A Quote by Naomi Wolf

“Healthy" and “diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society makes for its own purposes. Women have long been defined as sick as a means of subjecting them to social control.

Naomi Wolf

Quote Topics

Been Control Defined Diseased Healthy Judgments Long Makes Means Often Out Own Points Purposes Sick Social Social Control Society Subjective Susan Them Women

Quote Author

Naomi Wolf
American - Author
Born: November 12, 1962

You don't sit there at twenty-five, unpublished, inexperienced, and respond to Susan Sontag's editorial suggestions like a little snot, rejecting every one of them. But it had a lot to do with the fact that I didn't admire Susan's own fiction.

Sigrid Nunez

The good or healthy society would then be defined as one that permitted people's highest purposes to emerge by satisfying all their basic needs.

Abraham Maslow

Manliness has been defined as assertion of the self. Womanliness has been defined as the nurturing of selves other than our own - even if we quite lose our own in the process. (Women are supposed to find in this loss their true fulfillment.) But every individual person is born both to assert herself or himself and to act out a sympathy for others trying to find themselves - in Christian terms, meant to love one's self as one loves others ... Jesus never taught that we should split up that commandment - assigning 'love yourself' to men, 'love others' to women. But society has tried to.

Barbara Deming

The diseased, anyway, are more interesting than the healthy. The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healthy people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man’s sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. Then, too the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap at the air. Then, too, then, too, then, too.

Roberto Bolano

I believe that the community's duty to education is, therefore, its paramount moral duty. By law and punishment, by social agitation and discussion, society can regulate and form itself in a more or less haphazard and chance way. But through education society can formulate its own purposes, can organize its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to move.

John Dewey

In the mouth of Society are many diseased teeth, decayed to the bones of the jaws. But Society makes no effort to have them extracted and be rid of the affliction. It contents itself with gold fillings.

Khalil Gibran

The State always moves slowly and grudgingly towards any purpose that accrues to society's advantage, but moves rapidly and with alacrity towards one that accrues to its own advantage; nor does it ever move towards social purposes on its own initiative, but only under heavy pressure, while its motion towards anti-social purposes is self-sprung.

Albert J. Nock

The problem is one of opposition between subjective and objective points of view. There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality. But often what appears to a more subjective point of view cannot be accounted for in this way. So either the objective conception of the world is incomplete, or the subjective involves illusions that should be rejected.

Thomas Nagel

In the present moment, you are beyond all definition. This means that you are no longer defined by the pain and limitations of the past. You are no longer defined by your judgments, opinions or beliefs nor are you defined by the judgment, opinions or beliefs of others.

Leonard Jacobson

In a sick society, women who have difficulty fitting in are not ill but demonstrating a healthy and positive response.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Flyaway, problem hair is the enemy of feminism, and was probably invented by the Man to crush Susan Sontag.

Caitlin Moran

A materialist feminist approach to women's oppression destroys the idea that women are a 'natural group' . . . What the analysis accomplishes on the level of ideas, practice makes actual at the level of facts: by its very existence, lesbian society destroys the artificial (social) fact constituting women as a 'natural group.' A lesbian society pragmatically reveals that the division from men of which women have been the object is a political one . . .

Monique Wittig

International Women's Day means many things to many people. Officially, it is 'a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women.' These are important points that deserve to be called out - so we all remember their significance.

Stephanie Ruhle

What does it mean to be healthy? You may think that being healthy means that you are not sick, but being healthy is far more than that. If you feel okay, or average, or nothing much at all, you are not healthy.