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Feminism is one way of attacking society as it now exists.
Simone de Beauvoir -
it is only on posters and in advertisement pages that Americans have those chubby cheeks, expanding smiles, smooth looks, and faces flushed with well-being. In fact, almost all are at odds with themselves; drink offers a remedy for this inner malady of which boredom is the most usual sign: as drinking is accepted by society, it does not appear as a sign of their Americans' inability to adapt themselves; it is rather the adapted form of inadaptability.
Simone de Beauvoir
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To give space when what one most yearns for is closeness, that is both the great test and great tragedy of love.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Given masculine norms, it is clear that women are more likely to be considered crazy - I'm not saying to be crazy.
Simone de Beauvoir -
It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Man is a talking animal and he will always let himself be swayed by the power of the word. Machines won't change human nature.
Simone de Beauvoir -
The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity. The evil all arose from the fact that he had increased his needs rather than limited them; . . . As long as fresh needs continued to be created, so new frustrations would come into being. When had the decline begun? The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty. . . . Only a moral revolution - not a social or political revolution - only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.
Simone de Beauvoir -
To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.
Simone de Beauvoir -
The time that one gains cannot be accumulated in a storehouse; it is contradictory to want to save up existence, which, the fact is, exists only by being spent and there is a good case for showing that airplanes, machines, the telephone, and the radio do not make men of today happier than those of former times.
Simone de Beauvoir -
As soon as a woman re- fuses to be perfectly happy doing housework eight hours a day, society has a tendency to want to do a lobotomy on her.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Because we are separated everything separates us, even our efforts to join each other.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Can one say that there is a way of crying out, of speaking, which is properly feminine? Personally, I don't think so. In the end, I find this is another way of putting women in a kind of singularity, a ghetto, which is not what I want. I want them to be singular and universal at the same time.
Simone de Beauvoir
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She was trying to get rid of a religious hangover.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Most feminists in France came to feminism after '68 as a result of the hypocrisy they experienced in leftist movements. In these movements, where everyone believed there was going to be true equality, fraternity between men and women, and that together they were going to struggle against this rotten society, even there they noticed that the leftists, the militants, kept them "in their place." Women made the coffee while the others did the talking; they were the ones who typed the letters.
Simone de Beauvoir -
The state of emotional intoxication allows one to grasp existence in one's self and in the other, as both subjectivity and passivity. The two partners merge in this ambiguous unity; each one is freed of his own presence and achieves immediate communication with the other.
Simone de Beauvoir -
I don't want to be just another blade of grass.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Every time I start on a new book, I am a beginner again. I doubt myself, I grow discouraged, all the work accomplished in the past is as though it never was, my first drafts are so shapeless that it seems impossible to go on with the attempt at all, right up until the moment - always imperceptible, there, too, there is a break - when it is has become impossible not to finish it.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Truthfully speaking, women are dangerous, even those who aren't feminists, because there has always been a women's revolt. Only it has usually translated itself into solitary, individualist, disagreeable manifestations - the whole history of the taming of the shrew, the woman-shrew. They weren't shrews without cause.
Simone de Beauvoir
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At bottom, antipsychiatry is still psychiatry. And it doesn't really address itself to women's problems.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one that you met when you were nineteen.
Simone de Beauvoir -
To be a woman, if not a defect, is at least a peculiarity.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Sometimes you can accept an important post, on condition that it really puts you in a position to help women. Unfortunately, women who have important posts very often adopt masculine standards-power, ambition, personal success - and cut themselves off from other women.
Simone de Beauvoir