Madalyn Murray O'Hair Quotes

The double standard means men can run around and women cannot. I think I'm up to testing that.

People aren't comfortable thinking of women as people. Like we're not people, we're women, and that means something completely different, especially when you have power.

Whenever women have insisted on absolute equality with men, they have invariably wound up with the dirty end of the stick. What they are and what they can do makes them superior to men, and their proper tactic is to demand special privileges, all the traffic will bear. They should never settle merely for equality. For women, "equality" is a disaster.

Not to be too doctrinaire, but we live in the patriarchy! And therefore anything explicitly associated with the female gender, including motherhood, needs to be defensively claimed, because it's either devalued or sentimentally idealized, but not supported. I so thoroughly believe that female human beings have worth that I don't feel the need to argue it, but I think that there's a part of me that very specifically wants to make space for those ideas to be centralized, if only for the moment.

Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.

The women's movement hasn't changed my sex life. It wouldn't dare.

Let women issue a declaration of independence sexually, and absolutely refuse to cohabit with men until they are acknowledged as equals in everything, and the victory would be won in a single week.

To conclude that women are unfitted to the task of our historic society seems to me the equivalent of closing male ideas to female facts.

Women have to stand up to tremendous discriminatory practices, whether inherited traditions, whether imposed norms, male perceptions of power and control. The women always have to go through that and cannot take any privilege for granted.

Music is a male-dominated field. Women are not always taken as seriously as we should be, so sometimes we have to put our foot down.

We have to overcome the practice of male domination - even though it's changing, and changing in Liberia quite drastically.

Obviously, I don't want to minimize the patriarchal nature of our media, our government and our culture as a whole. But I think it's our refusal as women to own our power that is our biggest problem, both individually and collectively. The linchpin that holds the current system in place is the slumber of women.

When those of our army whose voices are likely to coo tell us that the day of sex antagonism is over and that henceforth we only have to advance hand in hand with the male, I do not believe it.

Women cannot serve two masters at once who are urgently beaming antithetical orders.... Either we believe in patriarchy the rule of men over women - or we believe in equality.

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

There are three billion women in the world who have vaginas. I don't think we can stop fighting for our sexual liberation, for our right to control our bodies. But at the same time as we're doing that, we have to also be fighting for the rights of trans women and standing up for them and making sure that we're always providing platforms for them and listening to their concerns in solidarity.

Women piece together their lives from the scraps left over for them.

Society was built on male power, and women's power was... ignored is the best word to describe it I suppose, we have been running society on one power, half a power really. And that's so terrible. The world needs women's power too.

Women have traditionally been either put on pedestals or damned as the source of all sexual temptation and sin. These are two sides of the same coin, since both place women in a nonhuman role. Playboy has opposed these warped sexual values and, in so doing, helped women step down from their pedestals and enjoy their natural sexuality as much as men.

When I started working in a feminist feminine magazine all my life was about rebelling against male authority, which is authority in general is male, so it was rebelling against everything. Everything that was around me made me angry.

Feminism has nothing at all to do with being 'feminine.' Feminine means accentuating the womanly attributes that make women deliciously different from men. The feminine woman enjoys her right to be a woman. She has a positive outlook on life. She knows she is a person with her own identity and that she can seek fulfillment in the career of her choice, including that of traditional wife and mother.

As women, you have to negotiate your way through a man's world.

Women can always think as much as they like, an' they could get up on a platform an' talk till they bust, as long as they didn't want the world to be made no better, an' they wouldn't be thought unwomanly. It's soon as a woman wants any practical good done that she is considered a unwomanly creature.

I think there are many feminists who would say that I am not a feminist. I love women, I have a lot of girlfriends, I admire them, they make so much more sense to me than men, and I feel like the world is a better place when women are in charge. So that kind of by default makes me a feminist. I love working in a female world.

There are some men who, in a spirit of arrogance, think they are superior to women. They do not seem to realize that they would not exist but for the mother who gave them birth. When they assert their superiority they demean her.