Olympia Dukakis Quotes

Anger has been a really big deal for women: how can we express it without feeling that, as the physically weaker sex, we won't get killed. The alpha-woman was burned at the stake and had her head chopped off in days of old.

As soon as a women gets to an age where she has opinions and she's vital and she's strong, she's systematically shamed into hiding under a rock.

It is a hidden fear that somehow, if they are only given a chance, women will suddenly do as they have been done by.

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

Cinema has only been around for about 100 years. Has all of the world's violence towards women taken place only within the past 100 years?

Till you lift womanhood itself, you will never arrest--nay, you will never importantly diminish the dreadful curse, the great sin of great cities.

The darkest page in history is the persecutions of woman.

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.

I do feel visceral revulsion at the burka because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women.

Misogyny is at the reptilian brain stem of a lot of right-wing politics.

Writers of feminist dystopian fiction are alert to the realities that grind down women's lives, that make the unthinkable suddenly thinkable.

I feel like there's such ancient pain in us as humans. For instance, we come from this patriarchal lineage where women have been oppressed, and we're feeling, I think, collective pain from these energies being so out of balance.

There has been only one war fought literally worldwide, affecting every living thing, and that has been men's all-out, non-stop, millennia-long war against women, a war that not only continues to this moment without the slightest abatement but intensifies hourly.

As women got little crumbs of power, men began to act paranoid - as if we'd disabled them utterly. Do all women have to keep silent for men to speak? Do all women have to be legless for men to walk?

I'm not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself - then they get to say 'See, you did it yourself.'

Women have got to make the world safe for men since men have made it so darned unsafe for women.

Violence against women is real and something I feel passionately about, and the gateway to all that is wolf whistling. It's allowing a man to impose his will on a woman who is just trying to walk down the street and live her life. It's all about unwanted versus wanted attention, and, of course, there's a fine line.

The problem is with men. I know I shouldn't say this, but they've shrouded and hidden women to hide their incompetence.

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

We are victims of evil customs. It is a crime against humanity that our women are shut up within the four walls of the houses as prisoners. There is no sanction anywhere for the deplorable condition in which our women have to live.

I never say 'nagging.' I think that 'nagging' is a term that men created to get women to pipe down some. But, it's a trap that we've created. We created several terms for women to back you down. Nagging means to stop asking me questions, then we get away with more. I think it's a term men created.

God as 'He,' as a patriarchal thing, is offensive to me. It's standard fare for America, 'He, He, He.' Every time I hear that it's like another blow against females. It's very radical talk at this point for females to say this kind of stuff, but nationwide I still hear females referring to God as 'He.'

Women are oppressed in the east, in the west, in the south, in the north. Women are oppressed inside, outside home, a woman is oppressed in religion, she is oppressed outside religion.

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

The more insight I get, the more scared I get of women in general.