A Quote by Rebecca West

The word 'idiot' comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: men are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.

Rebecca West

Quote Topics

Affairs Brain Cast Cells Darkness Deep Defect Details Every Fate Female Follow Greek Idiocy Idiot Intent Lives Lunacy Male Meaning Men Moonlight Nature Object Obsessed Outlines Person Private Private Person Public Public Affairs Root See Shows Than Through Which Women Word World Worse

Quote Author

Rebecca West
Irish - Author
December 21, 1892 - March 15, 1983

Idiocy is the female defect ... It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy.

Rebecca West

This policy of supplying by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, both private and public.

James Madison

I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which 'sexism' is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed 'patrivincialism' or patrochialism': the assumption that women are a subgroup, that men's culture is the 'real' world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the 'great' or 'liberalizing' periods of history have been the same for women as for men.

Adrienne Rich

I think the defect actually lies with male artists. Male artists often border on idiocy, while it's important for a woman not to be that way, if possible. Women are outstanding in science, just as good as men.

Georg Baselitz

One of the things about the modern world is that the public and the private - which is not the same as the public and the personal - but the public and the private... it's very, very much harder than it used to be to have things that are private and things that are public.

David Miliband

In the end, it is because the media are driven by the power and wealth of private individuals that they turn private lives into public spectacles. If every private life is now potentially public property, it is because private property has undermined public responsibility.

Terry Eagleton

Pornography reveals that male pleasure is inextricably tied to victimizing, hurting, exploiting; that sexual fun and sexual passion in the privacy of the male imagination are inseparable from the brutality of male history. The private world of sexual dominance that men demand as their right and their freedom is the mirror image of the public world of sadism and atrocity that men consistently and self-righteously deplore. It is in the male experience of pleasure that one finds the meaning of male history.

Andrea Dworkin

Male dominance in society always means that out of public sight, in the private, ahistorical world of men with women, men are sexually dominating women.

Andrea Dworkin

There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome." "And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody." "And yours," he replied with a smile, "is wilfully to misunderstand them.

Jane Austen

General, your tank is a powerful vehicle It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men. But it has one defect: It needs a driver. General, your bomber is powerful. It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant. But it has one defect: It needs a mechanic. General, man is very useful. He can fly and he can kill. But he has one defect: He can think.

Bertolt Brecht

?Courage is a virtue appreciated in a male but considered a defect in our gender. Bold women are a threat to a world that is badly out of balance, in favor of men.

Isabel Allende

The men who administer public affairs must first of all see that everyone holds onto what is his, and that private men are never deprived of their goods by public men.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Every human perfection is allied to a defect into which it threatens to pass, but it is also true that every defect is allied to a perfection.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumes as such, publicly.

Roland Barthes

Ron allowed us to see right away the private piece of a person about to become very public. I suspect we're going to see more of her very private world - Laura's private experience. I'm not sure yet how public she's going to be about the actions she's going to have to take.

Mary McDonnell

I think when you're an adult you start to like the very things that make you different. If you obsess about some defect, you make it obvious to everyone, and suddenly everyone is staring at just that defect. It's always like that. The more you hide something, the more it shows. But when you accept your defect, suddenly no one on earth sees it anymore.

Audrey Tautou

A Quote by Rebecca West

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors