Naomi Wolf Quotes - Page 3

The stronger that women grow, the more prestige, fame, and money is accorded to the display professions: They are held higher and higher above the heads of rising women, for them to emulate.

At least a third of a woman's life is marked with aging; about a third of her body is made of fat. Both symbols are being transformed into operable condition

The economics of industrialized countries would collapse if women didn't do the work they do for free: According to economist Marilyn Waring, throughout the West it generates between 25 and 40 percent of the gross national product.

Aging in women is 'unbeautiful' since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be broken.

Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints.

The Western sexual revolution sucks. It has not worked well enough for women.

Obama has done things like Hitler did. Let me be very careful here. The National Socialists rounded people up and held them without trial, signed legislation that gave torture impunity, and spied on their citizens, just as Obama has. It isn't a question of what has been done that Hitler did. It's what does every dictator do, on the left or the right, that is being done here and now.

Most urgently, women's identity must be premised upon our 'beauty' so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of self-esteem exposed to the air.

Germany was a parliamentary democracy with many, many humane and decent people who kept writing in their journals - I've read these journals, these memoirs - "Surely our leaders will stop this nonsense. Surely someone will take on these thugs. Surely the pendulum will swing back." Everyone was sitting at home going, "Well, they haven't come for me. This is crazy, but surely someone's going to take care of it." We all have to take care of it.

Looking back on 200 years of feminist agitation in this country, we've got to get it that the moral high ground doesn't get us anything. Pleading with powerful men never gets us what we need. Talking doesn't do it. Being right doesn't do it. Hardball politics does it ... and a political strategy.

Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden and name her "Health": if public discourse were really concerned with women's health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth.

I don't want people to be suicidal. I want them to be energized and angry.

Why am I voting for Obama? Obama, of all the candidates, is the only one of the major candidates - even more than Hillary Clinton, when they were running against each other - to speak in favor of the defense of the Constitution and the separation of powers.

I would like to trust and believe that the American spirit of resistance will win the day, but I keep having to be this downer Cassandra person in saying that without dismantling this horrific legislative apparatus that has basically given George W. Bush dictatorial power, the spirit of America is not enough. We have to have that spirit, but we have to have tactics and strategies and a movement and a victory.

We need to get back into grappling with people we disagree with if we want to restore the Republic.

What editors are obliged to appear to say that men want from women is actually what their advertisers want from women.

I'm asking people to think critically and not to be lazy in their thinking.

Dissident Natan Sharansky writes that there are two kinds of states - “fear societies” and “free societies.”… The two societies make up two kinds of consciousness. The consciousness derived of oppression is despairing, fatalistic, and fearful of inquiry. It is mistrustful of the self and forced to trust external authority. It is premised on a dearth of self-respect. It is cramped … In contrast, the consciousness of freedom … is one of expansiveness, trust of the self, and hope. It is a consciousness of limitless inquiry … It builds up in a citizen a wealth of self-respect.

The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.

Poststructuralism. . . . is a form of literary criticism that uses elaborate wordplay to prove its central premise, that all language is internally contradictory and has no fixed meaning.

Health makes good propaganda.

Kim Kardashian's marriage to Kris Humphries famously lasted 72 days, and was reported in the tabloids as being all about the big bucks paid by magazines for the bridal photos: it is a spectacle of a bride-to-be as entrepreneur, not as romantic heroine; the groom, in this scenario, is nothing but a prop.

The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon them.

When women are pessimistic about their political strength and feel hopeless about changing the conditions of their lives, it is almost as if they do not believe that democracy means the country belongs to them. But it's true.

It is foolish for people to think they can align themselves and be safe in a police state.