Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
-
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.
-
It's true that this is one of the problems which often arises among my radical, revolutionary feminist friends: Do you have to join the system or not? On the one hand, if you don't, you risk being ineffectual. But if you do, from that moment on, you place your feminism at the service of a system which you want to take apart.
-
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.
-
Harmony between two individuals is never granted-it has to be conquered indefinitely.
-
Women aren't more easily swayed by fascism than men, but I believe that their situation makes them in effect more slavish than men.
-
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.
-
In order to be an artist, one must be deeply rooted in the society.
-
There are so many problems. Women can go to work on these as well without giving up their feminism.
-
Many things would be changed for Americans if they would only admit that there is ill-luck in this world and that misfortune is not a priori a crime.
-
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.
-
She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.
-
Literature is always what the dominant ideology recognizes as literature.
-
When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.
-
Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself.
-
The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one.
-
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.
-
She offered her mouth to him, as if enchanted. A Persian princess, a little Indian, a fox, a morning glory, a lovely wisteria--it always pleased them when you told them they looked like something, like something else.
-
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.
-
Habit has a kind of poetry.
-
The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady, yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet.
-
To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.
-
I think that Freud understood absolutely nothing about women - as he himself said.
-
I think that feminism permits women to speak among themselves, instead of simply being resentful, having personal complaints, which get them nowhere and which make them sick and ill-tempered, depressive and poison the lives of their husbands and children. It's much better to arrive at a collective consciousness of this problem, which is both a kind of therapy and the basis for a struggle.
-
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.