All Quotes By Tag: Feminism

“There will be great reason to suspect the Men of jealousy; and it cannot be rash to say, that their only reason for locking up from us all the avenues of knowledge, is the fear of our excelling them in it. (…) Had we the same advantages of study allowed us which the Men have, there is no room to doubt but we should at least keep pace with them in the sciences, and every useful knowledge. It can only then be a mean dastardly jealousy in them to exclude us from those advantages, in which we have so natural a right to emulate them.”

“Haunted by the ‘male’ in femaleAs if we can’t stand on our ownAs if we need a tail”

“My aunt says, she is a very bad wife to her husband, because she is busy serving orphan kids and physically challenged people of our society. Everyone praises her work that she is doing really good for society. But yes! She is only a very bad wife. She says proudly and laugh.”

“Stepping into a brand new path is difficult, but not much difficult than remaining in a situation, where the rooted mindsets such as traditions, culture, lifestyle and society are not helping you to improve your life in the way you really want.”

“What do you do, as a leftist feminist, in any church? You stay in a shitty place where you’ll never win because the systems by which it operates are so fundamentally patriarchal that there is no way out, save a revolution…So what do women do? They break away and make their own church. That happens. Or they stay and wait for eternity in faith that things will change, but things really don’t change, not much. Or they become secular.”

“Religious literacy is one way out from under the thumb of fundamentalism; constructing new literacies is another.”

“As long as women are denied the priesthood, we will try to make our own rituals at our own kitchen altars and we will sew our own magical capes at our own sewing machines”

“Jews: look to Miriam, not Moses … Muslims: look to Fatimah, not Muhammad. Buddhists: remember Tara, the mother of liberation. Christians: pray to Mary for your salvation.”

“The most revolutionary change that hit the world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries was the liberation of women. The Bible and the Qur’an came from societies controlled by men. No surprise there. That’s how the world everywhere was run until fairly recently. And there is something worth noting before we go deeper into the issue. History shows that the men in charge never volunteer to give up their privileges. They don’t wake up one day and say, ‘I’ve suddenly realised that the way I control and dominate others is wrong. I must change my ways. So I’ll share my power with them. I’ll give them the vote!’ That’s never how it works. History shows that power always has to be wrested from those who have it. The suffragettes who fought for the vote or suffrage for women learned that lesson. Men didn’t volunteer to give women the vote. Women had to fight them for it.”

“A tourist couple — European by the look of them — were taking pictures in the courtyard of the mosque. The woman had covered her head with one of the long scarves provided at the entrance. Someone — perhaps a passer-by — must have warned her that her dress was too short; she had tied another scarf around her waist to cover her legs above the knee. The man, by contrast, had sandals and Bermuda shorts apparently no one had seen as a problem.”

“The Bible is not absurd for the people who wrote it; it becomes absurd when people in our day insist on taking it literally. The Bible does not present us with material that is ridiculous in the context from which it came. The Bible springs from the context in which people then were thinking, searching, and trying to find answers .”

“Antisemitism is unique among religious hatreds. It is a racist conspiracy theory fashioned for the needs of messianic and brutal rulers, as dictators from the Tsars to the Islamists via the Nazis have shown. Many other alleged religious ‘hatreds’ are not hatreds in the true sense. If I criticise Islamic, Orthodox Jewish or Catholic attitudes towards women, for instance, and I’m accused of being a bigot, I shrug and say it is not bigoted to oppose bigotry.”

“The abiding western dominology can with religion sanction identify anything dark, profound, or fluid with a revolting chaos, an evil to be mastered, a nothing to be ignored. ‘God had made us master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savages and senile peoples.’ From the vantage point of the colonizing episteme, the evil is always disorder rather than unjust order; anarchy rather than control, darkness rather than pallor. To plead otherwise is to write ‘carte blanche for chaos.’ Yet those who wear the mark of chaos, the skins of darkness, the genders of unspeakable openings — those Others of Order keep finding voice. But they continue to be muted by the bellowing of the dominant discourse.”

“If one does not make an ego out of gender, one would still know whether one is a man or a woman, gay, straight, bisexual, transgender—whatever else we may think of. But those identities need to fit very loosely and be worn very lightly. All sense of privilege or deprivation that has developed around one’s gender identity, all rigidity regarding proper roles and behaviors for the various genders, must be cut through.”

“derelict. my voice cracked and yolk poured out. wind chimes rigid, no breeze, no song. my wings found hidden in your suitcase. pleas for help mistaken for a swan song. i’m stuffing pages from my journal down my throat as kindling. hoping the smoke will get the taste of you out of my mouth. he looks at me from across the room and all i want is to push him against the wall. ravage. ravage. carnage has never been more vogue. is it still art if it doesn’t bring you to your knees? lover, let me prey at your altar. let me bare my fangs in praise. don’t i look so pretty in a funeral shroud? i keep time with the click of my creaking bones. dance with me under the milky translucence of a world suffocating. how did you find me? i buried myself beneath the cicadas. is a girl trapped in glass still a prize?let me get under your skin. i want to know what your fears taste like. i want to consume.”