The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love. This is not to say that fathers have no place, for father-love, with its driving for self-improvement and discipline, is also essential to survival, but that uncorrected father-love, father-love as it were practiced by both parents, is a way to annihilation.
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Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
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It is fatally easy for Western folk, who have discarded chastity as a value for themselves, to suppose that it can have no value for anyone else. At the same time as Californians try to re-invent celibacy, by which they seem to mean perverse restraint, the rest of us call societies which place a high value on chastity backward.
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There has come into existence, chiefly in America, a breed of men who claim to be feminists. They imagine that they have understood ''what women want'' and that they are capable of giving it to them. They help with the dishes at home and make their own coffee in the office, basking the while in the refulgent consciousness of virtue. Such men are apt to think of the true male feminists as utterly chauvinistic.
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Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep and long-lasting. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed.
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Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.
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We in the West do not refrain from childbirth because we are concerned about the population explosion or because we feel we cannot afford children, but because we do not like children.
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The blind conviction that we have to do something about other people's reproductive behavior, and that we may have to do it whether they like it or not, derives from the assumption that the world belongs to us, who have so expertly depleted its resources, rather than to them, who have not.
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The misery of the middle-aged woman is a gray and hopeless thing, born of having nothing to live for, of disappointment and resentment at having been gypped by consumer society, and surviving merely to be the butt of its unthinking scorn.
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The principle of the brotherhood of man is narcissistic... for the grounds for that love have always been the assumption that we ought to realize that we are the same the whole world over.
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What we ought to see in the agonies of puberty is the result of the conditioning that maims the female personality in creating the feminine.
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All societies on the verge of death are masculine. A society can survive with only one man; no society will survive a shortage of women.
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Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.
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She became the character she was playing in an Ibsen play; she'd stalk around with grey hair. She was also the meanest woman in the world.
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Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you. Security is the denial of life.
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There's no such thing as security. There never has been.
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The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.
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The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.
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Energy is the power that drives every human being. It is not lost by exertion by maintained by it.
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You're only young once, but you can be immature forever.
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The most threatened group in human societies as in animal societies is the unmated male: the unmated male is more likely to wind up in prison or in an asylum or dead than his mated counterpart. He is less likely to be promoted at work and he is considered a poor credit risk.
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Yet if a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got? If she never takes off her high-heeled shoes, how will she ever know how far she could walk or how fast she could run?
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Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity.
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Security is when everything is settled, when nothing can happen to you; security is the denial of life.
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Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves.
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Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It has no mother.
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The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough.
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Every time a woman makes herself laugh at her husband's often-told jokes she betrays him. The man who looks at his woman and says 'What would ...
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