Kate Millett Quotes

The image of the woman as we know it is an image created by men and fashioned to suit their needs.

The complete destruction of traditional marriage and the nuclear family is the 'revolutionary or utopian' goal of feminism.

Many women do not recognize themselves as discriminated against; no better proof could be found of the totality of their conditioning.

When one group rules another, the relationship between the two is political. When such an arrangement is carried out over a long period of time it develops an ideology (feudalism, racism, etc.). All historical civilizations are patriarchies: their ideology is male supremacy.

We are women. We are a subject people who have inherited an alien culture.

Perhaps patriarchy's greatest psychological weapon is simply its universality and longevity. ... Patriarchy has a still more tenacious or powerful hold through its successful habit of passing itself off as nature.

A sexual revolution begins with the emancipation of women, who are the chief victims of patriarchy, and also with the ending of homosexual oppression.

During depression the world disappears. Language itself. One has nothing to say. Nothing. No small talk, no anecdotes. Nothing can be risked on the board of talk. Because the inner voice is so urgent in its own discourse: How shall I live? How shall I manage the future? Why should I go on?

Homosexuality was invented by a straight world dealing with its own bisexuality.

To love is simply to allow another to be, live, grow, expand, become. An appreciation that demands and expects nothing in return.

Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different.

Aren't women prudes if they don't and prostitutes if they do?

However muted its present appearance may be, sexual dominion obtains nevertheless as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power

The great mass of women throughout history have been confined to the cultural level of animal life in providing the male with sexual outlet and exercising the animal functions of reproduction and care of the young.

The lesbian is the archtypical feminist, because she's not into men - she's the independent woman par excellence.

The enormous social change involved in a sexual revolution is basically a matter of altered consciousness, the exposure and elimination of social and psychological realities underlying political and cultural structures. We are speaking, then, of a cultural revolution, which, while it must necessarily involve the political and economic reorganization traditionally implied by the term revolution, must go far beyond this as well.

Intercourse is an assertion of mastery, one that announces his own higher caste and proves it upon a victim who is expected to surrender, serve, and be satisfied.

You have to be a little patient if you're an artist. People don't always get you the first time.

The concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit, since love is the only circumstance in which the female is (ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity.

Let us stop being afraid. Of our own thoughts, our own minds. Of madness, our own or others'. Stop being afraid of the mind itself, its astonishing functions and fandangos, its complications and simplifications, the wonderful operation of its machinery--more wonderful because it is not machinery at all or predictable.

In sex one wants or does not want. And the grief, the sorrow of life is that one cannot make or coerce or persuade the wanting, cannot command it, cannot request it by mail order or finagle it through bureaucratic channels.

How crazy craziness makes everyone, how irrationally afraid. The madness hidden in each of us, called to, identified, aroused like a lust. And against that the jaw sets. The more I fear my own insanity the more I must punish yours.

No one should be adored, it's fundamentally immoral.

Hostility is expressed in a number of ways. One is laughter.

To be a rebel is not to be a revolutionary. It is more often by a way of spinning one's wheels deeper in sand.