Mary Daly Quotes & Sayings

If God is male, then male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination. — Mary Daly

The word 'sin' is derived from the Indo-European root 'es-,' meaning 'to be.' When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a [person] trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, 'to be' in the fullest sense is 'to sin'. — Mary Daly

I hope that in its richness, as well as in its incompleteness, Gyn/Ecology will continue to be a Labrys enabling women to learn from our mistakes and our successes, and cast our Lives as far as we can go, Now, in the Be-Dazzling Nineties. — Mary Daly

Every woman who has come to consciousness can recall an almost endless series of oppressive, violating, insulting, assaulting acts against her Self. Every woman is battered by such assaults - is on a psychic level, a battered woman. — Mary Daly

Cut off from the intuitive knowledge of ontological reason, technical knowledge is directionless and ultimately meaningless. When it dominates, life is deprived of an experience of depth, and it tends toward despair. — Mary Daly

The method that is required is not one of correlation but of liberation. Even the term "method" must be reinterpreted and in fact wrenched out of its usual semantic field, for the emerging creativity in women is by no means a merely cerebral process. In order to understand the implications of this process it is necessary to grasp the fundamental fact that women have had the power of naming stolen from us. We have not been free to use our power to name ourselves, the world or God. The old naming was not the product of dialogue- a fact inadvertently admitted in the genesis story of Adam's naming the animals and the women. Women are now realizing that the universal imposing of names by men has been false because partial. That is, inadequate words have been taken as adequate. — Mary Daly

Women have had the power of naming stolen from us. — Mary Daly

We will look upon the earth and her sister planets as being with us, not for us. — Mary Daly

We are aware that the gods of patriarchy are pale derivatives and reversals of ancient yet always Present Goddess(es). We suspect that phallocentric writers and artists who have even a glimmer of insight are sometimes made uncomfortable by their own state of deception. Those who have any awareness of the heinous crime of reversal which is patriarchy must be in a state of deep conflict and fear of...Her. — Mary Daly

If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males. — Mary Daly

God's plan' is often a front for men's plans and a cover for inadequacy, ignorance, and evil. — Mary Daly

It is impossible to Name and Act against oppression if there are no Nameable oppressors. — Mary Daly

Work is a substitute religious experience for many workaholics. — Mary Daly

I know that I will be punished just as much for being an itty-bitty feminist as for going the whole way. And so I go the whole way. — Mary Daly

Few gynecologists recommend to their heterosexual patients the most foolpoof of solutions, namely, misterectomy. — Mary Daly

There are and will be those who think I have gone overboard. Let them rest assured that this assessment is correct, probably beyond their wildest imagination, and that I will continue to do so. — Mary Daly

You become courageous by doing courageous acts ... Courage is a habit. — Mary Daly

Hags live. Women traveling into feminist time/space are creating Hag-ocracy, the place we govern. To govern is to steer, to pilot. — Mary Daly

Originally, it was believed that witches possessed the power of glamour and according to the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, witches by their glamour could cause the male 'member' to disappear. In modern usage, this meaning has almost disappeared into the background and the power of the term is masked and suffocated by such foreground images as those associated with glamour magazine. — Mary Daly

I urge you to sin. But not against these itty-bitty religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism-or their secular derivatives, Marxism, Maoism, Freudianism and Jungianism-whic h are all derivatives of the big religion of patriarchy. Sin against the infrastructure itself! — Mary Daly

What the women do is become caretakers for the men. In those circumstances, I decided, and many others have, that there's a reality called women's space. There has to be a separate space for women. — Mary Daly

Why indeed must 'God' be a noun? Why not a verb - the most active and dynamic of all. — Mary Daly

Tokenism does not change stereotypes of social systems but works to preserve them, since it dulls the revolutionary impulse. — Mary Daly

If God is male, then the male is God. — Mary Daly

[W]omen under phallocratic rule are confined to the role of vessels/carriers, directed and controlled by men. Since that role is the basic base reversal of the very be-ing of Voyaging/Spiraling women, when we direct our own Crafts/Vessels we become reversers of that deadly reversal. — Mary Daly

You guard against decay, in general, and stagnation, by moving, by continuing to move. — Mary Daly

...the essential task of feminism is not to go looking around for a ready-made theory and then try to make it relevant to our (little?) "issue" or "problem". This is self-depreciating in the extreme, a fact that is obvious if one realises that feminism is cosmic in its dimensions. — Mary Daly

It is the creative potential itself in human beings that is the image of God. — Mary Daly

I had explained that a woman's asking for equality in the church would be comparable to a black person's demanding equality in the Ku Klux Klan — Mary Daly

Courage to be is the key to revelatory power of the feminist revolution. — Mary Daly

One hundred percent of the bishops who oppose the repeal of anti-abortion laws are men and one hundred percent of the people who have abortions are women. — Mary Daly

Male religion entombs women in sepulchres of silence in order to chant its own eternal and dreary dirge to a past that never was. — Mary Daly

Goddess is the deep Source of creating integrity and the Self-affirming be-ing of women. — Mary Daly

The liberation of language is rooted in the liberation of ourselves ... — Mary Daly

What men do to trees mirrors what they do to women. — Mary Daly