Naomi Wolf
The economics of industrialized countries would collapse if women didn't do the work they do for free: According to economist Marilyn Waring, throughout the West it generates between 25 and 40 percent of the gross national product.Collection: Country
Aging in women is 'unbeautiful' since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be broken.Collection: Powerful
The Western sexual revolution sucks. It has not worked well enough for women.Collection: Revolution
Obama has done things like Hitler did. Let me be very careful here. The National Socialists rounded people up and held them without trial, signed legislation that gave torture impunity, and spied on their citizens, just as Obama has. It isn't a question of what has been done that Hitler did. It's what does every dictator do, on the left or the right, that is being done here and now.Collection: People
Germany was a parliamentary democracy with many, many humane and decent people who kept writing in their journals - I've read these journals, these memoirs - "Surely our leaders will stop this nonsense. Surely someone will take on these thugs. Surely the pendulum will swing back." Everyone was sitting at home going, "Well, they haven't come for me. This is crazy, but surely someone's going to take care of it." We all have to take care of it.Collection: Crazy
Looking back on 200 years of feminist agitation in this country, we've got to get it that the moral high ground doesn't get us anything. Pleading with powerful men never gets us what we need. Talking doesn't do it. Being right doesn't do it. Hardball politics does it ... and a political strategy.Collection: Country
Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden and name her "Health": if public discourse were really concerned with women's health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth.Collection: Self Esteem
I don't want people to be suicidal. I want them to be energized and angry.Collection: Suicidal
Why am I voting for Obama? Obama, of all the candidates, is the only one of the major candidates - even more than Hillary Clinton, when they were running against each other - to speak in favor of the defense of the Constitution and the separation of powers.Collection: Running
I would like to trust and believe that the American spirit of resistance will win the day, but I keep having to be this downer Cassandra person in saying that without dismantling this horrific legislative apparatus that has basically given George W. Bush dictatorial power, the spirit of America is not enough. We have to have that spirit, but we have to have tactics and strategies and a movement and a victory.Collection: Believe
We need to get back into grappling with people we disagree with if we want to restore the Republic.Collection: People
What editors are obliged to appear to say that men want from women is actually what their advertisers want from women.Collection: Men
I'm asking people to think critically and not to be lazy in their thinking.Collection: Thinking
The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.Collection: Self Esteem
Poststructuralism. . . . is a form of literary criticism that uses elaborate wordplay to prove its central premise, that all language is internally contradictory and has no fixed meaning.Collection: Criticism
Health makes good propaganda.Collection: Propaganda
The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon them.Collection: Broken
When women are pessimistic about their political strength and feel hopeless about changing the conditions of their lives, it is almost as if they do not believe that democracy means the country belongs to them. But it's true.Collection: Country
It is foolish for people to think they can align themselves and be safe in a police state.Collection: Thinking
The '60s and '70s - I grew up in the Haight-Ashbury - people around me were going to school by day and all night long having these incredibly exciting meetings, mobilizing, marching, drafting statements. It was very intoxicating. It was very energizing. We've really forgotten a lot of those skills. Or they haven't been transmitted. It's useful to the people controlling us to have those skills not be available.Collection: School
George W. Bush legalized torture, but Obama is legalizing impunity. He promised to roll stuff back, but he is institutionalizing these things forever. It is terrifying and the left doesn't seem to recognize it.Collection: Forever
Demographically, I'm a hippie from San Francisco and I'm not culturally inclined to be sympathetic to states' rights. My cultural heritage is FDR and Medicare and federal government solutions. But if you think through the analysis, strengthening state rights is a good corrective of the aggregation of an over-reaching federal power.Collection: Hippie
I am worried that Americans I have met on my journey across the country, seem very hopeless and are feeling powerless to make change and are feeling passive. I'm not blaming them. But one thing we need at a time like this is for people to feel empowered and angry.Collection: Country
If people wake up, think critically, and get angry, we get connected to that courage that the founding generation meant us to have. History shows when millions just don't go along, resist at any level - and I'm talking about all the way up to bipartisan impeachment and arrest of the leaders of the coup - then it can't happen.Collection: Thinking
Liberals roll their eyes about going on "Oprah" to reach a mass audience by using language that anyone can understand even if you majored in semiotics at Yale. We look down on people we don't agree with. It doesn't serve us well.Collection: Eye
I met Muslim immigrants in Brooklyn who were swept up in 9-11 raids, held in abusive conditions, beaten, denied rights. That's how things started in Germany. Guantanamo was modeled after what Stalin developed for the Gulag.Collection: Rights
Frankly, liberals are out of the habit of communicating with anyone outside their own in cohort. We have a cultural problem with self-righteousness and elitism.Collection: Self
The reason I'm voting for Barack Obama is that it's either him or a police state - someone who's carrying on policies that are clearly stated and directed at subverting liberty. He's definitely the lesser of two evils.Collection: Two
There's been a systematic propagandizing of American citizens for 30 years to make us forget what America is supposed to be and what our rights are and what our system is and what our core principles are. And one of them since 1807 has been this right that the founding generation put in place, to make sure that military troops would never, ever, ever be deployed in the United States of America for civilian policing.Collection: Military
Millions of people have to restore liberty and have to understand the danger and personal risk they face in a police state.Collection: People
We need people to be alert and thinking for themselves and connected to each other and connected to that sense of hope and empowerment and radical chutzpah that the founding generation had and intended us to have.Collection: Thinking
People who have come of age from the '80s on have experienced a form of activism that's very sterile and annoying. It's not that much fun to be an activist. That's partly by design. They are sterile protests and anonymous e-mail activism - not the kind of thing where people fall in love, form friendships for life, and see the change they make right in front of them. I've seen that, when people start to experience doing these things together and the power that it has.Collection: Falling In Love
I don't want to overstate tantra because I'm sure there are scumbags everywhere, but it seems like it's an ideology that actually respects female desire.Collection: Desire
After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it.Collection: September 11
Today a woman must ignore her reflection in the eyes of her lover, since he might admire her, and seek it in the gaze of the God of Beauty, in whose perception she is never complete.Collection: Self Esteem
When people like Glenn Beck throw around the word Nazi without taking that kind of care, they are engaging in demagoguery. I am doing it with a concrete footnoted historical context.Collection: People
Historically, when a leader has deployed his own military against civilians, it's never been good. There's never been a time where it's ended well.Collection: Military
Cosmetic surgery and the ideology of self-improvement may have made women's hope for legal recourse to justice obsolete.Collection: Self
Women are mere "beauties" in men's culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable, artless ingenue.Collection: Character
To find freedom and happiness in each others' arms, or you know, inside their own bodies and minds. That is a very empowering thing in a society that's trying to control us all the time.Collection: Empowering
We are in the midst of a violent backlash againist feminism that uses images of female beauty as political weapons against women's advancement.Collection: Political
“Healthy" and “diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society makes for its own purposes. Women have long been defined as sick as a means of subjecting them to social control.Collection: Self Esteem
As soon as a woman's primary social value could no longer be defined as the attainment of virtuous domesticity, the beauty myth redefined it as the attainment of virtuous beauty. It did so to substitute both a new consumer imperative and a new justification for economic unfairness in the workplace where the old ones had lost their hold over newly liberated women.Collection: Self Esteem
There is this giant void in the culture about women in that age group as heroines, as romantic beings, as sexual beings and as creative beings, and there's not that void for men. Women don't stop being all those things as their lives continue into those decades.Collection: Men
In 70s America, protest used to be very effective, but in subsequent decades municipalities have sneakily created a web of "overpermiticisation" - requirements that were designed to stifle freedom of assembly and the right to petition government for redress of grievances, both of which are part of our first amendment.Collection: Government
Democracy is disruptive... there is no right in a democratic civil society to be free of disruption.Collection: Democracy
Beauty' is a currency system like the gold standard.Collection: Gold
Cosmetic surgery is not "cosmetic," and human flesh is not "plastic." Even the names trivialize what it is. It's not like ironing wrinkles in fabric, or tuning up a car, or altering outmoded clothes, the current metaphors. Trivialization and infantilization pervade the surgeons' language when they speak to women: "a nip," a "tummy tuck."...Surgery changes one forever, the mind as well as the body. If we don't start to speak of it as serious, the millennium of the man-made woman will be upon us, and we will have had no choice.Collection: Men