Quotes by Philosophers - Page 229

No society can surely be flourishing and happy of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable.
Adam Smith
We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them thatexcrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body. Yet the very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he is indeed separate! Society as we now know it is therefore playing a game with self-contradictory rules.
Alan W. Watts
Because the horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things — they always do. It's that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something g
Slavoj Žižek
People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?
Jean-Paul Sartre
That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
Erich Fromm
To be wealthy and honored in an unjust society is a disgrace.
Confucius
No social stability without individual stability.
Aldous Huxley
For there is but one essential justice which cements society, and one law which establishes this justice. This law is right reason, which is the true rule of all commandments and prohibitions. Whoever neglects this law, whether written or unwritten, is necessarily unjust and wicked.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.
Aristotle
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Ten thousand women marched through the streets shouting, 'We will not be dictated to,' and went off and became stenographers.
G.K. Chesterton
She had never done these things before; she did them expertly. She had a capacity for action, a competence that clashed incongruously with her appearance.
Ayn Rand
That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes -- the legal subordination of one sex to the other -- is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.
John Stuart Mill
In oppressing, one becomes oppressed. Men are enchained by reason of their very sovereignty; it is because they alone earn money that their wives demand checks, it is because they alone engage in a business or profession that their wives require them to be successful, it is because they alone embody transcendence that their wives wish to rob them of it by taking charge...
Simone de Beauvoir
Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity.
Simone de Beauvoir
--All that because Promethea is a woman? All this uproar, this trembling, this resistance?--Yes. No. Y-Yes...Naynayno. Whynoyes.Yes, Promethea is a woman.Yes, but "because is a woman," that is not important.But no it precisely its not being important that is so important.
Hélène Cixous
But I am just a woman who thinks her duty is not to forget. And this duty, which I believe I must fulfill, is: "as a woman" living now I must repeat again and again "I am a woman," because we exist in an epoch still so ancient and ignorant and slow that there is still always the danger of gynocide.
Hélène Cixous
There is absolutely nothing feminine about the colour pink, or, anything bad-luck'ish about the colour black — in itself.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
One thing is certain: When the time has come, nothing which is man made will subsist. One day, all human accomplishments will be reduced to a pile of ashes. But every single child to whom a woman has given birth will live forever, for he has been given an immortal soul made to God's image and likeness. In this light, the assertion of de Beauvoir that 'women produce nothing' becomes particularly ludicrous.
Alice von Hildebrand
Unwittingly, the feminists acknowledge the superiority of the male sex by wishing to become like men.
Alice von Hildebrand
Feminists who accept the claim made in The Book of Genesis, and, that God is a he, need to make their minds up.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Another kind of transcendence myth has been dramatization of human life in terms of conflict and vindication. This focuses upon the situation of oppression and the struggle for liberation. It is a short-circuited transcendence when the struggle against oppression becomes an end in itself, the focal point of all meaning. There is an inherent contradiction in the idea that those devoted to a cause have found their whole meaning in the struggle, so that the desired victory becomes implicitly an undesirable meaninglessness. Such a truncated vision is one of the pitfalls of theologies of the oppressed. Sometimes black theology, for example that of James Cone, resounds with a cry for vengeance and is fiercely biblical and patriarchal. It transcends religion as a crutch (the separation and return of much old-fashioned Negro spirituality) but tends to settle for being religion as a gun. Tailored to fit only the situation of racial oppression, it inspires a will to vindication but leaves unexplored other dimensions of liberation. It does not get beyond the sexist models internalized by the self and controlling society — models that are at the root of racism and that perpetuate it. The Black God and the Black Messiah apparently are merely the same patriarchs after a pigmentation operation — their behavior unaltered.
Mary Daly
Young women with ambitions should be very crafty and cautious, lest mayhap they be caught in the soft, silken mesh of a happy marriage, and go down to oblivion, dead to the world.
Elbert Hubbard
The natural ambition of woman is through marriage to climb up, leaning upon a man; but those days are gone. You shall be great without the help of any man, just as you are.
Swami Vivekananda
One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.
Simone de Beauvoir
All we think about in the cycle of violence is men. If we miss the oestrogen factor we cannot solve the cycle of violence. We cannot bring peace to the world unless we hold women accountable and morally responsible, particularly for their attacks upon children.
Stefan Molyneux
We will not let ourselves be intimidated by the number and violence of attacks against women; nor be fooled by the self-serving praise showered on the “real woman”; nor be won over by men’s enthusiasm for her destiny, a destiny they would not for the world want to share.
Simone de Beauvoir
A woman's situation, i.e those meanings derived from the total context in which she comes to maturity, disposes her to apprehend her body not as instrument of her transcendence, but "an object destined for another.
Simone de Beauvoir
That the power regimes of heterosexism and phallogocentrism seek to augment themselves through a constant repetition of their logic, their metaphysic, and their naturalized ontologies does not imply that repetition itself ought to be stopped—as if it could be. If repetition is bound to persist as the mechanism of the cultural reproduction of identities, then the crucial question emerges: What kind of subversive repetition might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself?
Judith Butler
I would respect feminist who said "Single moms, are you kidding me? Stop taking government benefits because, the government is the patriarchy. So, you are taking things from the patriarchy so you dont have to be responsible. Any woman who takes money from the government using cops who usually extract it from men by force is not a feminist. Is a exceedingly bad bride of the state." I would admire that but, of course feminism doesn't have anything to do with any of that stuff.Look, it's fine. Have your fun. Make fun of men. Go for it. Yea, we're all idiots, we're all selfish, greedy bastards. Ok, it's fine because the government is going to run out of money soon and then all these woman are going to try to find some guy to latch onto when the benefits stop flowing and I mean, you saw this happening with the soviet union. "Now we need you! You guys are great! We missed you so much! Give me some money!"It's just a bunch of noise from a bunch of people who are stealing from the productive.
Stefan Molyneux
Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowlegde of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper; outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of proptiety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, every thing else is needless, for, at least, twenty years of their lives.
Mary Wollstonecraft
The situation of those men in the hierarchy of gender who avail themselves of female tenderness is not thereby altered: Their superordinate position is neither abandoned, nor their male privilege relinquished. The vulnerability these men exhibit is not a prelude in any way to their loss of male privilege or to an elevation in the status of women.
Sandra Lee Bartky
Here are young women with more opportunities, more liberties than almost any women in history and at that moment we tell them they’re short-changed silenced victims of a patriarchy? It’s defeatist and demoralising.
Christina Hoff Sommers
American women are characteristically frigid and materialistic. The man who 'has his way' with an American girl is under a material obligation to her. The woman has granted a material favour. In cases of divorce American law overwhelmingly favours the woman. American women will divorce readily enough when they see a better bargain. It is frequently the case in America that a woman will be married to one man but already 'engaged' to a future husband, the man she plans to marry after a profitable divorce.
Julius Evola
Women are no longer required to be chaste or modest, to restrict their sphere of activity to the home, or even to realize their properly feminine destiny in maternity. Normative femininity [that is, the rules for being a good woman] is coming more and more to be centered on women’s body—not its duties and obligations or even its capacity to bear children, but its sexuality, more precisely, its presumed heterosexuality and its appearance. . . . The woman who checks her makeup half a dozen times a day to see if her foundation has caked or her mascara has run, who worries that the wind or the rain may spoil her hairdo, who looks frequently to see if her stockings have bagged at the ankle, or who, feelingfat, monitors everything she eats, has become, just as surely as the inmateof Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a self committed to a relentless self-surveillance. This self-surveillance is a form of obedienceto patriarchy.
Rosemarie Tong
Girls are weighed down by restrictions, boys with demands - two equally harmful disciplines.
Simone de Beauvoir
[Woman] is simply what man decrees; thus she is called "the sex," by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex -- absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute -- she is the Other.
Simone de Beauvoir
One understands now the drama that rends the adolescent girl at puberty: she cannot become “a grown-up” without accepting her femininity
Simone de Beauvoir
The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny thatthe effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen themby repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalentof destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipationis imperative.
Hélène Cixous
I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man. So only anoblique consideration will be found here of man; it’s up to him to saywhere his masculinity and femininity are at: this will concern us oncemen have opened their eyes and seen themselves clearly.
Hélène Cixous
They grab you by the breasts, they pluck your derriere, they stuff you in a pot, they saute you with sperm, they grab you by the beak, they stick you in a house, they fatten you up on conjugal oil, they shut you up in your cage. And now, lay.
Hélène Cixous
Gracious Creator of the whole human race! hast thou created such a being as woman, who can trace thy wisdom in thy works, and feel that thou alone art by thy nature, exalted above her-for no better purpose? Can she believe that she was only made to submit to man her equal; a being, who, like her, was sent into the world to acquire virtue? Can she consent to be occupied merely to please him; merely to adorn the earth, when her soul is capable of rising to thee? And can she rest supinely dependent on man for reason, when she ought to mount with him the arduous steeps of knowledge?
Mary Wollstonecraft
If so few female geniuses are found in history, it is because society denies them any means of expression.
Simone de Beauvoir
The relation of woman to husband, of of daughter to father, of sister to brother, is a relation of vassalage.
Simone de Beauvoir
she gives birth in pain, she heals males' wounds, she nurses the newborn and buries the dead; of man she knows all that offends his pride and humiliates his will. While inclining before him and submitting flesh to spirit, she remains on the carnal borders of the spirit; and she contests the sharpness of hard masculine architecture by softening the angles; she introduces free luxury and unforeseen grace.
Simone de Beauvoir
; the man who does not "understand" a woman is happy to replace his subjective deficiency with an objective resistance; instead of admitting his ignorance, he recognizes the presence of a mystery exterior to himself: here is an excuse that flatters his laziness and vanity at the same time.
Simone de Beauvoir
The relation of woman to husband, of daughter to father, of sister to brother, is a relation of vassalage.
Simone de Beauvoir
Taking without being taken in the anguish of becoming prey is the dangerous game of adolescent feminine sexuality.
Simone de Beauvoir
The little girl feels that her body is escaping her, that it is no longer the clear expression of her individuality: it becomes foreign to her; and at the same moment she is grasped by others as a thing: on the street, eyes follow her, her body is subject to comments; she would like to become invisible; she is afraid of becoming flesh and afraid to show her flesh.
Simone de Beauvoir
: woman is an eminently poetic reality since man projects onto her everything he is not resolved to be.
Simone de Beauvoir
Democracy does not speak in unison; its tunes are dissonant, and necessarily so. It is not a predictable process; it must be undergone, as a passion must be undergone. It may also be that life itself becomes foreclosed when the right way is decided in advance, or when we impose what is right for everyone, without finding a way to enter into community and discover the "right" in the midst of cultural translation. It may be that what is "right" and what is "good" consist in staying open to the tensions that beset the most fundamental categories we require, to know unknowingness at the core of what we know.
Judith Butler
To be called a copy, to be called unreal, is thus one way in which one can be oppressed. But consider that it is more fundamental than that. For to be oppressed means that you already exist as a subject of some kind, you are there as the visible and oppressed other for the master subject as a possible or potential subject. But to be unreal is something else again. For to be oppressed one must first become intelligible. To find that one is fundamentally unintelligible (indeed, that the laws of culture and of language find one to be an impossibility) is to find that one has not yet achieved access to the human. It is to find oneself speaking only and always as if one were human, but with the sense that one is not. It is to find that one's language is hollow, and that no recognition is forthcoming because the norms by which recognition takes place are not in one's favour.
Judith Butler
The feminine body is expected to be flesh, but discreetly so;
Simone de Beauvoir
We must be undone in order to do ourselves: we must be part of a larger social fabric of existence in order to create who we are.
Judith Butler
Scriassine studied me in turn. "You're not so dumb, you know. Generally I dislike intelligent women, maybe because they're not intelligent enough. They always want to prove to themselves, and to everyone else, how terribly smart they are. So all they do is talk and never understand anything. What struck me the first time I saw you was that way you have of keeping quiet.
Simone de Beauvoir
Desperate, lonely, cut off from the human community which in many cases has ceased to exist, under the sentence of violent death, wracked by desires for intimacy they do not know how to fulfil, at the same time tormented by the presence of women, men turn to logic.
Andrea Nye
All women live
Nussbaum
All women live in sexual objectification the way fish swim in water.
Nussbaum
Pregnancy = "the slow, difficult, and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself. The ability to succeed in this path without masochism and without annihilating one's affective, intellectual, and professional personality - such would seem to be the stakes to be won through guiltless maternity.
Julia Kristeva