Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
-
I don't want to be just another blade of grass.
-
To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue nonetheless to exist for him also: mutually recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other...when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the 'division' of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.
-
At bottom, antipsychiatry is still psychiatry. And it doesn't really address itself to women's problems.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The emancipation of women must be the work of women themselves, independent of the class struggle.
-
It is impossible to do anything for anyone.
-
You have to start from where you are today and from what can be done.
-
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.
-
The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority.
-
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.
-
When an individual (or a group of individuals) is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he is inferior.
-
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.
-
The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another.
-
There is a poetry in making preserves; the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars.
-
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.
-
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.