Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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I am not at all for a feminism which is entirely separatist, which would say, "this domain is purely for women." I don't believe that at all.
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No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.
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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.
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What is very troubling is that people who have tried to write literature, even, for example, proletarian writers, seem to write within the norms of the dominant class.
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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.
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There are so many problems. Women can go to work on these as well without giving up their feminism.
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Choice springs from the totality of the person. Thus, to study, to analyze what a person is, does not eliminate the idea of freedom.
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When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.
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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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It's so easy to be mistaken about the future. Sometimes there are avant-gardes which believe themselves to be the avant-garde and which later find themselves to be absolutely dated.
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Justice can never be done in the midst of injustice.
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I think there is a great tendency toward autobiography among women today. It is perhaps facile - and I say that even though I have written one myself.
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Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know it's exigencies.
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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.
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Woman has always been man's dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.
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...counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen.
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The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.
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The way I approached a question, my habit of mind, the way I looked at things, what I took for granted - all this was myself and it did not seem to me that I could alter it.
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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.
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You can't address yourself to women by speaking a language which no average woman will understand. In my opinion, it's wrong.
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There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial...Yes: throughout these pages I meant what I was writing and I meant the opposite; reading them again I feel completely lost...I was lying to myself. How I lied to myself!
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If you are writing something in which you are really involved, you don't even need to think about it any longer. The situation itself demands your total commitment as an individual, just as in your political commitments.
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I consider it almost antifeminist to say that there is a feminine nature which expresses itself differently, that a woman speaks her body more than a man, because after all, men also speak their bodies when they write. Everything is implicated in the work of a writer.
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I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.