Pietro Aretino Quotes

Some ... sexist evil probably predates religion and can be ascribed to our biology, but there is no question that religion promulgates and renders sacrosanct attitudes toward women that would be unseemly in a brachiating ape.

What evil is there in seeing a man possess a woman? Why, the beasts would be more free than we!

... so long as woman sat with bandaged eyes and manacled hands, fast bound in the clamps of ignorance and inaction, the world of thought moved in its orbit like the revolutions of the moon; with one face (the man's face) always out, so that the spectator could not distinguish whether it was disc or sphere.

The exploitation of women, mass hunger, disregard for freedom of conscience and for freedom of speech, widespread and racial discrimination all these evils are far too prevalent to be overlooked.

Woman gives herself as a prize to the weak and as a prop to the strong and no man ever has what he should.

Man treats woman as his own property and not as being capable of feelings, like himself. The way man treats women is much worse than the way landlords treat servants and the high-caste treat the low-caste. These treat them so demeaningly only in situations mutually affecting them; but men treat cruelly and as slaves, from their birth till death.

I long for the day my sisters will rise, and occupy the sphere to which they are called by their high nature and destiny.

There is a vulgar persuasion, that the ignorance of women, by favoring their subordination, ensures their utility. 'Tis the same argument employed by the ruling few against the subject many in aristocracies; by the rich against the poor in democracies; by the learned professions against the people in all countries.

This view that women are somehow inferior to men is not restricted to one religion or belief. It is widespread. Women are prevented from playing a full and equal role in many faiths.

Man has regarded woman as his tool. She has learnt to be his tool and in the end found it is easy and pleasurable to be such, because when one drags another in his fall, the descent is easy.

Human envy is certainly not one of the sources of discontent that a free society can eliminate. It is probably one of the essential conditions for the preservation of such a society that we do not countenance envy, not sanction its demands by camouflaging it as social justice, but treat it, in the words of John Stuart Mill, as 'the most anti-social and evil of all passions.'

Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.

Thank God, they cannot cut down the clouds!

A butterfly flitting from flower to flower ever remains mine, I lose the one that is netted by me.

We truly possess only what we are able to renounce; otherwise, we are simply possessed by our possessions.

Freedom cannot be achieved unless women have been emancipated from all forms of oppression... Our endeavors must be about the liberation of the woman, the emancipation of the man and the liberty of the child.

Possessiveness destroys love. And they should not be possessed, because that again destroys your love.

Woman, thou shouldst ever be clothed in rags and in mourning, appearing only as a penitent, drowned in tears, and expiating thus the sin of having caused the fall of the human race. Woman thou art the gate of the devil. It is thou who hast corrupted those whom Satan dare not attack face to face.

It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.

The universal religion - contempt for women.

Let woman share the rights and she will emulate the virtues of man; for she must grow more perfect when emancipated.

Male religion entombs women in sepulchres of silence in order to chant its own eternal and dreary dirge to a past that never was.

It is a tragedy beyond the power of language to convey when what has been imposed on women by force becomes a standard of freedom for women: and all the women say it is so.