Quotes from Rosalind Miles

True lovers may never know what love means. A man may love a woman out of his reach. She does not know he loves her, and he will never speak of it.

To face a man in combat is challenge enough. To find the goddess in a woman is the life work of a man. Hard though the first may be, the second is the harder longer road. But every man seeks the woman of the dream, and only the best of men finds what he seeks.

No other woman had that air of spring in January, that ever-bubbling fount of love and hope.

That he loved her was his life's greatest grace—that she loved him was a burden and mystery beyond compare.

Florence Nightingale was never called "the Lady with the Lamp," but "the Lady with the Hammer," an image deftly readjusted by the war reporter of the Times since it was far too coarse for the folks back home. Far from gliding about the hospital with her lamp aloft, Nightingale earned her nickname through a ferocious attack on a locked storeroom when a military commander refused to give her the medical supplies she needed.

Every gain, every success for women is taken to mean that men are being cheated and denigrated. To me it's healthier to turn the question around. While women were straining every muscle, nerve and bone for the last thirty years, while they labored to remake themselves, their lives and the world, what were twentieth-century men doing all this time? And how long will it take them to join in and support us?

Oh, I know, I know, she was a sweet girl, a simple country girl; everyone told me that, both then and since. But I could not forgive her animal dumbness - worse, her rank sensuality, easy as any cow's, and like her dumpling breasts, quite irresistable to men - while those of us whom God has made to think and feel, who are strung out like harps along the wires of our own nature, why, we are rarer than music and must content ourselves with smaller audiences.

In all this flurry of false scientism, the central question went unaddressed: if the possession of a penis and outsize brain were the distinguishing marks of the lords of creation, why was the world not rules by whales?

Every one of the "great" belief systems of the world, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Confucianism, insists on women's inferiority as an article of faith. Individual

Women are the greatest wronged and still-suffering majority in the history of the world, and we can never say that loudly or long enough.

Every revolution is a revolution of ideas-yet to innovate is not reform.

Religion should be kindness. Faith is love.

As the source and force of life, she was timeless and endless.

Wherever I am, in wood or field, By dawn or evening light, Without cease my heart feels The pain of one who is not here...

Skupljanje hrane nesumnjivo je bilo na prvom mjestu ženskih dužnosti budu?i da je taj zadatak održavao pleme na životu. Ni u jednom se trenutku pretpovijesne žene s djecom ili bez nje nisu oslanjale na svoje partnere, lovce, za nabavku hrane.

Individual patriarchs may indeed wriggle off the charge of woman-hating; the key to the gross inflictions laid on women in their names lies in the nature of the system itself. For a monotheism is not merely a religion—it is a relation of power. Any "One God" idea has a built-in notion of primacy and supremacy; that One God is god above all others and his adherents are supreme over all nonbelievers.

One famous female Sufi mystic and religious teacher was Rabi-'ah al-' Ada-wiyyah (712?801), who after a girlhood in slavery fled to the desert, where she rejected all offers of marriage and devoted herself to prayer and scholarship. Although the most distinguished of women Sufis, Rabi-'ah was not unique, since Sufism gave all women the chance to attain a holy dignity

Woe to the land where naked greed holds sway.

women are the race itself, the strong primary sex, and man the biological afterthought.

Domination was not absolute, systems were imperfect, there was still too much room to maneuver - control could not be based on an organ that men could not control. There had to be more - an idea of imminent, eternal maleness that was not physical, visible, fallible; one that was greater than all women because greater than man; whose power was omnipotent and unquestionable - one god, God the father, who man now invented in his own image.

Achieving power, man reached out for the secret of control; and as he began to look beyond the end of his penis, he found a stronger lord, a greater master - God.

She loved your mother', Taliesin said gently. 'This is her farewell.' As he spoke, a chanted melody began inside the chamber, a song without words. Yet it spoke of the beauty in the heart of the flame, of the passing glory of the white bird on the wing, and the blossom of the sea spray under the shining prow. It sang of a mother with her baby, of the hard love between men and women, and the gentle rest that comes at last to all.

To women, therefore, the effect was broadly the same, however the message of male supremacy came packaged. All these systems - Judaism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam - were presented to them as holy, the result of divine inspiration transmitted from a male power to males empowered for this purpose, thereby enshrining maleness itself as power.

All patriarchies, in fact, only succeeded by colonizing, indeed cannibalizing the forms, emblems and sacred objects of the Goddess they were purporting to root out. Much recent theological scholarship has been devoted to recovering what in ages past every schoolgirl knew: that the Great Goddess in her threefold incarnation (maiden, mother and wisewoman) lies behind the Christian trinity, that her immature aspect of moon maiden became the Virgin Mary, and so on.