Germaine de Staël Quotes

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

While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact.

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.

When women are the advisers, the lords of creation don't take the advice till they have persuaded themselves that it is just what they intended to do. Then they act upon it, and, if it succeeds, they give the weaker vessel half the credit of it. If it fails, they generously give her the whole.

Misogyny should be understood as the ‘law enforcement’ branch of a patriarchal order, which has the overall function of policing and enforcing its governing ideology. Sexism wears a lab coat, misogyny goes on witch hunts.... Sexism is bookish; misogyny is combative. Sexism has a theory; misogyny wields a cudgel.

Men make angry music and it's called rock-and-roll; women include anger in their vocabulary and suddenly they're angry and militant.

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.

Just as the slave master required the slaves to imitate the image he had of them, so women, who live in a relatively powerless position, politically and economically, feel obliged by a kind of implicit force to live up to culture's image of what is female.

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

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

Men are superior to women, for one thing they can urinate from a speeding car.

It's very hard for a woman in comedy. It's hard for women to be bold and not care what anyone, particularly men, think. Maybe that is why so many women comics are lesbians.

Women don't want to exchange places with men. Male chauvinists, science-fiction writers and comedians may favor that idea for its shock value, but psychologists say it is a fantasy based on ruling-class ego and guilt.

The psychology of women hitherto actually represents a deposit of the desires and disappointments of men.

I am emboldened by my looks to say things Republican men wouldn't.

People don't want to see women doing things they don't think women should do.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

Man is the organizer of life, woman is his organ for carrying out plans.

I don’t have any respect to men who send women out to do their fighting for them.

The oppression of women is based on custom and tradition—not religion.

Women's chains have been forged by men, not by anatomy.

… male religious leaders have had -- and still have -- an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter.

Women to govern men, slaves freemen, are much in the same degree; all being total violations and perversions of the laws of nature and nations.

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.

One of the major differences between gender discrimination and Racial or Religious Discrimination is that the with the latter the perpetrators fundamentally recognized that it was based on power offered moral challenges. However, men—the perpetrators of discrimination against women have mostly not even considered the moral aspect of it and perceived it as natural.