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The renewed use of lobotomy today is particularly applicable to women: Because they do routine things, it is possible to take away their spirit of revolt, of debate, of criticism, and still leave them perfectly capable of making stews or washing dishes. It's terrible, this tendency to consider women something dangerous to society.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Society turns away from the aged worker as though he belonged to another species. That is why the whole question is buried in a conspiracy of silence. Old age exposes the failure of our entire civilization.
Simone de Beauvoir
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As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity.
Simone de Beauvoir -
When women act like women, they are accused of being inferior. When women act like human beings, they are accused of behaving like men.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Justice can never be done in the midst of injustice.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Retirement revives the sorrow of parting, the feeling of abandonment, solitude and uselessness that is caused by the loss of some beloved person.
Simone de Beauvoir -
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
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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.
Simone de Beauvoir -
If the feminine issue is so absurd, is because the male's arrogance made it "a discussion.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Choice springs from the totality of the person. Thus, to study, to analyze what a person is, does not eliminate the idea of freedom.
Simone de Beauvoir -
It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Dwelling-place and food are useful for life but give it no significance: the immediate goals of the housekeeper are only means, not true ends.
Simone de Beauvoir -
I never thought of myself as being in the avant-garde. I said what I had to say, as I was able to say it.
Simone de Beauvoir
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But women do not say 'We', except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say 'women', and women use the same word in referring to themselves.
Simone de Beauvoir -
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.
Simone de Beauvoir -
A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Two separate beings, in different circumstances, face to face in freedom and seeking justification of their existence through one another, will always live an adventure full of risk and promise.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Habit has a kind of poetry.
Simone de Beauvoir -
In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.
Simone de Beauvoir
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There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Virginia Woolf thought a lot about her own sex when she wrote. In the best sense of the word, her writing is very feminine, and by that I mean that women are supposed to be very sensitive to all the sensations of nature, much more so than men, much more contemplative. It's this quality that marks her best works.
Simone de Beauvoir -
Few books are more thrilling than certain confessions, but they must be honest, and the author must have something to confess.
Simone de Beauvoir -
The past is not a peaceful landscape lying there behind me, a country in which I can stroll wherever I please, and will gradually show me all its secret hills and dales. As I was moving forward, so it was crumbling. Most of the wreckage that can be seen is colourless, distorted, frozen: its meaning escapes me... all that's left is a skeleton. I shall never find my plans again, my hopes and fears - I shall not find myself.
Simone de Beauvoir