Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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If you are truly on the left, if you reject ideas of power and hierarchy, what you want is equality. Otherwise, it won't work at all.
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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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Women's mutual understanding comes from the fact that they identify themselves with each other; but for the same reason each is against the others.
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I discovered feminism around 1970-72-precisely the time when feminism began to exist in France. Before that, there was no feminism.
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Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful.
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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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Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.
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Let women be provided with living strength of their own.
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To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints on active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simpily an all-pervasive system.
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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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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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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 ballot box is a most inadequate mechanism of change.
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Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly.
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I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.
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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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I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe.
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I take on a shape and an existence only if I first throw myself into the world by loving, by doing.
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Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart.
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It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body.
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You can't define the future. And in my opinion, you can't define the avant-garde.
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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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The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.
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We belong to this earth. Now I can see the truth ... I love you on this earth of ours. Love me, do!