Kate Millett
Hostility is expressed in a number of ways. One is laughter.Collection: Laughter
People have a right to their own lives, and if you can't help somebody, you ought to get out of their way.Collection: Respect
To be a rebel is not to be a revolutionary. It is more often by a way of spinning one's wheels deeper in sand.Collection: Rebel
In many patriarchies, language, as well as cultural tradition, reserve the human condition for the male. With the Indo-European languages this is a nearly inescapable habit of mind, for despite all the customary pretense that 'man' and 'humanity' are terms which apply equally to both sexes, the fact is hardly obscured that in practice, general application favors the male far more often than the female as referent, or even sole referent, for such designations.Collection: Sex
It may be that a second wave of the sexual revolution might at last accomplish its aim of freeing half the race from its immemorial subordination--and in the process bring us all a great deal closer to humanity. It may be that we shall even be able to retire sex from the harsh realities of politics, but not until we have created a world we can bear out of the desert we inhabit.Collection: Sex
For it is precisely because certain groups have no representation in a number of recognized political structures that their position tends to be so stable, their oppression so continuous.Collection: Numbers
The rationale which accompanies that imposition of male authority euphemistically referred to as 'the battle of the sexes' bears a certain resemblance to the formulas of nations at war, where any heinousness is justified on the grounds that the enemy is either an inferior [part of the] species or really not human at all.Collection: Sex
Coitus can scarcely be said to take place in a vacuum; although of itself it appears a biological and physical activity, it is set so deeply within the larger context of human affairs that it serves as a charged microcosm of the variety of attitudes and values to which culture subscribes. Among other things, it may serve as a model of sexual politics on an individual or personal plane.Collection: Attitude
Prostitution is really the only crime in the penal law where two people are doing a thing mutually agreed upon and yet only one, the female partner, is subject to arrest.Collection: Law
The care of children ..is infinitely better left to the best trained practitioners of both sexes who have chosen it as a vocation...[This] would further undermine family structure while contributing to the freedom of women.Collection: Sex
Monogamy and prostitution go together.Collection: Together
Homosexuality was invented by a straight world dealing with its own bisexuality. But finding this difficult, and preferring not toadmit it, it invented a pariah state, a leper colony for the incorrigible whose very existence, when tolerated openly, was admonition to all. We queers keep everyone straight as whores keep matrons virtuous.Collection: World
The worst part about prostitution is that you're obliged not to sell sex only, but your humanity. That's the worst part of it: that what you're selling is your human dignity. Not really so much in bed, but in accepting the agreement - in becoming a bought person.Collection: Sex
As women, we're probably more protective of children. Also, we've been minors all of our historyCollection: Children
The whole bloody system is sick: the very notion of leadership, a balloon with a face painted upon it, elected and inflated by media's diabolic need to reduce ideas to personalities.Collection: Leadership
There are only moments. Live in this one. The happiness of these days.Collection: Moments
[Madness] is the jail we could all end up in. And we know it. And watch our step. For a lifetime. We behave. A fantastic and entire system of social control, by the threat of example as effective over the general population as detention centers in dictatorships, the image of the madhouse floats through every mind for the course of its lifetime.Collection: Jail
Life is a publicity stunt. A shill. You've been had.Collection: Life
Given the conditions under which you're a young person in this society, many things would be at least as important to you as your sexuality.Collection: Important
I believe there's a killer in all of us. I know there's one inside me. When you know the killer in you and you know also that you do not want to kill, you have to set yourself upon a course of learning. Not to kill that killer then, but to control it.Collection: Believe
A revolution is not the overturning of a cart, a reshuffling in the cards of state. It is a process, a swelling, a new growth in the race. If it is real, not simply a trauma, it is another ring in the tree of history, layer upon layer of invisible tissue composing the evidence of a circle.Collection: Change
Mystical state, madness, how it frightens people. How utterly crazy they become, remote, rude, peculiar, cruel, taunting, farouche as wild beasts who have smelled danger, the unthinkable.Collection: Crazy
Psychiatry causes so much deathCollection: Causes
I don't believe in monogamy, possessing people, the rightness or inevitability of jealousy.Collection: Believe
We are naïve and moralistic women. We are human beings. Who find politics a blight upon the human condition. And do not know how one copes with it except through politics.Collection: Blight
Men and women were declared equal one morning and everybody could divorce each other by postcardCollection: Morning
Everybody believes in psychiatry it's supposed to be for our own good. Let psychiatry prove that anybody has an illness, and I'd concede, but there is no physical proof.Collection: Believe
Hell, I don't want to grow old at all. I never want to die.Collection: Want
What is the future of the woman's movement How in the hell do I know I don't run it.Collection: Running
Ah, but depression - that is what we all hate. We the afflicted. Whereas the relatives and shrinks, the tribal ring, they rather welcome it: you are quiet and you suffer.Collection: Depression
You won't do any more housework Then you go to the bin.Collection: Housework
You may well ask how I expect to assert my privacy by resorting to the outrageous publicity of being one's actual self on paper. There's a possibility of it working if one chooses the terms, to wit: outshouting image-gimmick America through a quietly desperate search for self.Collection: America
one of the blessings of adulthood is that one is no longer addressed as a thing.Collection: Blessing