Quotes from Mary Daly

Hags live. Women traveling into feminist time/space are creating Hag-ocracy, the place we govern. To govern is to steer, to pilot.

Women's minds have been mutilated and muted to such a state that 'Free Spirit' has been branded into them as a brand name for girdles and bras rather than as the name of our verb-ing, be-ing Selves.

Patriarchy has stolen our cosmos and returned it in the form of 'Cosmopolitan' magazine and cosmetics.

Almost everything has been stolen from us by the patriarchy. Our creativity has been stolen, our creative energies, our religion. I want it back.

Despite erasure by the media and other patriarchal institutions, there was, by 1975, a substantial body of feminist writings as well as artwork, music, films, and organization of all kinds.

Work is a substitute "religious" experience for many workaholics.

You become courageous by doing courageous acts...Courage is a habit.

It's like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging.

Courage to be is the key to revelatory power of the feminist revolution.

Think of Virginia Woolf, 'A Room of One's Own' - that's what women have always needed under patriarchy and can't be creative without. They took away my classroom and my status to teach, and now they have taken away my office, and all of it is giving the message that Virginia Woolf and I are losing what I call 'womenspace.'

If God is male, then the male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination.

Women have had the power of naming stolen from us.

Work is a substitute religious experience for many workaholics.

The word 'sin' is derived from the Indo-European root 'es-,' meaning 'to be.' When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a [person] trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, 'to be' in the fullest sense is 'to sin'.

There are and will be those who think I have gone overboard. Let them rest assured that this assessment is correct, probably beyond their wildest imagination, and that I will continue to do so.

Every woman who has come to consciousness can recall an almost endless series of oppressive, violating, insulting, assaulting acts against her Self. Every woman is battered by such assaults - is on a psychic level, a battered woman.

It is the creative potential itself in human beings that is the image of God.

It is impossible to Name and Act against oppression if there are no Nameable oppressors.

God's plan' is often a front for men's plans and a cover for inadequacy, ignorance, and evil.

We are aware that the gods of patriarchy are pale derivatives and reversals of ancient yet always Present Goddess(es). We suspect that phallocentric writers and artists who have even a glimmer of insight are sometimes made uncomfortable by their own state of deception. Those who have any awareness of the heinous crime of reversal which is patriarchy must be in a state of deep conflict and fear of...Her.

Courage to be is the key to revelatory power of the feminist revolution.

What men do to trees mirrors what they do to women.

Originally, it was believed that witches possessed the power of glamour and according to the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, witches by their glamour could cause the male 'member' to disappear. In modern usage, this meaning has almost disappeared into the background and the power of the term is masked and suffocated by such foreground images as those associated with glamour magazine.

If God is male, then male is God.