Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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As long as the family and the myth of the family ... have not been destroyed, women will still be oppressed.
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Writing ... is a profession that can only be learned by writing.
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I was struck by the absence, even among very young boys and girls, of any interior motivation; they were incapable of thinking, of inventing, of imagining, of choosing, of deciding for themselves; this incapacity was expressed by their conformism; in every domain of life they employed only the abstract measure of money, because they were unable to trust to their own judgment.
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Literature in France seems to be undergoing a crisis now, and nothing comes immediately to mind.
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Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, ans scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth.
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Work almost always has a double aspect: it is a bondage, a wearisome drudgery; but it is also a source of interest, a steadying element, a factor that helps to integrate the worker with society. Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.
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Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity.
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There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.
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This is certainly a very tricky point: How to ally yourself to other leftist forces without losing your feminist specificity.
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I never thought of myself as being in the avant-garde. I said what I had to say, as I was able to say it.
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I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen.
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I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
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It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world.
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I willingly trust myself to chance. I let my thoughts wander, I digress, not only sitting at my work, but all day long, all night even. It often happens that a sentence suddenly runs through my head before I go to bed, or when I am unable to sleep, and I get up again and write it down.
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In order to be an artist, one must be deeply rooted in the society.
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Men create their own gods and thus have some slight understanding that they are self-fabricated. Women are much more susceptible, because they are completely oppressed by men; they take men at their word and believe in the gods that men have made up. The situation of women, their culture, makes them kneel more often before the gods that have been created by men than men themselves do, who know what they've done. To this extent, women will be more fanatical, whether it is for fascism or for totalitarianism.
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The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return.
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We always come back to the same vicious circle - an extreme degree of material or intellectual poverty does away with the means of alleviating it.
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For me, the problem of time is linked up with that of death, with the thought that we inevitably draw closer and closer to it, with the horror of decay.
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Each of us is responsible for everything and to every human being.
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Feminism is a revolutionary movement which is different from the class struggle movement, the proletarian movement, but which is a movement which must be leftist. By that I mean at the extreme left, a movement working to overthrow the whole society.
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You have never had any confidence in him. And if he has no confidence in himself it is because he sees himself through your eyes.
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I'm not against mothers. I am against the ideology which expects every woman to have children, and I'm against the circumstances under which mothers have to have their children.
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To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future.