Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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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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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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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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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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Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful.
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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.
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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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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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Let women be provided with living strength of their own.
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The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.
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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 most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.
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The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.
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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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Every time a man dies, a child dies too, and an adolescent and a young man as well; everyone weeps for the one who was dear to him.
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To be feminist doesn't mean simply to do nothing, to reduce yourself to total impotence under the pretext of refusing masculine values. There is a problematic, a very difficult dialectic between accepting power and refusing it, accepting certain masculine values, and wanting to transform them. I think it's worth a try.
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Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.
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Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.
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Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, "I don't want to be just another blade of grass."
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Art is an attempt to integrate evil.
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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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Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.
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It is impossible to do anything for anyone.