or bring down a storm of criticism on my head. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

The tiniest criticism or put-down soaks into me and lies in my heart like a stone. Sometimes that spurs me on to work harder, but sometimes it just fills me up with sadness. ~ Cathy Cassidy

According to Mark 11:12-13, God's messengers were not the only ones who were incompetent: 'He [Jesus] was hungry. And on seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see if he could find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs.'
Imagine Jesus, the divine, holy, wisest of the wise not knowing that figs were out of season. Now allegedly Jesus could have performed a miracle and made figs magically appear, but he preferred sour grapes instead: Then he said to the tree, 'May no one ever eat fruit from you again.' (Mark 11:14) ~ G.M. Jackson

One of the first books of travel, giving European readers some insight into the unfamiliar world of the Orient, was published in 1356-67 in Anglo-Norman French. Called simply Travels, it was said to be by Sir John Mandeville, but a French historian, Jean d'Outremeuse, may well have written the book. It is a highly entertaining guide for pilgrims to the Holy Land, but goes beyond, taking the reader as far as Tartary, Persia, India and Egypt, recounting more fantasy than fact, but containing geographical details to give the work credence.

Mandeville's book whetted the Western European reader's appetite for the travel book as a journal of marvels: dry scientific detail was not what these readers wanted. Rather it was imagination plus information. Thus, myths of 'the fountain of youth' and of gold-dust lying around 'like ant-hills' caught the Western imagination, and, when the voyagers of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries found 'new worlds' in the Americas, these myths were enlarged and expanded, as Eldorado joined the Golden Road to Samarkand in the imagination of readers concerning distant lands. ~ Ronald Carter

Americans are finally coming to a point where they're accepting of religious criticism, is because George Bush is the first president who really put religion so front-and-center. He's the most Christ-y president we've ever had - and he is, not uncoincidentally, the biggest disaster we've ever had. I think even people who are religious don't like it shoved down their throat. I think people kind of get it on a certain level, that this is an antiscience administration, and we're living in a time where we can't afford to be antiscience - for environmental reasons, for educational reasons. ~ Bill Maher

Water inflated the belly
Of Hart Crane, and of Shelley.
Coleridge was a dope.
Southwell died on a rope. ~ Roy Fuller

To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren't is to learn inequality in little ways all day long. So even if we agree that sexual imagery is in fact a language, it is clearly one that is already heavily edited to protect men's sexual
and hence social
confidence while undermining that of women. ~ Naomi Wolf

I don't like compliments. No. I prefer criticisms; prefer to prove them wrong ~ Paul Scholes

I may feel that without some recognizability I cannot live. But I may also feel that the terms by which I am recognized make life unlivable. This is the juncture from which critique emerges, where critique is understood as an interrogation of the terms by which life is constrained in order to open up the possibility of different modes of living; in other words, not to celebrate difference as such but to establish more inclusive conditions for sheltering and maintaining life that resists models of assimilation. ~ Judith Butler

Why should anyone raise an eyebrow because a latter-day Einstein's wife expects her husband to put aside that lifeless theory of relativity and help her with the work that is supposed to be the essence of life itself: diaper the baby and don't forge to rinse the soiled diaper in the toilet paper before putting it in the diaper pail, and then wax the kitchen floor. ~ Betty Friedan

I understand feminism to be a social savior because it liberates everyone without exclusion, whereas masculinism damns itself by measuring a man's health by the amount of sexual gratification he receives. ~ Morrissey

The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly as necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

We must stand together and resist all such incursion! We must come together in brotherhood and toss out those like you - women who take a man's job, who rob a man of the ability to feed his family."
"Who is 'we'?" Jessica peered at the empty green hedge behind him. "You appear to be alone."

"I speak for all working men! ~ Courtney Cole

Because when you kiss your first boy or girl, you don't want to be so caught up in your lack of self-worth that you forget to enjoy the kiss, that you forget that you deserve the pleasure of that moment. You don't want to be so caught up in your lack of self-worth that you become an object of his or her desire, a grateful unworthy slave to his or her attention. ~ Jamie Le Fay

Feminism is small revolutions, every day ~ Manju Kapur

Critical feedback shared in good faith is inherently a constructive dialogue. A "critique," a term that is both a noun and a verb, represents the systematical application of critical thought, a disciplined method of analysis, expressing of opinions, and rendering judgments. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Your beauty is not a tax you are required to pay to take up space in this world. ~ Mackenzi Lee

But radical feminist or not, Alesha Parkhurst loved British freedoms as much as Karen Andersen. ~ Louise Burfitt-Dons

My father did not have to trade dying alone for the joys of the road. My mother did not have to give up a journey of her own to have a home. Neither do I. Neither do you. ~ Gloria Steinem

Modern feminism cannot survive without victims. ~ Katie Pavlich

Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all! ~ Henry James

Now that I think about it, it seems to me that's what Idiocy is: the ability to be enthusiastic all the time about anything you like, so that a drawing on the wall does not have to be diminished by the memory of the frescoes of Giotto in Padua. ~ Julio Cortazar

When did feminism become confused with Buddhism? Why on earth have I, because I'm a woman, got to be nice to everyone? And why have women - on top of everything else - got to be particularly careful to be "lovely" and "supportive" to each other at all times? This idea of the "sisterhood" I find, frankly, illogical, I don't build in a 20 percent "Genital Similarity Regard Bonus" if I meet someone else wearing a bra. If someone's an arsehole, someone's an arsehole - regardless of whether we're both standing in the longer ~ Caitlin Moran