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Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man.
Simone de Beauvoir -
All oppression creates a state of war.
Simone de Beauvoir
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We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible.
Simone de Beauvoir -
It must be said in addition that the men with the most scrupulous respect for embryonic life are also those who are most zealous when it comes to condemning adults to death in war.
Simone de Beauvoir -
The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.
Simone de Beauvoir -
It is not mere chance that makes families speak of a child who is 'extraordinary for his age' and also of an old man who is 'extraordinary for his age'; the extraordinariness lies in their behaving like human beings when they are either not yet or no longer men.
Simone de Beauvoir -
There has to be a certain relationship between the life and the writing style, and that is really a problem.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Those interested in perpetuating present conditions are always in tears about the marvelous past that is about to disappear, without having so much as a smile for the young future.
Simone de Beauvoir -
When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy it implies, then the "division" of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.
Simone de Beauvoir -
In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.
Simone de Beauvoir -
The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady, yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet.
Simone de Beauvoir -
I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe.
Simone de Beauvoir -
All success cloaks a surrender.
Simone de Beauvoir
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History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born.
Simone de Beauvoir -
In 1949, I believed that social progress, the triumph of the proletariat, socialism would lead to the emancipation of women. But I saw that nothing came of it: first of all, that socialism was not achieved anywhere, and that in certain countries which called themselves socialist, the situation of women was no better than it was in so-called capitalist countries.
Simone de Beauvoir -
There are cases where the slave does not know his servitude and where it is necessary to bring the seed of his liberation to him from the outside: his submission is not enough to justify the tyranny which is imposed upon him.
Simone de Beauvoir -
I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I can not appropriate the snow field where i slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat.
Simone de Beauvoir -
The Communists, following Hegel, speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion.
Simone de Beauvoir -
That is what chills your spine when you read an account of a suicide: not the frail corpse hanging from the window bars but what happened inside that heart immediately before.
Simone de Beauvoir
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It's true that what you find in New York is something other than America. Only small towns and small countries are self-satisfied; a real capital goes beyond its borders.
Simone de Beauvoir -
I realized that even if we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short.
Simone de Beauvoir -
I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth – and truth rewarded me.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.
Simone de Beauvoir