Quotes by Marilyn French

“Men seem unable to feel equal to women: they must be superior or they are inferior”

“Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that. It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion and self-destruction. You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you cant even think straight.”

“All men are rapists and thats all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, and their codes.”

“Nothing is ever simple. What do you do when you discover you like parts of the role youre trying to escape?”

“Whatever they may be in public life, whatever their relations with men, in their relations with women, all men are rapists and thats all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, their codes.”

“I hate discussions of feminism that end up with who does the dishes, she said. So do I. But at the end, there are always the damned dishes.”

“Anyone determined to find another person or group inferior can always find whole lists of grounds that demonstrate inferiority because we are all inferior to the ideals of humanness we have erected”

“Oh, God, why dont I remember that a little chaos is good for the soul?”

“To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons”

“One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.”

They leave the genitals off Barbie and Ken, but they manufacture every kind of war toy. Because sex is more threatening to us than aggression. There have been strict rules about sex since the beginning of written rules, and even before, if we can believe myth. I think thats because its in sex that men feel most vulnerable. In war they can hype themselves up, or they have a weapon. Sex means being literally naked and exposing your feelings. And thats more terrifying to most men than the risk of dying while fighting a bear or a soldier.

I have opened all the doors in my head. I have opened all the pores in my body. But only the tide rolls in.

Pride. You have it where you can have it.

Six men control almost all the media in the United States--book publishing, magazines, television, movie studios, newspapers, and radio. They are not friendly toward feminism, which has almost disappeared from the surface of our society. You will almost never see a feminist column on an op-ed page, a feminist article in a magazine, or newspaper, actual (not satirized) feminist ideas on television or in the movies. Only magazines & radio controlled by feminists--and these are few and not well-funded--offer information on the feminist perspective.This might be understandable if feminism were a wild-eyed manic philosophy. But it is a belief, a politics, based on one simple fact: women are human beings who matter as much as men. That is all that feminism claims. As human beings, women have the right to control their own bodies, to walk freely in the world, to train their minds and bodies, and to love and hate at will. Only those who wish to continue to coerce women into a servant/slave class for men cannot accept this principle.

When a man loses superiority, he loses potency. Thats what all this talk about castrating women is about. Castrating women are those who refuse to pretend men are better than they are and better than women are. The simple truth — that men are only equal — can undermine a culture more devastatingly than any bomb. Subversion is telling the truth.

My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I dont even need to shrug. I simply dont care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply dont matter.

All men are rapists, and thats all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, their codes.

There was no justice, there was only life. And life she had.

S and M is only the expression in the bedroom of an oppressive-submissive relation which can happen also in the kitchen or at the factory, can happen between people of any gender. There is obviously something titillating about these relationships, but it isnt the sexual components that makes them ugly, theyre uglier elsewhere. Nothing sexual is depraved. Only cruelty is depraved, and thats another matter.

To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time any place more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.