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Equality Quotes

Browse 1955 quotes about Equality.

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Equality Quotes

“Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable feminity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars--to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording--all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...”

FeminismEqualityFeminism Woman Submission
Book:The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
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“The differences between the sexes are found in babies, and across cultures, too -so this is not some weird WEIRD phenomenom. Given a choice, neonate girls spend more time looking at faces, while neonate boys spend more time looking at things.”

FeminismEqualityGenderLgbtqProgressivesDerridaDeconstructionismRadical Left
Book:A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
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“I told him I had, perhaps, different notions of matrimony from what the received custom had given us of it; that I thought a woman was a free agent as well as a man, and was born free, and, could she manage herself suitably, might enjoy that liberty to as much purpose as the men do; that the laws of matrimony were indeed otherwise, and mankind at this time acted quite upon other principles, and those such that a woman gave herself entirely away from herself, in marriage, and capitulated, only to be, at best, but an upper servant, and from the time she took the man she was no better or worse than the servant among the Israelites, who had his ears bored—that is, nailed to the door-post—who by that act gave himself up to be a servant during life; that the very nature of the marriage contract was, in short, nothing but giving up liberty, estate, authority, and everything to the man, and the woman was indeed a mere woman ever after—that is to say, a slave. Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress (1724)”

FeminismEqualityMarriage As Slavery
Book:Roxana
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“I added, that whoever the woman was that had an estate, and would give it up to be the slave of a great man, that woman was a fool, and must be fit for nothing but a beggar; that it was my opinion a woman was as fit to govern and enjoy her own estate without a man as a man was without a woman; and that, if she had a mind to gratify herself as to sexes, she might entertain a man as a man does a mistress; that while she was thus single she was her own, and if she gave away that power she merited to be as miserable as it was possible that any creature could be. Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress (1724)”

FeminismEqualityMarriage As Slavery
Book:Roxana
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“What are you so angry about?" my mother had asked me the last time I had gone home to visit. Why aren't you more angry, I had wanted to ask her. But I couldn't talk to my mother that way. She understood that I did not want to live her life, to work as a waitress, until my toes curled in and my feet hurt all the time, to marry a man who would beat my children and treat me as if I had no right to object to object to anything he chose to do. She didn't want that life for me either. She wanted me happy and successful, to live unafraid among people who loved me, and to do things she had never been able to do and tell her all about them. So I told her, about the shelter, the magazine, readings and discussion groups. I told her about trying to write stories, though I hesitated to send send her all that I wrote. And there were far too many times when I would sit down to write my mama and stare at the paper unable to puzzle out how to explain how urgent and unimportant it was to change how women's lives were shaped. Not only that we should be paid equal money for equally difficult work, but that we should genuinely begin to think about what word we might choose to undertake, how we might live our daily lives. Why should I have to marry at all? Or explain myself if I chose to love a woman? Why could I not spend my hours writing stories instead of raising children or keeping house or working some deadly boring job just to cover the rent of an apartments where I was not safe anyway.”

PoliticsFeminismEqualityGenderSexismForeword
Book:The Women's Room
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“The sensible women who, if they wanted, would certainly be able to qualify themselves for the world of discussion and ideas, are precisely those who, if they are not qualified, never try to enter it or to destroy it. They have other fish to fry. At a mixed party they gravitate to one end of the room and talk women’s talk to one another. They don’t want us, for this sort of purpose, any more than we want them. It is only the riff-raff of each sex that wants to be incessantly hanging on the other. Live and let live. They laugh at us a good deal. That is just as it should be. Where the sexes, having no real shared activities, can meet only in Affection and Eros— cannot be Friends—it is healthy that each should have a lively sense of the other’s absurdity. Indeed it is always healthy. No one ever really appreciated the other sex—just as no one really appreciates children Friendship or animals—without at times feeling them to be funny. For both sexes are. Humanity is tragi-comical; but the division into sexes enables each to see in the other the joke that often escapes it in itself—and the pathos too.”

FeminismEqualityDifferenceEgalitarianism
Book:The Four Loves
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“In Stanton, Mott won a devoted convert. Elizabeth recalled: 'It seemed to me like meeting a being from some larger planet, to find a woman who dared to question the opinions of Popes, Kings, Synods, Parliaments, with the same freedom she would criticize an editorial in the London Times, recognizing no higher authority than the judgment of a pure-minded, educated woman. When I first heard from the lips of Lucretia Mott that I had the same right to think for myself that Luther, Calvin, and John Knox had, and the same right to be guided by my own convictions, and would no doubt live a higher, happier life than if guided by theirs, I felt at once a new-born sense of dignity and freedom; it was like suddenly coming into the rays of the noon-day sun, after wandering with a rushlight in the caves of the earth.”

FeminismEqualityReligious FreedomQuakerismLucretia MottElizabeth Cady Stanton
Book:Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America
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“The cultivation world did not care about wedding attendants, and would not have the female cultivator wear a veil. Supposedly, a thousand years ago, a male cultivator from the mortal world wanted the female cultivator he was marrying to wear a veil. The female cultivator then beat him up. After the beating, the female cultivator said, what bad habit was this? Other men could not look at a woman’s face at the wedding banquet but a man’s face could be seen by other women? Their path union ceremony was cancelled because of this. The male cultivator’s tragic and true experience helped speed up the equality between genders in the cultivation world. At least, not many male cultivators dared to have female cultivators do things that they themselves were not willing to do.”

FeminismEqualityWeddingFeminismoIgualdadCostumbresBodas
Book:Ascending, Do Not Disturb
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“It should come as no surprise that women need to work doubly hard to prove their right to power. They have to look to their menfolk around them who can support their claim, rather than detract from it--to their fathers and patriarchs, not to their husbands and lovers. They must clarify to a suspicious public that they are not greedy and conniving, power-hungry for their own sakes, but concerned for the success of a broad swath of society. How does one do that except by somehow downplaying their own ambition, or subsuming her power to that of a male associate, or allowing herself to be interrupted in important meetings, or apologizing more than her male counterparts, or appearing more tentative in her decision-making, or not applying for positions and promotions she might think she isn't qualified for? A woman is rarely congratulated for grasping for more, for reaching higher. Women know exactly how their ambition is perceived by the public, and they must veil their power grabs in a warm and cuddly swath of nonaggression and nonthreatening verbiage, dazzling smiles, colored hair, and a calm and steady gaze, maternal even, without holding their head too high, but not too low either. Is it any surprise that today's women don't even apply for political position of authority if they have to walk through a gauntlet of abuse dissecting their appearance, demeanor, age, weight, and sexual past white simultaneously walking a tightrope of unspoken demands for masculinization?”

FeminismEqualityEgyptology
Book:When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt
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“It is said it is useless to look for equality in a relationship. Whether you want it or not, one always leads, and the other follows. Maybe we should give matriarchy a chance. But the weight should always be towards one side. As long as we compete for equality, none of us will lead, and none of us will follow.”

LoveRelationshipsLove QuotesPowerFeminismRelationship QuotesMen And WomenEqualityEquality QuotesMatriarchy
Book:The World's Most Frustrated Man
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“When we say that men are taller than women, the words -on average- are implied. Pointing to the existence of your friend Rhonda, who really is quite tall, does not negate the statistical truth that, on average, men are still taller than women.”

FeminismEqualityGenderLgbtqProgressivesDerridaDeconstructionismRadical Left
Book:A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
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“He would open the door of the drawing-room or the nursery, I thought, and find her among her children perhaps, or with a piece of embroidery on her knee at any rate, the center of some different order in the system of life, and the contrast between this world and his own, which might be the law courts or the House of Commons, would at once refresh and invigorate; and there would follow, even in the simplest talk, such a natural difference of opinion that the dried ideas in him would be fertilized anew; and the sight of her creating in a different medium from his own would so quicken his creative power that insensibly his sterile mind would begin to plot again, and he would find the phrase or the scene which was lacking when he put on his hat to visit her.”

InspirationalFeminismEqualityGender Equality
Book:A Room of One’s Own
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“Because female intellect is weaker than men.” Said the elderly scholar. “Says who, sir?” “It is written in the hymns.” “May I ask, who wrote those hymns?”Asked the girl. “The hymns were written by our forefathers.” Said the elderly scholar. “By forefathers you mean, our male ancestors?” Asked the girl, again.”

WomenFeminismEqualityDiscriminationWomen EmpowermentShon MehtaGender Bias
Book:A Tale of a Fairy Tale and other stories
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“In Astrology, the moon, among its other meanings, has that of "the common people," who submit (they know not why) to any independent will that can express itself with sufficient energy. The people who guillotined the mild Louis XVI died gladly for Napoleon. The impossibility of an actual democracy is due to this fact of mob-psychology. As soon as you group men, they lose their personalities. A parliament of the wisest and strongest men in the nation is liable to behave like a set of schoolboys, tearing up their desks and throwing their inkpots at each other. The only possibility of co-operation lies in discipline and autocracy, which men have sometimes established in the name of equal rights.”

GovernmentDemocracyPsychologyDisciplineEqualityCooperationCoexistenceMobMob Psychology
Book:Moonchild
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“Sometimes ‘reality’ is used to debunk as childish or unknowledgeable points of view that actually are holding out a more radical possibility of equality or freedom or democracy or justice.… It reminds me of parents who say, ‘Oh, you’re gay…’ or ‘Oh, you’re trans—well, of course I accept you, but it’s going to be a very hard life.’ Instead of saying, ‘This is a new world, and we are going to build it together…”

JusticePossibilityEquality
Author:Judith Butler
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“In my judgment, the woman is the equal of the man. She has all the rights I have and one more, and that is the right to be protected. That is my doctrine. You are married; try and make the woman you love happy. Whoever marries simply for himself will make a mistake; but whoever loves a woman so well that he says 'I will make her happy,' makes no mistake. And so with the woman who says, 'I will make him happy.' There is only one way to be happy, and that is to make somebody else so.”

LoveHappinessMarriageRightsEqualEmpathyEqualityDoctrineSelflessness
Book:The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child
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“Sir, — Whether women are the equals of men has been endlessly debated; whether they have souls has been a moot point; but can it be too much to ask [for a definitive acknowledgement that at least they are animals?… Many hon. members may object to the proposed Bill enacting that, in statutes respecting the suffrage, 'wherever words occur which import the masculine gender they shall be held to include women;' but could any object to the insertion of a clause in another Act that 'whenever the word "animal" occur it shall be held to include women?' Suffer me, thorough your columns, to appeal to our 650 [parliamentary] representatives, and ask — Is there not one among you then who will introduce such a motion? There would then be at least an equal interdict on wanton barbarity to cat, dog, or woman… Yours respectfully, AN EARNEST ENGLISHWOMAN”

HumanityFeminismHumanSocial JusticeFeministEqualityLetterEnglishStatus
Book:What It Means to Be Human
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