Kate Millett Quotes

It's intoxicating for a man to be waited on. Combine this with very, very skillful sex, and that will get them.

He is sometimes slave who should be master; and sometimes master who should be slave.

It is better for a woman to compete impersonally in society, as men do, than to compete for dominance in her own home with her husband, compete with her neighbors for empty status, and so smother her son that he cannot compete at all.

Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.

Like many works of literature, Hollywood chooses for its villains people who strive for social dominance through the pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power. But the ordinary business of capitalism is much more egalitarian: It's about finding meaning and enjoyment in work and production.

Attention is the way social primates measure status. It is highly rewarding because it causes the release of brain chemicals such as dopamine and endorphins.

The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.

So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.

A king is always a king - and a woman always a woman: his authority and her sex ever stand between them and rational converse.

People who study primate societies make a distinction between two kinds of cultural interactions, agonic and hedonic. In agonic societies, you gain status by asserting dominance over others. In hedonic societies, you gain status by drawing attention to yourself. Open source is a hedonic culture.

Some people are by nature slaves and will always be so.

He who allows me to rule is in fact my master.

Power is the chance to impose your will within a social context, even when opposed and regardless of the integrity of that chance.

Aristocracy is naturally abhorrent to me, and adored equality is my idol.

Men are marked out from the moment of birth to rule or to be ruled.

The oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors…. The oppressed find in the oppressors their model of 'manhood/

In a superior civilization, as, for example, that of the Indo-Aryans, the being who is without a characteristic form or caste... would emerge as a pariah. In this respect America is a society of pariahs. There is a role for pariahs. It is to be subjected to beings whose form and internal laws are precisely defined. Instead the modern pariahs seek to become dominant themselves and to exercise their dominion over all the world.

Every organism, every human being, must conquer or serve.

However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four.

One notable feature is that English doesn't have much of a system for expressing relative social status.

Girls, in particular, use storytelling to establish hierarchies, a pecking order. There is a sort of jockeying of who is in charge of shared history.

When young women get called bossy, it's often because they're trying to exercise power without status. It's not a problem that they're being dominant; the backlash arises because they're overstepping their status.

If you're a baboon on the Serengeti, and you're miserable, it's almost certainly because some other baboon has had the free time and energy to devote to making you miserable.

Beta males and females historically fare poorly in anchor positions, and whoever has the dominate, or more alpha, personality will always win out in spoken word count simply because they don't wait for an opening.

When human beings say they have power, it always makes me laugh a little bit.