Quotes About Oppression

Porque não contestam as mulheres a soberania do macho? Nenhum sujeito se coloca imediata e espontaneamente como não essencial; não é o Outro que, definindo-se como Outro, define o Um; ele é posto como Outro pelo Um definindo-se como Um. Mas para que o Outro não se transforme no Um é preciso que se sujeite a esse ponto de vista alheio. De onde vem essa submissão na mulher?

counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen.

A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison.

Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly. Let but the future be opened to her, and she will no longer be compelled to linger in the present.

If so few female geniuses are found in history, it is because society denies them any means of expression.

Girls are weighed down by restrictions, boys with demands - two equally harmful disciplines.

One of the benefits that oppression secures for the oppressor is that the humblest among them feels superior.

Woman] is simply what man decrees; thus she is called the sex, by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex -- absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute -- she is the Other.

Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, ans scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth.

We will not let ourselves be intimidated by the number and violence of attacks against women; nor be fooled by the self-serving praise showered on the "real woman"; nor be won over by men's enthusiasm for her destiny, a destiny they would not for the world want to share.

In oppressing, one becomes oppressed. Men are enchained by reason of their very sovereignty; it is because they alone earn money that their wives demand checks, it is because they alone engage in a business or profession that their wives require them to be successful, it is because they alone embody transcendence that their wives wish to rob them of it by taking charge...

Kad?n? götürüp mutfaÄŸa ya da süslenme odas?na kapat?yor, sonra da ufkunun darl???na ÅŸa??yoruz; kanatlar?n? kesiyoruz, sonra, uçam?yor diye yak?n?yoruz.

It is easier to put people in chains than to remove them if the chains bring prestige, said George Bernard Shaw.

Législateurs, prêtres, philosophes, écrivains, savants se sont acharnés à démontrer que la condition subordonnée de la femme était voulue dans le ciel et profitable à la terre.

Lo que es seguro es que ahora es muy difícil para las mujeres asumir a un tiempo su condición de individuo autónomo y su destino femenino; es la fuente de estas torpezas y malestares que a veces las presenta como un sexo perdido. Y sin duda es más cómodo sufrir la esclavitud ciega que trabajar por la liberación: los muertos también están mejor adaptados a la tierra que los vivos.

Doomed to procreation and secondary tasks, stripped of her practical importance and her mystical prestige, woman becomes no more than a servant.

It is difficult for men to measure the enormous extent of social discrimination that seems insignificant form the outside and whose moral and intellectual repercussions are so deep in woman that they appear to spring from an original nature. The man most sympathetic to women never knows her concrete situation fully.

To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints on active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simpily an all-pervasive system.

Life has made me discover the world as it is, that is, a world of suffering and oppression, of undernourishment for the majority of people, things that I didn't know when I was young and when I imagined that to discover the world was to discover something beautiful.

From a New York Times biography from May 27, 2010 entitled Introduction to Simone de Beauvoir's 'The Second Sex' ] Beauvoir herself was as devout an atheist as she had once been a Catholic, and she dismisses religions — even when they worship a goddess — as the inventions of men to perpetuate their dominion.

The relation of woman to husband, of of daughter to father, of sister to brother, is a relation of vassalage.

If I had rediscovered in Heaven, amplified to infinity, the monstrous alliance of fragility and implacability, of caprice and artificial necessity which had oppressed me since my birth, rather than worship Him I would have chosen damnation.

Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority.

Il y a toujours eu des femmes; elles sont femmes par leur structure physiologique; aussi loin que l'histoire remonte, elles ont toujours été subordinnées à l'homme; leur dépendance n'est pas la conséquence d'un événement ou d'un devenir, elle n'est pas arrivée.