Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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Let women be provided with living strength of their own. Let them have the means to attack the world and wrest from it their own subsistence, and their dependence will be abolished -- that of man also.
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Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.
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I admire Freud a great deal as a person and thinker. Despite everything, I find his work very, very rich, but I think that for women he has been absolutely disastrous. And even more so, everyone who came after him.
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Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female - whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.
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There is a poetry in making preserves; the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars.
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Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.
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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.
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Love and action always imply a failure, but this failure must not keep us from loving and acting. For we have not only to establish what our situation is, we have to choose it in the very heart of its ambiguity.
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Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing - and a neater one than silence.
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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.
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The innumerable conflicts that set men and women against one another come from the fact that neither is prepared to assume all the consequences of this situation which the one has offered and the other accepted.
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The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another.
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On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself – on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.
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There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one's conscience.
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The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.
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Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority.
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When an individual (or a group of individuals) is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he is inferior.
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There's something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.' There are too many with that vocation. God would have had to love only me.
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It is impossible to do anything for anyone.
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Let women be provided with living strength of their own.
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The emancipation of women must be the work of women themselves, independent of the class struggle.
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But I must admit I didn´t like that idea; do the same thing as everyone else. Eating to live, living to eat - that had been the nightmare of my adolescence. If it meant going back to that, if would be just as well to turn on the gas at once. But I suppose everyone thinks of things like that: let´s turn on the gas at once. And you don´t turn it on.
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To refuse everything, to say, even when there is something which really should be done, "Ah, that's no longer feminist," is a pessimistic, even masochistic tendency in women, the result of having been habituated to inertia, to pessimism.
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The father's life is surrounded by mysterious prestige: the hours he spends in the home, the room where he works, the objects around him, his occupations, his habits, have a sacred character. It is he who feeds the family, is the one in charge and the head. Usually he works outside the home, and it is through him that the household communicates with the rest of the world: he is the embodiment of this adventurous, immense, difficult, and marvelous world; he is transcendence, he is God.