Kate Millett Quotes & Sayings

The care of children ..is infinitely better left to the best trained practitioners of both sexes who have chosen it as a vocation ... [This] would further undermine family structure while contributing to the freedom of women. — Kate Millett

The complete destruction of traditional marriage and the nuclear family is the 'revolutionary or utopian' goal of feminism. — Kate Millett

What is the future of the woman's movement? How in the hell do I know? I don't run it. — Kate Millett

We are naive and moralistic women. We are human beings who find politics a blight upon the human condition. And do not know how one copes with it except through politics. — Kate Millett

In those days, when you got boxed, that was it. A lot of old people were there because somebody wanted the farm. It was about property. People are treated like property. — Kate Millett

What is the natural reaction when told you have a hopeless mental illness? That diagnosis does you in; that, and the humiliation of being there. I mean, the indignity you're subjected to. My God. — Kate Millett

Mother had committed me for life. This is where I felt betrayed the most. — Kate Millett

But madness? That small remnant of altered consciousness, pure or in response to circumstances. Circumstances of life, even those of the body itself and its chemistry. How cruel and stupid to punish this as we do with ostracism and fear, to have forged a network of fear, strong as the locks and bars of a back ward. This is the jail we could all end up in. And we know it. And watch our step. For a lifetime. We behave. A fantastic and entire system of social control, by the threat of example as effective over the general population as detention centers in dictatorships, the image of the madhouse floats through every mind for the course of its lifetime. — Kate Millett

Patriarchy, reformed or unreformed, is patriarchy still: its worst abuses purged or foresworn, it might actually be more stable and secure than before. — Kate Millett

People have a right to their own lives, and if you can't help somebody, you ought to get out of their way. — Kate Millett

In sex one wants or does not want. And the grief, the sorrow of life is that one cannot make or coerce or persuade the wanting, cannot command it, cannot request it by mail order or finagle it through bureaucratic channels. — Kate Millett

One of the blessings of adulthood is that one is no longer addressed as a thing. — Kate Millett

The arbitrary character of patriarchal ascriptions of temperament and role has little effect upon their power over us. Nor do the mutually exclusive, contradictory, and polar qualities of the categories "masculine" and "feminine" imposed upon human personality give rise to sufficiently serious question among us. Under their aegis each personality becomes little more, and often less than half, of its human potential. Politically, the fact that each group exhibits a circumscribed but complementary personality and range of activity is of secondary importance to the fact that each represents a status or power division. In the matter of conformity patriarchy is a governing ideology without peer; it is probably that no other system has ever exercised such a complete control over its subjects. — Kate Millett

Ah, but depression - that is what we all hate. We the afflicted. Whereas the relatives and shrinks, the tribal ring, they rather welcome it: you are quiet and you suffer. — Kate Millett

My sister said, You're making it hard for all us housewives in Nebraska. — Kate Millett

You have to be a little patient if you're an artist. People don't always get you the first time. — Kate Millett

They are more beautiful than anything in the world, kinetic sculptures, perfect form in motion. — Kate Millett

Perhaps patriarchy's greatest psychological weapon is simply its universality and longevity ... Patriarchy has a still more tenacious or powerful hold through its successful habit of passing itself off as nature. — Kate Millett

How crazy craziness makes everyone, how irrationally afraid. The madness hidden in each of us, called to, identified, aroused like a lust. And against that the jaw sets. The more I fear my own insanity the more I must punish yours ... — Kate Millett

Intercourse is an assertion of mastery, one that announces his own higher caste and proves it upon a victim who is expected to surrender, serve, and be satisfied. — Kate Millett

Monogamy and prostitution go together. — Kate Millett

As women, we're probably more protective of children. Also, we've been minors all of our history. — Kate Millett

The rationale which accompanies that imposition of male authority euphemistically referred to as 'the battle of the sexes' bears a certain resemblance to the formulas of nations at war, where any heinousness is justified on the grounds that the enemy is either an inferior [part of the] species or really not human at all. — Kate Millett

The concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit, since love is the only circumstance in which the female is (ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity. — Kate Millett

Perhaps nothing is so depressing an index of the inhumanity of the male-supremacist mentality as the fact that the more genial human traits are assigned to the underclass: affection, response to sympathy, kindness, cheerfulness. — Kate Millett

We are women. We are a subject people who have inherited an alien culture. — Kate Millett

The worst part about prostitution is that you're obliged not to sell sex only, but your humanity. That's the worst part of it: that what you're selling is your human dignity. Not really so much in bed, but in accepting the agreement - in becoming a bought person. — Kate Millett

To love is simply to allow another to be, live, grow, expand, become. An appreciation that demands and expects nothing in return. — Kate Millett

When one group rules another, the relationship between the two is political. When such an arrangement is carried out over a long period of time it develops an ideology (feudalism, racism, etc.). All historical civilizations are patriarchies: their ideology is male supremacy. — Kate Millett

I believe there's a killer in all of us. I know there's one inside me. When you know the killer in you and you know also that you do not want to kill, you have to set yourself upon a course of learning. Not to kill that killer then, but to control it. — Kate Millett

I'm slammed with an identity that can no longer say a word; mute with responsibility. — Kate Millett

And what is boredom? Perhaps the inability to find meaning, to complete a perception, to arrive at an understanding: partly grasped, but forever just out of reach. It is not lack of interest, but interest frustrated, cut off, imperfectly held. So says the Chronicle today. But for me it is the fear of emptiness. — Kate Millett

Many women do not recognize themselves as discriminated against; no better proof could be found of the totality of their conditioning. — Kate Millett

It would appear that love is dead. Or very likely in a bad way. — Kate Millett

During depression the world disappears. Language itself. One has nothing to say. Nothing. No small talk, no anecdotes. Nothing can be risked on the board of talk. Because the inner voice is so urgent in its own discourse: How shall I live? How shall I manage the future? Why should I go on? — Kate Millett

Writing is so much more problematic than drawing, full of moral pitfalls, ambiguity, public responsibility. If you record a day of your life, does the decision to do so change the shape of the day? One of Doris Lessing's days in The Golden Notebook is fifty-four pages long. It's complete; the rest are summaries - the "impression" of a day foisted artfully upon the reader by providing a few details. Fiction is made this way - as lineal perspective gives the illusion of three dimensions in drawing. But does the selection of a day - that you begin by knowing you must remember and observe - really affect it? Do you change the balance, distort the truth? The period itself, its choice and selection, does that not in itself constitute a kind of misconstruction, and the rest follow subconsciously? — Kate Millett

Aren't women prudes if they don't and prostitutes if they do? — Kate Millett

No one should be adored, it's fundamentally immoral. — Kate Millett

It started with Carol and it was almost an accident. Woke up one night because I had to tell Fumio, sitting up in bed smoking, terrified, what will he do, will he kill me, will he ever speak to me again, so I made him wake up and I told him. He laughed into his pillow. Why are you laughing? 'Well, at least you won't get pregnant, ... giggled, and went back to sleep. — Kate Millett

The image of the woman as we know it is an image created by men and fashioned to suit their needs. — Kate Millett

It is necessary to realize that the most sacrosanct article of sexual politics in the period, the Victorian doctrine of chivalrous protection and its familiar protestations of respect, rests upon the tacit assumption, a cleverly expeditious bit of humbug, that all women were "ladies" - namely members of that fraction of the upper classes and bourgeoisie which treated women to expressions of elaborate concern, while permitting them no legal or personal freedom. The psycho-political tacit here is a pretense that the indolence and luxury of the upper-class woman's role in what Veblen called "vicarious consumption" was the happy lot of all women. The efficacy of this maneuver depends on dividing women by class and persuading the privileged that they live in an indulgence they scarcely deserve ... To succeed, both the sexual revolution and the Woman's Movement which led it would have to unmask chivalry and expose its courtesies as subtle manipulation. — Kate Millett

Everybody believes in psychiatry; it's supposed to be for our own good. Let psychiatry prove that anybody has an illness, and I'd concede, but there is no physical proof. — Kate Millett

The whole bloody system is sick: the very notion of leadership, a balloon with a face painted upon it, elected and inflated by media's diabolic need to reduce ideas to personalities. — Kate Millett

Listening to the sound of the water, her sound, her lovely body glistening through the room a moment from now. There are only moments. Live in this one. The happiness of these days. — Kate Millett

They weren't crazy. They were tired of being locked up. Even I could see that. — Kate Millett

Comprehending at one bound the myth of Demeter and knowing that she was Demeter, that the fountain between her thighs was my own youth and I Persephone, who had come to her in spring and would come forever, for she was my youth, older than I and yet my youth, my ever-recurrent spring, and spring itself only a metaphor for the source, the waters, the hidden river, the tunnel of life between her thighs. — Kate Millett

We're more sexually repressed than men, having been given a much more strict puritanical code of behavior than men ever have. — Kate Millett

Politics is repetition. It is not change. Change is something beyond what we call politics. Change is the essence politics is supposed to be the means to bring into being. — Kate Millett

What is our freedom fight about? Is it about the liberation of children or just having sex with them? — Kate Millett

The great mass of women throughout history have been confined to the cultural level of animal life in providing the male with sexual outlet and exercising the animal functions of reproduction and care of the young. — Kate Millett

Men and women were declared equal one morning and everybody could divorce each other by postcard. — Kate Millett

Prostitution is really the only crime in the penal law where two people are doing a thing mutually agreed upon and yet only one, the female partner, is subject to arrest. — Kate Millett

I saw hell. The hospital had divided and conquered pretty successfully. — Kate Millett

In many patriarchies, language, as well as cultural tradition, reserve the human condition for the male. With the Indo-European languages this is a nearly inescapable habit of mind, for despite all the customary pretense that 'man' and 'humanity' are terms which apply equally to both sexes, the fact is hardly obscured that in practice, general application favors the male far more often than the female as referent, or even sole referent, for such designations. — Kate Millett

For it is precisely because certain groups have no representation in a number of recognized political structures that their position tends to be so stable, their oppression so continuous. — Kate Millett

Come here." I stop like a thief in a pantomime. And then dive into the warmth next to her. "Snuggling" - surely the most pleasant thing in the world. Scrunching further and further into the mattress as we struggle closer and closer warmer and warmer nearer and nearer, our bodies like a letter fitting into an envelope, my legs over her legs, our hips sliding against each other, her arm tighter and tighter around my shoulders, my face nestled more and more firmly into her collarbone. It is bliss. The simplest and most primitive bliss. A childlike, sexual, friendly, animal bliss. — Kate Millett

Under patriarchy the female did not herself develop the symbols by which she is described. As — Kate Millett

This country is becoming increasingly authoritarian. It's based on capital punishment. — Kate Millett

Hostility is expressed in a number of ways. One is laughter. — Kate Millett

The enormous social change involved in a sexual revolution is basically a matter of altered consciousness, the exposure and elimination of social and psychological realities underlying political and cultural structures. We are speaking, then, of a cultural revolution, which, while it must necessarily involve the political and economic reorganization traditionally implied by the term revolution, must go far beyond this as well. — Kate Millett

Girl next to me at the baggage counter said she wrote her way to liberation. How did you handle first person narrative, I asked her. And said she knew the hole of depression, had been there. But I am out now, I escaped, I told her. 'You will fall into it again,' she said. Already I was sliding. — Kate Millett

Life is a publicity stunt. A shill. You've been had. — Kate Millett

Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different. — Kate Millett

We touched each other's center, perfectly, just the fingertip upon the clitoris moving more and more slowly, our eyes steady on each other and the delicate pressure fine and more fine until all motion stopped in one still point remembered always, a vision. And then I did not know her pleasure from mine, my body from hers. We fell into and became each other. Then we slipped over the edge, entered and made love. — Kate Millett

Hell, I don't want to grow old at all. I never want to die. — Kate Millett

A revolution is not the overturning of a cart, a reshuffling in the cards of state. It is a process, a swelling, a new growth in the race. If it is real, not simply a trauma, it is another ring in the tree of history, layer upon layer of invisible tissue composing the evidence of a circle. — Kate Millett

Probably one should never feel such gaiety or such despair. Better to operate on an even keep like Friedan and Gloria and the others. — Kate Millett

Given the conditions under which you're a young person in this society, many things would be at least as important to you as your sexuality. — Kate Millett

Coitus can scarcely be said to take place in a vacuum; although of itself it appears a biological and physical activity, it is set so deeply within the larger context of human affairs that it serves as a charged microcosm of the variety of attitudes and values to which culture subscribes. Among other things, it may serve as a model of sexual politics on an individual or personal plane. — Kate Millett

The involuntary character of psychiatric treatment is at odds with the spirit and ethics of medicine itself. — Kate Millett

Whatever the "real" differences between the sexes may be, we are not likely to know them until the sexes are treated differently, that is alike. — Kate Millett

You won't do any more housework? Then you go to the bin. — Kate Millett

Lady," we always call each other, partly a joke, partly in earnest, using still the old word, in its full flavor a kind of exorcism against "saleslady," "old lady," "ladylike." Relishing the anachronism, even the formality a type of aphrodisiac, a contrast to our delight in the horny, the vulgar, the vernacular which we cultivate just as ardently. — Kate Millett

Psychiatry causes so much death. — Kate Millett

It was horrifying. You wouldn't believe how people are treated there. You could see that these people had withdrawn so far that they just lived in their own minds. They did terrible things to themselves. — Kate Millett

A sexual revolution begins with the emancipation of women, who are the chief victims of patriarchy, and also with the ending of homosexual oppression. — Kate Millett

With the first act of cruelty committed in the name of revolution, with the first murder, with the first purge and execution, we have lost the revolution. — Kate Millett

I was supposed to be women's lib, and now I'd exceeded it and gone over into international politics. — Kate Millett

The subordinated group has inadequate redress through existing political institutions, and is deterred thereby from organizing into conventional political struggle and opposition. — Kate Millett

Homosexuality was invented by a straight world dealing with its own bisexuality. — Kate Millett

You may well ask how I expect to assert my privacy by resorting to the outrageous publicity of being one's actual self on paper. There's a possibility of it working if one chooses the terms, to wit: outshouting image-gimmick America through a quietly desperate search for self. — Kate Millett

Let's always be having an affair. Wherever we meet, however many times a year - let it always be an affair. — Kate Millett

Their chattel status continues in their loss of name, their obligation to adopt the husband's domicile, and the general legal assumption that marriage involves an exchange of the female's domestic service and (sexual) consortium in return for financial support.31 — Kate Millett

As patriarchy enforces a temperamental imbalance of personality traits between the sexes, its educational institutions, segregated or co-educational, accept a cultural programing toward the generally operative division between "masculine" and "feminine" subject matter, assigning the humanities and certain social sciences (at least in their lower or marginal branches) to the female - and science and technology, the professions, business and engineering to the male. Of — Kate Millett

This is how psychiatry has functioned-as a kind of property arm of the government, who can put you away if your husband doesn't like you. — Kate Millett

The derogation of feminine status in lesser males is a consistent patriarchal trait. Like — Kate Millett

However muted its present appearance may be, sexual dominion obtains nevertheless as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power. — Kate Millett

To be a rebel is not to be a revolutionary. It is more often by a way of spinning one's wheels deeper in sand. — Kate Millett

Isn't privacy about keeping taboos in their place? — Kate Millett

It may be that a second wave of the sexual revolution might at last accomplish its aim of freeing half the race from its immemorial subordination
and in the process bring us all a great deal closer to humanity. It may be that we shall even be able to retire sex from the harsh realities of politics, but not until we have created a world we can bear out of the desert we inhabit. — Kate Millett

Mystical state, madness, how it frightens people. How utterly crazy they become, remote, rude, peculiar, cruel, taunting, farouche as wild beasts who have smelled danger, the unthinkable. — Kate Millett

The lesbian is the archtypical feminist, because she's not into men - she's the independent woman par excellence. — Kate Millett

I don't believe in monogamy, possessing people, the rightness or inevitability of jealousy. — Kate Millett

Let us stop being afraid. Of our own thoughts, our own minds. Of madness, our own or others'. Stop being afraid of the mind itself, its astonishing functions and fandangos, its complications and simplifications, the wonderful operation of its machinery
more wonderful because it is not machinery at all or predictable. — Kate Millett