Sexist Language Quotes

I feel compelled to make another 'nonapology.' Many readers are likely to be concerned about my use of masculine pronouns in relation to God. I think I both understand and appreciate this concern. It is a matter to which I have given much thought. I have generally been a strong supporter of the women's movement and action that is reasonable to combat sexist language. But first of all, God is not neuter. He is exploding with life and love and even sexuality of a sort. So 'It' is not appropriate. Certainly I consider God androgynous. He is as gentle and tender and nurturing and maternal as any woman could ever be. Nonetheless, culturally determined though it may be, I subjectively experience His reality as more masculine than feminine. While He nurtures us, He also desires to penetrate us, and while we more often than not flee from His love like a reluctant virgin, He chases after us with a vigor in the hunt that we most typically associate with males. As CS Lewis put it, in relation to God we are all female. Moreover, whatever our gender or conscious theology, it is our duty---our obligation---in response to His love to attempt to give birth, like Mary, to Christ in ourselves and in others.

"I shall, however, break with tradition and use the neuter for Satan. While I know Satan to be lustful to penetrate us, I have not in the least experienced this desire as sexual or creative---only hateful and destructive. It is hard to determine the sex of a snake. ~ M. Scott Peck

People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations. ~ Daniel Kahneman

Sexist language promotes and maintains attitudes that stereotype people according to gender while assuming that the male is the norm - the significant gender. Nonsexist language treats both sexes equally and either does not refer to a person's sex when it is irrelevant or refers to men and women and to girls and boys in symmetrical ways. ~ Rosalie Maggio

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek - it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.
- Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture, 1993 ~ Toni Morrison

Not only is the actual word "hysteria" gendered - it once referred to an exclusively female disease, a mental illness thought to be caused by a malfunctioning uterus - there is a very long history of critics using accusations or innuendo about women's mental health or emotional stability in order to shut down their political voices. ~ Sady Doyle

C++ is in that inconvenient spot where it doesn't help make things simple enough to be truly usable for prototyping or simple GUI programming, and yet isn't the lean system programming language that C is that actively encourages you to use simple and direct constructs. ~ Linus Torvalds

All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a share past ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech. ~ John Steinbeck

Each of you possesses the most powerful, dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised. It's a piece of neural audio technology for rewiring other people's minds. I'm talking about your language. ~ Mark Pagel

Rather they are largely related to an underdeveloped brain, for the areas that govern social awareness, empathy, and related language skills are not fully operational until we're about thirty years old. Despite this neurological handicap, scientific research shows that anyone - young or old - can exercise the language and social-awareness centers of the brain in ways that will enhance their capacity to communicate more effectively with others. ~ Andrew B. Newberg

The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor. ~ Thomas Carlyle

Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter. ~ Charles Baudelaire

I can hear the library humming in the night,
a choir of authors murmuring inside their books
along the unlit, alphabetical shelves,
Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son,
each one stitched into his own private coat,
together forming a low, gigantic chord of language. ~ Billy Collins

You have friends who actually care about you and speak the language of the inner self. You have avoided them of late. Your soul is as disheveled as your apartment, and until you can clean it up a little you don't want to invite anyone inside. ~ Jay McInerney

I thought that it was more likely the opposite. I must have shut grief out. Found it in books. Cried over fiction instead of the truth. The truth was unconfined, unadorned. There was no poetic language to it, no yellow butterflies, no epic floods. There wasn't a town trapped underwater or generations of men with the same name destined to make the same mistakes. The truth was vast enough to drown in. ~ Nina LaCour

As soon as we conform anything to language, we've changed it. Use a word and you've altered the world. The poets know this. It's what they try so hard to avoid. ~ Ethan Canin

With languages, you can move from one social situation to another. With languages, you are at home anywhere. ~ Edmund De Waal

He left Chainsaw behind, much to her irritation. Ronan didn't want her to learn any bad language. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. ~ Annie Dillard

They met near the southern limit of the establishment grounds and for a while they spoke in an abbreviated and Aesopic language. They understood each other well, with many decades of communication behind them, and it was not necessary for them to involve themselves in all the elaboration's of human speech.

Daneel said in an all but unhearable whisper, "Clouds. Unseen."

Had Daneel been speaking for human ears, he would have said, "As you see, friend Giskard, the sky has clouded up. Had Madam Gladia waited her chance to see Solaria, she would not, in any case, have succeeded."

And Giskard's reply of "Predicted. Interview, rather," was the equivalent of "So much was predicted in the weather forecast, friend Daneel, and might have been used as an excuse to get Madam Gladia to bed early. It seemed to me to be more important, however, to meet the problem squarely and to persuade her to permit this interview I have already told you about. ~ Isaac Asimov

it's the way he uses language - which is nothing like the way fantasists used language before him. There's no sense of nostalgia. There's no medieval floridness. There's no fairy tale condescension to the child reader. It's very straight, and very clean - there's no Vaseline on the lens. You see everything clearly, not with sparkles or a flowery sense of wonderment, but with very specific physical details. ~ Joe Fassler

Language is a personality as well. People are different when they speak different languages. ~ David Bezmozgis

Once you know the Romance languages, singing in those languages is so sexy and sensual. I do have a global audience, so why not? ~ Gloria Estefan

I'm online, therefore I am. ~ Stewart Lee Beck

In the very earliest times, when both people and animals lived on earth, a person could become an animal if he wanted to, and an animal could become a human being. Sometimes they were people and sometimes animals and there was no difference. All spoke the same language. That was the time when words were like magic. NALUNGLAQ, A NETSILIK ESKIMO ~ Virginia Morell

If you want to relate to a certain audience or generation, you have to speak their language. I truly believe that. ~ Erykah Badu

A tale should be judicious, clear, succinct; The language plain, and incidents well link'd; Tell not as new what ev'ry body knows; and, new or old, still hasten to a close. ~ William Cowper

The wolf said, "You know, my dear, it isn't safe for a little girl to walk through these woods alone."
Red Riding Hood said, "I find your sexist remark offensive in the extreme, but I will ignore it because of your traditional status as an outcast from society, the stress of which has caused you to develop your own, entirely valid, worldview. Now, if you'll excuse me, I must be on my way. ~ James Finn Garner

I believe that music is a spiritual language. My everyday self is pretty mundane and boring, but when I'm making music it allows for me to communicate a kind of transcendence that I can't communicate otherwise. ~ Sufjan Stevens

How often a mother initiates a conversation with her child is not predictive of the language outcomes - what matters is, if the infant initiates, whether the mom responds. ~ Po Bronson

I dreamed of going to the most remote places on this earth to dig for old bones, older than people. Before humans and their stupid ideas. Before hate. Maybe even before love, too. Dinosaurs just existed. No lectures, no books, no language. No world-conquering Europeans and no defeated everybody else. Just those powerful, unrestrained creatures roaming the planet. ~ Ibi Zoboi

He still read copy as if it were Braille; bumps in the language letting him know when ~ Mick Herron

I can admire the solemn and stately language of worship that recognizes the greatness of God, but it will not warm my heart or express my soul until it has also blended therewith the joyful nearness of that perfect love that casts out fear and ventures to speak with our Father in heaven as a child speaks with its father on earth. My brother, no veil remains. ~ Charles Spurgeon

It is commonplace to talk as if the world "has" meaning, to ask what "is" the meaning of a phrase, a gesture, a painting, a contract. Yet when thought about, it is clear that events are devoid of meaning until someone assigns it to them. ~ Dean C. Barnlund

And in front of it all are the pearly gates: the proverbial entrance to Heaven that she, in earthly life, thought might not exist. But they are real, not myth or fantasy.
As she passes through them, several people greet her. In foreign tongues even, but she understands. Language no longer matter. There are no barriers between herself and others, just love.
The gorgeous views seem to go on forever. Ornate structures, mansions, banquet halls, and natural beauty, orchards, gardens. People congregate around huge marble fountains. In the distance are snow-capped mountains of the purist white. She can hear the sounds of rushing rivers and the surf of the ocean at once.
Everyone around her is happy, loving, thankful. A choir sings songs of joy and peace while others play musical instruments of every kind in perfect harmony. Children laugh and play in the streets as well as in the clouds above her head. ~ Victoria Kahler

Some people accuse the new generation of being ignorant, maybe ignorant for the old generation, but it's a new language. ~ Domenico Dolce

When I started Ashes and Snow in 1992, I set out to explore the relationship between man and animals from the inside out. In discovering the shared language and poetic sensibilities of all animals, I am working towards restoring the common ground that once existed when people lived in harmony with animals. ~ Gregory Colbert

That 'simple desire' to share something meant that we could enter the world of language without words, where everything is always clear and there is no danger of being misinterpreted. ~ Paulo Coelho

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

Verbing Weirds Language only if you're expecting it to work in a simple way. This is a special case of the more general truth that Language Weirds. ~ John Lawler

After I nodded, she continued. We can no longer express with words our emotional states, our revelations, our transformations. Words fail. We are in the very beginning stages of what might take years or even decades of transition. The human race is developing a Universal Language. The practices that will assist humanity - and assist you - in reaching this higher communication will include all the things I'll share with you: vocal exploration, meditation, and energetic practices such as chi gong and yoga. Through these techniques, you are going to completely overhaul your nervous system and your energetic makeup to allow the emergence of this language within you. ~ Dielle Ciesco

The hostility to art shown by all revolutionary reformers must, however, be pointed out. Plato is
moderately reasonable. He only calls in question the deceptive function of language and exiles only poets
from his republic. Apart from that, he considers beauty more important than the world. ~ Albert Camus

The ballet needs to tell its own story in such a way it can be received without having to be translated into language. ~ Twyla Tharp

If it's a language you don't understand and you're not concerned with the meanings of the words, your impression comes from how the words look, particularly if the language uses different characters. ~ Squarepusher

I very much wish that some day or other you may have time to learn Greek, because that language is an idea. Even a little of it is like manure to the soil of the mind, and makes it bear finer flowers. ~ Sara Coleridge

At its best, SF cinema is an allegorical site that invites the audience to safely examine and reflect on long-standing social issues in an unfamiliar setting, providing the possibility of viewing them in a new light. At its worst, the process of allegorical displacement invites audiences to affirm racist ideas, confirm racial fears, and reinforce dubious generalizations about race and the place of African Americans in U.S. society without employing overt racial language or explicit imagery. ~ Adilifu Nama

To fly/steal is woman's gesture, to steal into language to make it fly. ~ Helene Cixous

What I fear from these reports is that the prevalent use of foul language has become an acceptable pattern in the schools, probably due in large part to the influence of TV and the general permissiveness in our society. ~ Gordon B. Hinckley

Pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable to the time, place, and company. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge