Sweet is revenge – especially to women. Lord Byron, Don Juan
Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,
’Tis woman’s whole existence. ibid.
Alas! the love of women! it is known
To be a lovely and a fearful thing! ibid.
In her first passion woman loves her lover,
In all the others all she loves is love. ibid.
There is a tide in the affairs of women,
Which, taken at the flood, leads – God knows where. ibid.
A woman being never at a loss ... the devil always sticks by them. Lord Byron
Empowerment of women ... Name me one religion that stands for that or ever has? Christopher Hitchens v Tony Blair: Is Religion a Force for Good in the World? debate 2010
Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny? Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about. Christopher Hitchens, Why Aren’t Women Funny? Vanity Fair article January 2007
To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation – is that good for the world? Christopher Hitchens
Throughout all religious texts, there is a primal fear that half the human race is simultaneously defiled and unclean, and yet is also a temptation to sin that is impossible to resist. Perhaps this explains the hysterical cult of virginity and of a Virgin, and the dread of the female form and of female reproductive functions. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great pp54-55
What wouldn’t I not give to have a bush in my mouth right now. My God – the smell – that stinking little pink-fish … let it drip like honey … It is what it is. Bill Hicks, Sane Man
Are simple women only fit
To dress, to darn, to flower, or knit,
To mind the distaff, or the spit?
Why are the needle and the pen
Thought incompatible by men? Esther Lewis, A Mirror for Detractors, 1754
The principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes – the legal subordination of one sex to the other – is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women
What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing – the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation of others. ibid.
No slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is. ibid.
The most important thing women have to do is to stir up the zeal of women themselves. John Stuart Mill, letter 14th July 1869
Can man be free if woman be a slave?
Chain one who lives, and breathes this boundless air
To the corruption of a closed grave?
Can they whose mates are beasts condemned to bear
Scorn heavier far than toil or anguish dare
To trample their oppressors? In their home,
Among their babes, thou knowst a curse would wear
The shape of woman – hoary crime would come
Behind and Fraud rebuild Religion’s tottering dome. Percy Bysshe Shelley
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Late 17th century proverb
A woman’s place is in the home. Mid-19th century proverb
A woman’s work is never done. Late 16th century proverb
Womanstock is rising in the market. I shall not live to see women vote, but I’ll come and rap at the ballot box. Lydia Maria Child, 1802-80, American abolitionist & suffragist
Woman, a pleasing but a short-lived flower,
Too soft for business and too weak for power:
A wife in bondage, or neglected maid:
Despised, if ugly; and if fair, betrayed. Mary Leapor, An Essay on Woman
Thus she spoke and turned away with a flash of her rosy neck and her ambrosial hair exhaled a divine fragrance; her dress flowed right down to her feet and her true god head was evident from her walk. Virgil, Aeneid
Fickle and changeable always is woman. ibid.
The older I get the more of my mother I see in myself. Nancy Friday, My Mother, My Self 1977
It was the promise of men, that around each corner there was yet another man, more wonderful than the last, that sustained me. You see, I had men confused with life … You can’t get what I wanted from a man, not in this life. ibid.
A perfect woman; nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command. William Wordsworth, She Was a Phantom of Delight, 1807
She had a tall man’s height or more
No bonnet screened her from the heat
A long drab-coloured coat she wore
A mantle reaching to her feet
Before me begging did she stand
Pouring out sorrows like the sea
Grief after grief on English land
Such woes I knew could never be. William Wordsworth
The two divinest things this world has got,
A lovely woman in a rural spot! G W Hunt, The Story of Rimini, 1816
The prime truth of woman, the universal mother … that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. G K Chesterton, What's Wrong With the World, 1910
Always keep your wits about you, you see. Don’t let nothing distract you. Especially women. Rerrr they’re the worst. Don’t have nothing to do with them. Have noth – oh hello. Carry on Spying 1964 starring Kenneth Williams & Barbara Windsor & Charles Hawtrey & Bernard Cribbins & Eric Barker & Dilys Laye & Jim Dale & Richard Wattis & Eric Pohlmann & Victor Maddern & Judith Furse et al, director Gerald Thomas, Williams
I would earnestly ask my sisters to keep clear of both the jargons now current everywhere … of the jargon, namely about the ‘rights’ of women, which urges women to do all that men do … merely because men do it, and without regard to whether this is the best that women can do; and of the jargon which urges women to do nothing that men do, merely because they are women … Women should bring the best she has, whatever that is … without attending to either of these cries. Florence Nightingale, Notes on Nursing, 1860
Seek to be good, but aim not to be great;
A woman’s noblest station is retreat. George Lyttelton, Advice to a Lady, 1773
The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul is, ‘What does a woman want?’ Sigmund Freud
What do women want? Shoes. Mimi Pond
All things that pass
Are woman’s looking-glass;
They show her how her bloom must fade,
And she herself be laid
With withered roses in the shade;
With withered roses and the fallen peach,
Unlovely, out of reach
Of summer’s joy that was. Christina Rossetti, Passing and Glassing
I put her on a pedestal. I tell ya, it wasn’t easy setting the fart-arse up there. Rab C Nesbitt s7e4: Property, BBC 1998
Ella is from Mars; I am from Penis. Rab C Nesbitt s8e1: Heat, Jamesie, BBC 1999
The extension of women’s rights is the basic principle of all social progress. Charles Foureir, Theorie des Quatre Mouvements, 1808
Yes, injured Woman! Rise, assert thy right! Anna Laetitia Barbauld 1743-1825, English poet & literary editor
But what is women? – only one of Nature’s agreeable blunders. Hannah Cowley nee Parkhouse, 1743-1809, Who’s the Dupe?