Mary Daly Quotes

Almost everything has been stolen from us by the patriarchy. Our creativity has been stolen, our creative energies, our religion. I want it back.

I urge you to sin. But not against these itty-bitty religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism-or their secular derivatives, Marxism, Maoism, Freudianism and Jungianism-whic h are all derivatives of the big religion of patriarchy. Sin against the infrastructure itself!

I think many people in my community had very different kinds of mothers: they had mothers who acquiesced in the system of male and white-supremacist domination, and my mother never did. She just could not do it. It just wasn't in her.

I really don't care what people say. It's amazing that feminism continues to exist at all, considering how much counter-feminism is out there.

I think I've always had a certain amount of skepticism of this whole 'shut up and smile' theory. I haven't ever swallowed that pill so easily, although I tried.

Against the State, against the Church, against the silence of the medical profession, against the whole machinery of dead institutions of the past, the woman of today arises.

I can hear the roar of women's silence.

Women have to be extremely careful about choosing something that they consider an act of defiance that can really be used to further their enslavement.

Blind submission in women is considered a virtue, while submission to wrong is itself wrong, and resistance to wrong is virtue alike in women as in man.

I feel that man-hating is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.

The women's movement is taking a different form right now, and it is because it has been so effective and so successful that there's a huge counter movement to try to stop it, to try to divide women from one another, to try to almost foment divisiveness.

I want to hear an alternative viewpoint, and I don't want girls to be defanged and declawed and pretty and mute.

I wouldn't say I'm a feminist, but I don't like girls pretending to be stupid because it's easier.

The struggle of democratic secularism, religious tolerance, individual freedom and feminism against authoritarian patriarchal religion, culture and morality is going on all over the world - including the Islamic world, where dissidents are regularly jailed, killed, exiled or merely intimidated and silenced.

There is hardly any other sphere in which prejudice and superstition of the most horrific kind have been retained so long as in that of women, and just as it must have been an inexpressable relief for humanity when it shook off the burden of religious prejudice and superstition, I think it will be truly glorious when women become real people and have the whole world open before them.

For more than six thousand years the history of woman has been one of hopeless sadness. She moved only to the clank of chains, and her vain desire for better and higher things could not find expression, for woman was by force of circumstances inarticulate. Detraction of one sex and exaltation of the other became a habit of mind expressed in law, in religion, in literature as well as in the ordinary activities of everyday life.

Do I let a group of power-mongering men with short penises tell me what to do?

During the ages, no rebellion has been of like importance with that of Woman against the tyranny of Church and State; none has had its far reaching effects.

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.

You may hiss as much as you please, but women will get their rights anyway. You can’t stop us, neither

Knowing the horror that most women have of anything approaching irreverence, the Bible has been called out to play the part of a scarecrow on the rich fields of men’s monopolies…Men have had the management of all things human for six thousand years…Has the result been so eminently successful that we need dread a little change?

The world will not change overnight, and liberation will not happen unless individual women agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts, and whatever the powers-that-be choose to call them.

We in the West would be wrong to prolong the pain of that transition unnecessarily, by elevating cultures full of bigotry and hatred towards women to the stature of respectable alternative ways of life.

Topple the Patriarchy

I was guilty of appropriating when I did a video called 'Hard Out Here.' I was guilty of assuming that there was a one-size-fits-all where feminism is concerned.