Top 85 Quotes & Sayings by Kate Millett
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American activist Kate Millett.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
It was horrifying. You wouldn't believe how people are treated there. You could see that these people had withdrawn so far that they just lived in their own minds. They did terrible things to themselves.
What is the natural reaction when told you have a hopeless mental illness? That diagnosis does you in; that, and the humiliation of being there. I mean, the indignity you're subjected to. My God.
Many women do not recognize themselves as discriminated against; no better proof could be found of the totality of their conditioning.
The involuntary character of psychiatric treatment is at odds with the spirit and ethics of medicine itself.
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.
This country is becoming increasingly authoritarian. It's based on capital punishment.
Politics is repetition. It is not change. Change is something beyond what we call politics. Change is the essence politics is supposed to be the means to bring into being.
In those days, when you got boxed, that was it. A lot of old people were there because somebody wanted the farm. It was about property. People are treated like property.
I saw hell. The hospital had divided and conquered pretty successfully.
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.
Men and women were declared equal one morning and everybody could divorce each other by postcard.
Everybody believes in psychiatry; it's supposed to be for our own good. Let psychiatry prove that anybody has an illness, and I'd concede, but there is no physical proof.
Psychiatry causes so much death.
I was supposed to be women's lib, and now I'd exceeded it and gone over into international politics.
Mother had committed me for life. This is where I felt betrayed the most.
We are naive and moralistic women. We are human beings who find politics a blight upon the human condition. And do not know how one copes with it except through politics.
We're more sexually repressed than men, having been given a much more strict puritanical code of behavior than men ever have.
They are more beautiful than anything in the world, kinetic sculptures, perfect form in motion.
You won't do any more housework? Then you go to the bin.
A sexual revolution begins with the emancipation of women, who are the chief victims of patriarchy, and also with the ending of homosexual oppression.
I'm slammed with an identity that can no longer say a word; mute with responsibility.
We are women. We are a subject people who have inherited an alien culture.
It would appear that love is dead. Or very likely in a bad way.
What is the future of the woman's movement? How in the hell do I know? I don't run it.
Aren't women prudes if they don't and prostitutes if they do?
They weren't crazy. They were tired of being locked up. Even I could see that.
Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different.
With the first act of cruelty committed in the name of revolution, with the first murder, with the first purge and execution, we have lost the revolution.
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.
Isn't privacy about keeping taboos in their place?
What is our freedom fight about? Is it about the liberation of children or just having sex with them?
My sister said, You're making it hard for all us housewives in Nebraska.
This is how psychiatry has functioned-as a kind of property arm of the government, who can put you away if your husband doesn't like you.
As women, we're probably more protective of children. Also, we've been minors all of our history.
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.
Homosexuality was invented by a straight world dealing with its own bisexuality.
As women, we're probably more protective of children. Also, we've been minors all of our history
No one should be adored, it's fundamentally immoral.
It may be that a second wave of the sexual revolution might at last accomplish its aim of freeing half the race from its immemorial subordination--and in the process bring us all a great deal closer to humanity. It may be that we shall even be able to retire sex from the harsh realities of politics, but not until we have created a world we can bear out of the desert we inhabit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
The image of the woman as we know it is an image created by men and fashioned to suit their needs.
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.
Isn't privacy about keeping taboos in their place
Homosexuality was invented by a straight world dealing with its own bisexuality. But finding this difficult, and preferring not toadmit it, it invented a pariah state, a leper colony for the incorrigible whose very existence, when tolerated openly, was admonition to all. We queers keep everyone straight as whores keep matrons virtuous.
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.
The lesbian is the archtypical feminist, because she's not into men - she's the independent woman par excellence.
You have to be a little patient if you're an artist. People don't always get you the first time.
To love is simply to allow another to be, live, grow, expand, become. An appreciation that demands and expects nothing in return.
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.
The worst part about prostitution is that you're obliged not to sell sex only, but your humanity. That's the worst part of it: that what you're selling is your human dignity. Not really so much in bed, but in accepting the agreement - in becoming a bought person.
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
People have a right to their own lives, and if you can't help somebody, you ought to get out of their way.
Perhaps nothing is so depressing an index of the inhumanity of the male-supremacist mentality as the fact that the more genial human traits are assigned to the underclass: affection, response to sympathy, kindness, cheerfulness.
The whole bloody system is sick: the very notion of leadership, a balloon with a face painted upon it, elected and inflated by media's diabolic need to reduce ideas to personalities.
The complete destruction of traditional marriage and the nuclear family is the 'revolutionary or utopian' goal of feminism.
Hostility is expressed in a number of ways. One is laughter.
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