Quotes About Inequality

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.

Economically, men and women almost form two castes; all things being equal, the former have better jobs, higher wages, and greater chances to succeed than their new female competitors; they occupy many more places in industry, in politics, and so forth, and they hold the most important positions.

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.

Women's entire history has been written by men.

In truth, to go for a walk with one's eyes open is enough to demonstrate that humanity is divided into two classes of individuals whose clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests, and occupations are manifestly different. Perhaps these differences are superficial, perhaps they are destined to disappear. What is certain is that right now they do most obviously exist.

L'action des femmes n'a jamais été qu'une agitation symbolique; elles n'ont gagné que ce que les hommes ont bien voulu leur concéder; elles n'ont rien pris: elles ont reçu.

If she could inherit, she would thus wrongly transmit her paternal family's riches to that of her husband: she is carefully excluded from the succession.

The prostitute is the sum of all types of feminine slavery at once.

the oppressor always attempts to diminish those he oppresses; man intentionally refuses women their chances.

The man most sympathetic to women never knows her concrete situation fully. So there is no good reason to believe men when they try to defend privileges whose scope they cannot even fathom.

Gerechtigkeit kann innerhalb der Ungerechtigkeit nie geschaffen werden.

Women's actions have never been more than symbolic agitation; they have one only what men have been willing to concede to them; they have taken nothing; they have received.

Women's actions have never been more than symbolic agitation; they have won only what men have been willing to concede to them; they have taken nothing; they have received.

Trudno bowiem m??czy?nie oceni? ogromne znaczenie dyskryminacji spoÅ'ecznych, które na zewnÄ…trz wydajÄ… siÄ™ bÅ'ahe, a których konsekwencje moralne i intelektualne tkwiÄ… w kobiecie tak gÅ'Ä™boko, ?e wydajÄ… siÄ™ mie? ?ródÅ'o w jej pierwotnej strukturze.

Today, the majority of workers are exploited. Moreover, social structures have not been deeply modified by the changes in women's condition. This world has always belonged to men and still retains the form they have imprinted on it.

in the United States a "poor white" from the South can console himself for not being a "dirty nigger"; and more prosperous whites cleverly exploit this pride.

Las mujeres no son solidarias como sexo: ante todo están ligadas a su clase; los intereses de las burguesas y los de las mujeres proletarias no coinciden.

Bourgeoises, elles sont solidaires des bourgeois et non des femmes prolétaires ; blanches des hommes blancs et non des femmes noires

Few myths have been more advantageous to the ruling master caste than this one: it justifies all privileges and even authorizes taking advantage of them. Men do not have to care about alleviating the suffering and the burdens that are physiologically women's lot since they are intended by Nature; they take this as pretext for increasing the misery of the women's condition-- for example, by denying woman the right to sexual pleasure, or making her work like a beast of burden.

In many cases, the man can commit acts with woman's complicity that degrade her without tarnishing his lofty image.

No hay esperanza para el vagabundo que está de pie en el magistrado. Si a través de sus balbuceos brota algo desgarrador que atraviesa el alma, no será escuchado ni por el magistrado, ni por los circunstantes. Es un grito mudo. Y los desgraciados entre ellos son casi siempre también sordos, los unos para los otros. Y cada desgraciado, bajo la presión de la indiferencia general, trata, mediante la mentira o la inconsciencia, de hacerse sordo a sí mismo.

The poor we have always with us, and the purpose of the Lord in providing the poor is to enable us of the better classes to amuse ourselves by investigating them and uplifting them and at dinners telling how charitable we are. The poor don't like it much. They have no gratitude. They would rather be uplifters themselves. But if they are taken firmly in hand they can be kept reasonably dependent and interesting for years.

There will never be a state of society anything like perfect! There never will be a time when there won't be a large proportion of people who feel poor no matter how much they have, and envy their neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes showily, and envy neighbors who can dance or make love or digest better.

But plenty things like this happened before Buzz Windrip ever came in, Doremus, insisted John Pollikop... You never thought about them, because they was just routine news, to stick in your paper. Things like the sharecroppers and the Scottsboro boys and the plots of the California wholesalers against the agricultural union and dictatorship in Cuba and the way phony deputies in Kentucky shot striking miners.