Richard Dawkins Quotes

Why extremists always focus on women remains a mystery to me. But they do. It doesn’t matter what country they’re in or what religion they claim. They want to control women.

The more I think on the present condition of woman, the more am I oppressed with the reality of their degradation.

Let us recognize that we can no longer tolerate violent oppression of women in the name of religion and culture any more than we would tolerate violent oppression espoused by any other bully in the name of a twisted rationale.

Nature says women are human beings, men have made religions to deny it. Nature says women are human beings, men cry out no!

Those religions that are oppressive to women are also against democracy, human rights, and freedom of expression.

Losing their reproductive rights is the first step to how women live in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan.

Sometimes I feel as if four thousand years of silencing women, of the fear of women who were burned in oil or eviscerated in front of their daughters, is imprinted deep within me and has altered my DNA.

A woman who does not become the slave of just one man becomes the slave of all men.

Respecting other people's cultures is well and good, but I draw the line at where some branches of Islam, what they do to women. It's indefensible.

Just in relation to women, it's not that huge an imaginative leap to see the connection between the Taliban and the Catholic Church.

There isn't a religion on earth that isn't damaging to the human race because every one of them is patriarchal and every one eliminates more than half of the human race - women. They are all oppressors of women.

The same men who are placing all these outrageous restrictions on women's freedoms in southern Somalia - that type of mentality - that's what I had to deal with in captivity.

I've worked for over 11 years in the Muslim world, and the one thing that I feel like I've learned - who's to say if it's true or not true, it's just my experience - is that men don't like to see really strong, aggressive women in that area of the world.

Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.

Moslem fundamentalists use 7th century customs to keep 21st century women in line.

That both Muslim fundamentalists and the Christian right are today focusing their attempts to regain control in a rapidly changing world on frantic efforts to maintain control over women, particularly over women's sexuality. Moreover, given their mythologies about "holy wars," it is also understandable that they should use "divinely approved" violence to do so…

Men regarded women as a servant class in the community, and that women were going to remain in the servant class until they lifted themselves out of it.

It’s important to say that none of the world’s great religions has been good for women. Not a single one of them.

The burqa is a prison for women, a tool of sexist domination and Islamist indoctrination, Veils had no basis in Islam and "belong to a tiny minority tradition reflecting an ideology that scuttles the Muslim religion., If they want to wear the veil, they can go to a country where it's the tradition, like Saudi Arabia.

The darkest page in history is the persecutions of woman.

Republicans try to wrestle women into Chastity belts.

You—the outside world—will be told that it is our “culture” and “religion” to do X, Y, and Z to women. Understand that whoever deemed it as such was never a woman.

… it is not sufficient to change laws, institutions and customs. It is essential that women acquire ‘a new skin’. This can occur only through a collective effort while women suffer and loathe the oppression of men; it does not follow that her ovaries condemn her to be on her knees for eternity.

[Women’s subjugation to men] is one of the chief hindrances to human improvement.

The burkini is not some new line of swimwear. It is the search version of the burqa and it has the same logic: hide women’s bodies in order to better to control them.