World Where Women Quotes & Sayings

A wrongheaded world," sighed Shiloh Davydov, "where women needs must deny their gender for fear that their ideas will be dismissed. — David Mitchell

We live in a world where sports have the potential to bridge the gap between racism, sexism and discrimination. The 2012 Olympic Games was a great start but hopefully what these games taught us is that if women are given an opportunity on an equal playing field the possibilities for women are endless. — Jackie Joyner-Kersee

The only contry in the world where there's a majority of women in parliament is Rwanda. Rwanda. That's when women get power, real power - if the men are either dead or in prison. — A. L. Kennedy

I think that's such an important message, especially for younger women, to know, 'I don't have to come out of the womb painting like Frida Kahlo. My very first thing that I make isn't going to be an around-the-world sensation.' You have to paint a hundred really ugly, barfy, diarrhea paintings before you come up with that one where you start to really get into your groove. — Kathleen Hanna

She had come to him to escape her mother's world, a world where all bodies were equal. She had come to him to make her body unique, irreplaceble. But he, too had drawn an equal sign between her and the rest of them: he kissed them all alike, stroked them all alike, made no, absolutely no distiction between Tereza's body and the other bodies. He sent her back to the world she tried to escape, sent to march naked with the other naked women — Milan Kundera

We see all around the world where women's rights are denied, where governments don't believe in educating their girls. There are 800 million people in the world who are illiterate and 75 percent of them are women and girls. — Laura Bush

Of course, we're so lucky to be in a time where that's not our reality anymore. I just thought it was very interesting to go back to that time now, and to look at all of these issues that are still relevant today, but just in such a different way, and to see how we approach them and try to overcome them. Yeah, we've come a long way with medicine and women's health in the Western world, but in a lot of parts of the rest of the world, that's still a huge issue. — Eve Hewson

I can't live in a world where there are only, like, four kinds of women. Or where every woman is obsessed with cake. The very least I ask is that we have one female character in the world who likes savory things! I don't have any role models who like cheese! — Caitlin Moran

I have a 22-year-old son, and when my son was born I made a decision to raise him. My husband and I took turns working, and it's easier to raise a kid in the documentary world, where you go away for two weeks or three weeks rather than the months that you spend on a feature. That was and still is much more open to women DPs than the world of fiction. — Maryse Alberti

My husband, Andrius, says that evil will rule until good men or women choose to act. I believe him. This testimony was written to create an absolute record, to speak in a world where our voices have been extinguished. These writing may shock or horrify you, but that is not my intention. It is my greatest hope that the pages in this jar stir your deepest well of human compassion. I hope they prompt you to do something, to tell somone. Only then can we ensure that this kind of evil is never allowed to repeat itself. — Ruta Sepetys

I do not live in a world where people can walk on water, or still a storm, or take five loaves of bread and feed 5000 men plus women and children. If that is a requirement of my commitment to Jesus, I find it difficult to stretch my mind outside the capacities of my world view. — John Shelby Spong

The de industrialization of the US. economy based on the migration of corporations into third world areas where labor is very cheap and thus more profitable for these companies creates on the one hand conditions in those countries that encourage people to emigrate to the US. in search of a better life. On the other hand, it creates conditions here that send more black people into the alternative economies, the drug economies, women into economies in sexual services, and sends them into the prison industrial complex. — Angela Davis

You are discontented with the world because you can't get just the small things that suit your pleasure, not because it's a world where myriads of men and women are ground by wrong and misery, and tainted with pollution. — George Eliot

They may look grown-up," she continued, "but it's a disguise. It's just the clay of time. Men and women are still children deep in their hearts. They still would like to jump and play, but that heavy clay won't let them. They'd like to shake off every chain the world's put on them, take off their watches and neckties and Sunday shoes and return naked to the swimming hole, if just for one day. They'd like to feel free, and know that there's a momma and daddy at home who'll take care of things and love them no matter what. Even behind the face of the meanest man in the world is a scared little boy trying to wedge himself into a corner where he can't be hurt. — Robert McCammon

A region where the men love their women one beat shy of a heart attack. A corner of the world proving there are some things hotter in the South than the weather. — Alex Morgan

The breakdown of mummies and daddies was an important part of lesbian relationships in the Bagatelle ... For some of us, however, role-playing reflected all the depreciating attitudes toward women which we loathed in straight society. It was the rejection of these roles that had drawn us to 'the life' in the first place. Instinctively, without particular theory or political position or dialectic, we recognized oppression as oppression, no matter where it came from.
But those lesbians who had carved some niche in the pretend world of dominance/subordination rejected what they called our 'confused' lifestyle, and they were in the majority. — Audre Lorde

I speak of a Canada where men and women of aboriginal ancestry, of French and British heritage, of the diverse cultures of the world, demonstrate the will to share this land in peace, in justice and with mutual respect. — Pierre Trudeau

We must continue to unite in sisterhood to turn our tears into triumph. There is no time to rest until our world achieves wholeness and balance, where all men and women are considered equal and free. — Leymah Gbowee

I've never seen a world where only men were responsible for the violence, and the women were innocent. They go together. Men and women are a violent mixture. — Claire Denis

I have heard stories from the depths of human lives where men and women were wrestling with the elemental problems of misery and sin--stories that put upon a man's heart a burden of vicarious sorrow, even though he does but listen to them. Here was real human need crying out after the living God revealed in Christ. Consider all the multitudes of men who so need God, and then think of Christian churches making of themselves a cockpit of controversy when there is not a single thing at stake in the business. So much of it does not matter! And there is one thing that does matter--more than anything else in all the world--that men in their personal lives and in their social relationships should know Jesus Christ. — Harry Emerson Fosdick

There's not a place in the whole world where everyone isn't willing
no, eager
to give a girl up to a man. — Rae Carson

When you bleed, this word is more powerful than any word you could ever speak. It is a blood word. It binds you to animals and trees and the moon and the sun. Where men take blood in the world in hunting and war, women give blood. It is the word ne because it closes the room of a woman's body to men. — Lidia Yuknavitch

It was this feminine conspiracy which made Southern society so pleasant. Women knew that a land where men were contented, uncontradicted ans safe in possession of unpunctured vanity was likely to be a very pleasant place for women to live. So, from the cradle to the grave, women strove to make men pleased with themselves, and the satisfied men repaid lavishly with gallantry and adoration. In fact, men willingly gave ladies everything in the world except credit for having intelligence. — Margaret Mitchell

In October 1941, Mahilue became teh first substantial city in occupied Soviet Belarus where almost all Jews were killed. A German (Austrian) policeman wrote to his wife of his feelings and experiences shooting the city's Jews in the first days of the month. 'During the first try, my hand trembled a bit as I shot, but one gets used to it. By the tenth try I aimed calmly and shot surely at the many women, children, and infants. I kept in mind that I have two infants at home, whom these hordes would treat just the same, if not ten times worse. The death that we gave them was a beautiful quick death, compared to the hellish torments of thousands and thousands in the jails of the GPU. Infants flew in great arcs through the air, and we shot them to pieces in flight, before their bodies fell into the pit and into the water.'
pp. 205-206 — Timothy Snyder

Times are a'changing, my man. Welcome to the new real world where fat people don't have to hate themselves anymore. Thank God for women like Melissa McCarthy and Adele so we can all start really believing that now. — Stephanie McAfee

Although many, we might even say most, strangers in this world become easily the victim of a fearful hostility, it is possible for men and women and obligatory for Christians to offer an open and hospitable space where strangers can cast off their strangeness and become our fellow human beings. — Henri Nouwen

I've had my breath taken away when a fan told me since watching my speech she has stopped herself being beaten up by her father. I've been stunned by the amount of men in my life that have contacted me since my speech to tell me to keep going, and that they want to make sure that their daughters will still be alive to see a world where women have power and equality, economically and politically. — Emma Watson

This is a story that could only have taken place in the tropics, where the climate draws sea rovers, pirates, and desperadoes from all corners of the world. They come and go, these adventurers, bedazzled and dazzling, and they leave women behind, lovers, who repeat outlandish tales, murmuring to themselves unheard, and if heard, not believed ... — Margaret Cezair-Thompson

Actually, I believe there are only two kinds of women in this world: Martha people and Oprah people. That doesn't mean one can't have an affinity for both of them, but my theory is that every chick is more firmly in one camp than the other. The typical Oprah woman is all self-actualized and best-life-y and Eat, Pray, Love. The Big O seems like the kind of gal who'd insist we all spend the afternoon wearing jammy pants. And how fun would that be?!
But Martha?
She's not putting up with that nonsense, and that makes me adore her all the more. She'll tell you what to eat, where to pray, and who to love, and I appreciate the guidance. — Jen Lancaster

Why have you gone so red, crimson as a poppy? You wanted to know, didn't you? So you've got the honest truth and faithful history of a world where he who shatters the skulls of others most efficiently and swells women's bellies fastest, reigns. And it's just as hard to compete with you people in murdering as it is in screwing - — Andrzej Sapkowski

As Miriam released my hand I felt that she and Midwife Bell had returned to a more primitive world, where men never intruded and even their role in conception was unknown. Here the chain of life was mother to daughter, daughter to mother. Fathers and sons belonged in the shadows with the dogs and livestock, like the retriever growling at Midwife Bell's unfamiliar car from the window of my neighbours' living room. — J.G. Ballard

I wonder how can I ever work for an organization that pollutes the world and refuses to clean up and sometimes even own up. And, I wonder how on earth can I work for an organization where one of my fellow classmates wouldn't get the same paycheck and the same perks and the same benefits as I would simply because she is a girl. — Sharad Vivek Sagar

Marrying a divorced man is ecologically responsible; in a world where there are more women than men, it pays to recycle. — Rita Rudner

It bothers them that instead of taking on the role of abandoned lover, I have become a happy wife. They relish seeing strong women like you and me humiliated. They cannot forgive us that we triumphed where so many others fail ... Courage is a virtue appreciated in a male but considered a defect in our gender. Bold women are a threat to a world that is out of balance, in favor of men. That is why they work so hard to mistreat and destroy us. — Isabel Allende

Where the techno-medical model of birth reigns, women who give birth vaginally generally labor in bed hooked up to electronic fetal monitors, intravenous tubes, and pressure-reading devices. Eating and drinking in labor are usually not permitted. Labor pain within this model is seen as unacceptable, so analgesia, and anesthesia are encouraged. Episiotomies (the surgical cut to enlarge the vaginal opening) are routinely performed, out of a belief that birth over an intact perineum would be impossible or that, if possible, it might be harmful to mother or baby. Instead of being the central actor of the birth drama, the woman becomes a passive, almost inert object - representing a barrier to the baby's eventual passage to the outside world. Women are treated as a homogenous group within the medical model, with individual variations receding in importance. — Ina May Gaskin

All men are liars, fickle, chatterers, hypocrites, proud or cowardly, despicable, sensual ; all women faithless, tricky, vain, inquisitive, and depraved. The world is only a bottomless cesspool, where the most shapeless sea-beasts climb and writhe on mountains of slime. But there is in the world a thing holy and sublime - the union of two of these beings, imperfect and frightful as they are. One is often deceived in love, often wounded, often unhappy ; but one loves, and on the brink of the grave one turns to look back and says : I have suffered often, sometimes I have been mistaken, but I have loved. It is I who have lived, and not a spurious being bred of my pride and my sorrow — Alfred De Musset

In a world where women do not say no, the man is never forced to settle down and make serious choices. His sex drive
the most powerful compulsion in his life
is never used to make him part of civilization as the supporter of a family. If a woman does not force him to make a long-term commitment
to marry
in general, he doesn't. It is maternity that requires commitment. His sex drive only demands conquest, driving him from body to body in an unsettling hunt for variety and excitement in which much of the thrill is in the chase itself.
The man still needs to be tamed. His problem is that many young women think they have better things to do than socialize single men. — George Gilder

There is no public space for women; the whole world is a prison where you have to be constantly aware at all times that you're a potential victim. What's more terrifying is that it's not necessarily preventative. — Jessica Valenti

H&M approached us to collaborate, and see if we could translate the dream we created at Lanvin to a wider audience, not just a dress for less. I have said in the past that I would never do a mass-market collection, but what intrigued me was the idea of H&M going luxury rather than Lanvin going public. This has been an exceptional exercise, where two companies at opposite poles can work together because we share the same philosophy of bringing joy and beauty to men and women around the world. — Alber Elbaz

I believe in a world of justice and human rights for all. A world where girls can grow up free of fear of abuse. A world where women are treated with the respect and dignity that is their right. A world where poverty is not acceptable. My dear young friends, you can make this your world. — Ban Ki-moon

It is a dreadful thing to see the dead city. Next to the port I found children, women, the old, waiting for a way to leave. I entered the houses, there were houses where the coffee and pita bread were left on the table, and I could not avoid [thinking] that this, indeed, had been the picture in many Jewish towns [i.e., in Europe, during World War II]'. — Golda Meir

In a modern world where a majority of women say, 'I don't need you, I've got my money, I've got my stuff,' I say, 'I desperately need men.' My whole album is a tribute to men. It takes a man in me to tell you that I'm on my knees for men. — Lou Doillon

There's always something new with sex. We lived in a world without Viagra, now we live in a world with Viagra. We lived in a world without blowjobs and anilingus in the Oval Office, and then it happens and you get to write about it. We live in a world where now the government is screwing with contraception and holding back vaccines that could save 4,000 women's lives a year, and you get to write about that. It's not as much fun as anilingus in the Oval Office, but what are you going to do? If you pay attention, there's always something new, and it's always really invigorating. — Dan Savage

Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world which in some places was as densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children, and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world. They were people without a written language, but with their own laws, their poetry, their history kept in memory and passed on, in an oral vocabulary more complex than Europe's, accompanied by song, dance, and ceremonial drama. They paid careful attention to the development of personality, intensity of will, independence and flexibility, passion and potency, to their partnership with one another and with nature. — Howard Zinn

I consider myself incredibly lucky to live and work in places like Canada and the U.S. where polio no longer threatens to rob the livelihoods of innocent children. As a young woman, I stand behind the women around the globe who are leading the charge against polio and working relentlessly to achieve a polio-free world. — Ksenia Solo

For any of us in this room today, let's start out by admitting we're lucky. We don't live in the world our mothers lived in, our grandmothers lived in, where career choices for women were so limited. — Sheryl Sandberg

I felt so much more than horror. I was so afraid, shocked by what I saw. There were hundreds of men, women and children hanging from the trees ... there was blood everywhere! We all saw that every person had been gutted, like a fish. My instinct was to run, but where to ... I was on a train. As I watched those around me on the train, so many others also looked like they had explosions in their eyes and they too wanted to flee. — Alfred Nestor

The water nymphs who came to Poseidon
explained how little they desired to couple
with the gods. Except to find out
whether it was different, whether there was
a fresh world, another dimension in their loins.
In the old Pittsburgh, we dreamed of a city
where women read Proust in the original French,
and wondered whether we would cross over
into a different joy if we paid a call girl
a thousand dollars for a night. Or an hour.
Would it be different in kind or only
tricks and apparatus? I worried that a great
love might make everything else an exile.
It turned out that being together
at twilight in the olive groves of Umbria
did, indeed, measure everything after that. — Jack Gilbert

I think that we live in a time where it's easier to be suspicious of dedicated men and women, people dedicated to their craft, because the world around them inspires them to be lazy. It inspires them to be negative. It inspires them to be snarky. — Ryan Adams

In many ways, this book is not about the politicians who are turning the ANC and Nelson Mandela's legacy into a nightmare. It is about all of us, South Africans, who keep quiet when our voices are needed. It is about those of us who keep quiet when journalists like Mzilikazi wa Afrika are arrested on trumped-up charges.11 It is about those of us who have forgotten that freedom is never fully achieved, but is defended and renewed every single day, in every square inch of space we occupy in the world. If the South Africa of our dreams withers and dies, it will be because we have stepped away from the public square. Where is the real ANC? Crucially, where are the men and women who fought so valiantly for this new South Africa? — Justice Malala

We weren't born yesterday. We are from [New York]. But we are also from somewhere else. We are from Oz, from the Looking-Glass Land, from Narnia, and from Middle Earth. If with part of ourselves we are men and women of the world and share the sad unbeliefs of the world, with a deeper part still, the part where our best dreams come from, it is as if we were indeed born yesterday, or almost yesterday, because we are also all of us children still. — Frederick Buechner

FOR AS LONG AS ANYONE COULD REMEMBER, THE CEREMONIAL foot washing had taken place at the grand Basilica of St. John Lateran as part of the Holy Thursday Mass. The pope would choose twelve priests, and in remembrance of Jesus' act of service to his disciples, wash the priests' feet. But in 2013, just ten days after his election, Pope Francis stunned the world and broke with tradition by traveling to a juvenile detention center outside Rome where he washed and kissed the feet of twelve prisoners, including two women and two Muslims. — Rachel Held Evans

Wallen, like Masters and Johnson, thinks it's possible that a majority of the so-called vaginal orgasms being had during intercourse are in reality clitoral orgasms. But unlike Masters and Johnson, he doesn't suggest that most women are having them easily. He believes, like Bonaparte, that the women having them - the paraclitoridiennes of the world - are an anatomically distinct group whose sexual response is different from that of the majority of women. And that maybe these women are where the whole notion of the vaginal orgasm originally came from. — Mary Roach

So accustomed have male media leaders become to the wealth and decision-making power they command they just can't parse the notion of equality between the sexes. They have never understood the world feminists actually envision, in which women and men share equal educational, economic, and professional opportunities, live free of abuse, can be fully sexual without judgment or coercion, and where girls and boys alike can embrace their authentic selves because no one will be told that strength, tenderness, confidence, empathy, or aggression is "inappropriate" for their gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or physical ability. — Jennifer L. Pozner

I believe women can lead more in the workplace.
I believe men can contribute more in the home. And I believe that this will create a better world, one where half our institutions are run by women and half our homes are run by men. — Sheryl Sandberg

I'm constantly pitching one episode where we see life through Castle's eyes. I think Castle's just a little off as far as his perception goes. A very, very clever man, but I want to see the world as Castle sees it - kind of a rose-colored glasses, all the women find him irresistible, all the guys find him super cool and do whatever he says. — Nathan Fillion

You are thinking about where your brain is at any time. It's very tricky but it's why women are very well suited to rule the world in the future, because of the multi-tasking they do and their ability to be moving in 15 directions at once. It's the women who behave like men, who focus in that singular way with the blinkers on, who have problems. You get a lot more done that way maybe, but you also lose the perception of who's behind you, what's going on, the 360 degrees of it, the whole picture of life that we do have as women. — Meryl Streep

I am done living in a world where women are lied to about their bodies; where women are objects of sexual desire but not subjects of sexual pleasure; where sex is used as a weapon against women; and where women believe their bodies are broken, simply because those bodies are not male. And I am done living in a world where women are trained from birth to treat their bodies as the enemy. — Emily Nagoski

When women and men understand that working to eradicate patriarchal domination is a struggle rooted in the longing to make a world where everyone can live fully and freely, then we know our work to be a gesture of love. Let us draw upon that love to heighten our awareness, deepen our compassion, intensify our courage and strengthen our commitment. — Bell Hooks

We've come a long way from the time when the crowning achievement in a woman's life was her youthful marriage. And many would agree that this represents progress for women. But when did the search for someone to marry become self-absorbed and pathetic? This absence of social sympathy for women's ambitions to marry is all the more striking because the social world has cared so deeply about virtually every other aspect of these privileged young women's inner and outer lives. ( ... ) The achievement of a good marriage is the one area of life where the most privileged, accomplished, and high achieving young women in society face a loss of support and sympathy for their ambitions and where the social expectations are for disappointment and failure, not success. — Barbara Dafoe Whitehead

I am from Britain and think it is right that as a woman I am paid the same as my male counterparts. I think it is right that I should be able to make decisions about my own body. I think it is right that women be involved on my behalf in the policies and decision-making of my country. I think it is right that socially I am afforded the same respect as men. But sadly I can say that there is no one country in the world where all women can expect to receive these rights. — Emma Watson

Artificial over-stimulation seemed like the perfect way to stifle a generation of young people who wanted more and more from a world where less and less was available. Whether the victims were men or women, arousal addiction seemed to have become the new normal. — Chuck Palahniuk

I think it's sad that we live in a world where men can steal and distribute and publish photos of women without their permission all over the Internet and even in print and make a lot of money doing so, but half naked photos that I took of myself are deemed "obscene." — Marie Calloway

In a world where women work three times as hard for half as much, our achievement has been denigrated, both marriage and divorce have turned against us, our motherhood has been used as an obstacle to our success, our passion as a trap, our empathy for others as an excuse to underpay us. — Erica Jong

But afterwards in the pub, they had dreamed about the big stories and talked for hours of how they would never be satisfied with the conventional or the shallow but instead would always dig deep. They were young and ambitious and wanted it all, all at once. There were times when Levin missed that, not the salary, or the working hours, or even the easy life in the bars and the women, but the dreams - he missed the power in them. He sometimes longed for that throbbing urge to change society and journalism and to write so that the world would come to a standstill and the mighty powers bow down. Even a hotshot like himself wondered: Where did the dreams go? — David Lagercrantz

How men envy and often hate these warm clocks, these wives, who know they will live forever. So what do we do? We men turn terribly mean, because we can't hold to the world or ourselves or anything. We are blind to continuity, all breaks down, falls, melts, stops, rots, or runs away. So, since we cannot shape Time, where does that leave men? Sleepless. Staring. — Ray Bradbury

Women of color have no call to trust white women until white women take a gander at the world around them, investigate, learn and annihilate ignorance founded in being white in a society where the perspective and voice presented to the general public is white. — Inga Muscio

My message to the world is that until we recognize that peace is not just the absence of war but the revival of life on the "backlines," where women are keeping kids in school, caring for the sick and injured, and daily negotiating space for the continuation of critical life processes of this nature, we're going to continue to miss the point. — Zainab Salbi

There is no chance for the welfare of the world unless the condition of woman is improved. It is not possible for a bird to fly on only one wing.
There is no hope for that family or country where there is no estimation of women, where they live in sadness. For this reason, they have to be raised first. — Swami Vivekananda

Try being an indie author, a minority author, a woman, and a person with health issues in the world of traditional - that's where you are clearly 'different' and marginalized. I am all of that, yet I am still here and smiling. Life is good! — Kailin Gow

There is no city or country in the world where women and girls live free of the fear of violence. No leader can claim: 'this is not happening in my backyard.' — Michelle Bachelet

Br>
'Yes, OK, but so what if I was!' Interrupted Jane. 'What if I was! That's my point. What if I was a bit overweight and not especially pretty? Why is that so terrible? So disgusting? Why is that the end of the world?'
Madeline found herself without words. To be fat and ugly actually would be the end of the world for her.
'It's because A woman's entire self-worth rests on her looks,' said Jane. 'That's why. it's because we live in a beauty-obsessed society where the most important thing a women can do is make herself attractive to men.
. — Liane Moriarty

We still live in a world where many men are pissed off that women choose to be powerful equals rather than submissive objects of sexual release. I am a human. A human being. Who cares how my body randomly decided to generate its reproductive organs in utero? I am not here with the obligation and purpose of being sexually appealing to another human being. I am here to get shit done. — Jennifer DeLucy

Small business is the gateway to opportunity for those who want a piece of the American dream. [ ... ] Well, wouldn't it be nice to hear a little more about the forgotten heroes of America-those who create most of our new jobs, like the owners of stores down the street; the faithfuls who support our churches, synagogues, schools, and communities; the brave men and women everywhere who produce our goods, feed a hungry world, and keep our families warm while they invest in the future to build a better America? That's where miracles are made, not in Washington, D.C. — Ronald Reagan

If men are obsolete, then women will soon be extinct
unless we rush down that ominous Brave New World path where women clone themselves by parthenogenesis, as famously do Komodo dragons, hammerhead sharks, and pit vipers. — Camille Paglia

The real problem here is a massive elephant in the room: our own culture. Our social values, our media - so influential on impressionable young girls - that have been allowed, for millenia, to send out this powerful, alienating message about girls and sport: that sport is unfeminine, that sport makes you sweaty and muscular, that sport is swearing and violence, that sport is ugliness in a world where women's sole priority, value and focus should be beauty and becoming an object of desire. — Anna Kessel

The world is full of men and women who work too much, sleep too little, hardly ever exercise, eat poorly, and are always struggling or failing to find adequate time with their families. We are in a perpetual hurry-constantly rushing from one activity to another, with little understanding of where all this activity is leading us ... The world has gone and got itself in an awful rush, to whose benefit I do not know. We are too busy for our own good. We need to slow down. Our lifestyles are destroying us. The worst part is, we are rushing east in search of a sunset. — Matthew Kelly

A library is many things, but particularly it is a place where books live, and where you can get in touch with other people, and other thoughts, through books ... Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had. — E.B. White

To the USSR on Stalin's death: Regardless of the identity of government personalities, the prayer of us Americans continues to be that the Almighty will watch over the people of that vast country and bring them in His wisdom opportunity to live their lives in a world where all men, and women, and children, dwell in peace and comradeship. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

It was the world of Southern, rural, black growing up, of folks sitting on porches day and night, of folks calling your mama, 'cause you walked by and didn't speak, and of the switch waiting when you got home so that you could be taught some manners. It was a world of single black older women schoolteachers, dedicated, tough; they had taught your mama, her sisters, and her friends. They knew your people in ways that you never would and shared their insight, keeping us in touch with generations. It was a world where we had a history. — Bell Hooks

Any woman who has moved from the playing fields of male discourse into the realm where women are developing our own descriptions of the world knows the extraordinary sense of shedding, as it were, the encumbrance of someone else's baggage, of ceasing to translate. — Adrienne Rich

Welcome to the world of the nesting instinct, where Mother Nature turns pregnant women into frenzied cleaning machines ahead of the new arrival. — Mark Woods

Where is any author in the world Teaches such beauty as a woman's eye? - Love's Labor Lost. The eyes appears to be more immediately connected with the soul than any other organ. A woman reflects every emotion, almost every thought from her two wonderful, priceless eyes, and no feature of her face is more a telltale of her nature. "Show me," says the old Chinese proverb, "a man's eyes, and I will tell you what he might have been. Show me his mouth, and I will tell you what he has been." The same is true of women. Up to thirty or thirty-five a woman may be actress enough to make her eyes tell one tale, while her life would reveal another; but little by little the true state of a woman's soul stands forth in the expression, the frankness, the furtiveness, the candor, or the boldness — Harriet Hubbard Ayer

I wish we lived in a world where how you looked or what you wore wasn't an issue for men or women, and it's by and large not an issue for men, so I wish it wasn't an issue for women, but it is. — Nicola Sturgeon

The community of the saints is not an "ideal" community consisting of perfect and sinless men and women, where there is no need of further repentance. No, it is a community which proves that it is worthy of the gospel of forgiveness by constantly and sincerely proclaiming God's forgiveness ... Sanctification means driving out the world from the Church as well as separating the Church from the world. But the purpose of such discipline is not to establish a community of the perfect, but a community consisting of men who really live under the forgiving mercy of God. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

If all the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players, where do all the audiences come from? — Denis Norden

I was banished from that world forever, I knew. I couldn't go back now. One day soon I would go away from here entirely; I would leave this house, perhaps never to return.
I hugged myself, comforting my fear. Very well then, I thought, I will be my own house. I will build myself a house out of my own flesh and bones where my frightened child-self can find shelter. After all, isn't that one of the things that women do? We are houses for our children, shielding them from harm within the stronghold of our bodies, until they are strong enough to breathe and walk alone. So surely I must be able to give myself shelter now. — Patrice Kindl

What a strange fate for Muslim memory, to be called upon in order to censure and punish! What a strange memory, where even dead men and women do not escape attempts at assassination, if by chance they threaten to raise the hijab that covers the mediocrity and servility that is presented to us as tradition. How did the tradition succeed in transforming the Muslim woman into that submissive, marginal creature who buries herself and only goes out into the world timidly and huddled in her veils? Why does the Muslim man need such a mutilated companion? — Fatema Mernissi

I just think the idea of moving away from the body and discovering sensuality by skimming the body, not tightening the body, seems rather new to me. Especially in this world where we're living right now, where the idea of giving freedom to women, especially in politics what's happening, it seemed so appealing to me, so that was the starting point. — Prabal Gurung

Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. it is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely toleration, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within the interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters — Audre Lorde

We live in a world where people like to pit women against each other. And this is why I love the idea of embracing other females who are doing what I'm doing. It's important for us to support each other. — Madonna Ciccone

He comes where we are, and he brings us the life we hunger for. An early report reads, "Life was in him, life that made sense of human existence" (John 1:4). To be the light of life, and to deliver God's life to women and men where they are and as they are, is the secret of the enduring relevance of Jesus. Suddenly they are flying right-side up, in a world that makes sense. — Dallas Willard

Seattle is beautiful. You look at the sky and it's one of the most beautiful skies in the world, and then there's the Puget Sound, which will kill you, if you fall into it, but it's also beautiful. Seattle is a city of contradictions. It's the most liberal and most literate city in America, and it has Starbucks and [Bill] Gates, but it's also where the Green River killer hunted women and where the runaway population is just shocking when you walk the streets. Within the same city, there's darkness and light. — Veena Sud

Women make up half the world; and I thought I had reached the stage where there was nothing in a woman's nakedness to surprise me. But I felt now as if I was experiencing anew, and seeing a woman for the first time. — V.S. Naipaul

However we resolve the issue in our individual homes, the moral challenge is, put simply, to make work visible again: not only the scrubbing and vacuuming, but all the hoeing, stacking, hammering, drilling, bending, and lifting that goes into creating and maintaining a livable habitat. In an ever more economically unequal world, where so many of the affluent devote their lives to ghostly pursuits like stock trading, image making, and opinion polling, real work, in the old-fashioned sense of labor that engages hand as well as eye, that tires the body and directly alters the physical world tends to vanish from sight. The feminists of my generation tried to bring some of it into the light of day, but, like busy professional women fleeing the house in the morning, they left the project unfinished, the debate broken off in mid-sentence, the noble intentions unfulfilled. Sooner or later, someone else will have to finish the job. — Barbara Ehrenreich

The truth for women living in a modern world is that they must take increasing responsibility for the skills they bring into birth if they want their birth to be natural. Making choices of where and with whom to birth is not the same as bringing knowledge and skills into your birth regardless of where and with whom you birth. — Michel Odent

What can a man say about woman, his own opposite? I mean of course something sensible, that is outside the sexual program, free of resentment, illusion, and theory. Where is the man to be found capable of such superiority? Woman always stands just where the man's shadow falls, so that he is only too liable to confuse the two. Then, when he tries to repair this misunderstanding, he overvalues her and believes her the most desirable thing in the world.
"Women In Europe" (1927). In CW 10: Civilization in Transition. P. 236 — C. G. Jung

Radical change is scary. It's terrifying, actually. And the feminism I support is a full-on revolution. Where women are not simply
allowed
to participate in the world as it already exists - an inherently corrupt world, designed by a patriarchy to subjugate and control and destroy all challengers - but are actively able to re-shapeit. Where women do not simply knock on the doors of churches, of governments, of capitalist marketplaces and politely ask for admittance, but create their own religious systems, governments, and economies. My feminism is not one of incremental change, revealed in the end to be The Same As Ever, But More So. It is a cleansing fire. — Jessa Crispin

The Tao can't be perceived. Smaller than an electron, it contains uncountable galaxies. If powerful men and women could remain centered in the Tao, all things would be in harmony. The world would become a paradise. All people would be at peace, and the law would be written in their hearts. When you have names and forms, know that they are provisional. When you have institutions, know where their functions should end. Knowing when to stop, you can avoid any danger. All things end in the Tao as rivers flow into the sea. — Laozi

Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing. — George Meredith