Virginia Woolf Quotes

To be political means to speak out, to risk being called 'catty', or worse. I don't hear men worrying about whether they may be right or not. They enjoy the fight, whether it is with words or fists. Women still tend to shy away from controversy, to be uncomfortable with competition.

Woman is also the element of conflict.

When I hear the words 'Women should be barefoot and pregnant and in the kitchen,' I think, 'What. A. Dream.' There are no negative connotations to it.

A man must know how to act in the face of opinion; a woman to submit to it.

Among human beings, the subjection of women is much more complete at a certain level of civilization than it is among savages. And the subjection is always reinforced by morality.

... patriarchy creates megapatterns that affect us all--even as we forge different individual choices within them--just as do themegapatterns of nationalism or racism.

In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.

French women will always look up at a man, even if he is four inches shorter than she is.

Women hate everything which strips off the tinsel of sentiment, and they are right, or it would rob them of their weapons.

I don't hate women - they just sometimes make me mad.

I was surrounded by strong women so it had never even occurred to me that women were anything other than equal to men.

A woman can never be too rich or too thin, but until very, very recently, she could be too powerful, for which - if she wasn't smart enough to camouflage herself - she generally paid the price.

I remember becoming aware of women's issues and inequality. It became glaringly clear to me when I was living in America that women are regarded as less intelligent than men.

You could tell 'The Handmaid's Tale' from a male point of view. People have mistakenly felt that the women are oppressed, but power tends to organise itself in a pyramid. I could pick a male narrator from somewhere in that pyramid. It would interesting.

I grew up in a time when many people believed that men and women should not always be treated equally.

Patriarchy is a fundamental imbalance underlying society And it's one we rarely address because it's so universal. But as I get older, I see that peace is a product of balance.

It fills me with a weird rage to wear shoes that make me not able to walk easily or run if I had to. It feeds into this whole 'war on women' thing in my head.

Everything about women is in perpetual crisis.

Black men don't like to be called 'boys,' but women accept being called 'girls.'

Once, power was considered a masculine attribute. In fact, power has no sex.

I never realized until lately that women were supposed to be the inferior sex.

No one knows what women want!

Women with money and women in power are two uncomfortable ideas in our society.

Books about women and children are not valued in the same way as a book about war. And why is that? I don't know.

If I look at history, it seems that most wars and most cruel things have been done by men and not by women.