Listen, little lady, it's the order of the day,
Issued by the highest of authority;
Fellows in the service simply can't be turned away.
You know that defense must get priority.
So, if you're patriotic'lly inclined,
Heed the call to arms, and keep this thought in mind:

You can't say, "No," to a soldier,
A sailor or a handsome marine;
No, you can't say, "No," if he wants to dance,
If he's gonna fight, he's got a right to romance;
So, get out your lipstick and powder,
Be beautiful and dutiful, too.
If he says it's cold on those submarines,
You can knit a sweater, but that's not what he means;
Oh, you can't say, "No,"
No, no, no, no, no, no;
No, they're not made of tin,
So, you better give in
If you want him to win for you.
Mack Gordon (You Can't Say No to a Soldier)

I suppose that's really what so many American women are complaining about these days: They find their lives short on story and overburdened with epilogue.
Kurt Vonnegut (Deadeye Dick)

The argument in The Female Eunuch... holds that a woman has the right to express her own sexuality; which is not at all the same thing as the right to capitulate to male advances. The Female Eunuch argues that the rejection of the concept of female libido as merely responsive is essential to female liberation. This is the proposition that was interpreted by the brain-dead hacks of Fleet Street as "telling women to go out and do it".
Germaine Greer (Foreword to the Paladin 21st Anniversary Edition of The Female Eunuch)

Some doctors really believed that est femineo generi pars una uterus omnium morborum, "the womb is a part of every illness of the female sex".
Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch)

Sometimes she feels that she is being catapulted into a sort of shameful womanhood, and resists desperately, to the point of regressing into infantile and destructive behaviour. She may become unaccountably sullen or clumsy, long before the approach of puberty makes such changes explicable. Many of the changes thought to be intrinsically connected with puberty are actually connected with the last struggles of the little girl to retain her energy. The primary school has educated her as a person, making no distinction between boy and girl. We may expect the conflict to arise when she moves up to the junior school to find that, as a capitulation to womanly objections about the imposition of the masculine model of education on to girls, she has the unenviable options of studying dressmaking, domestic science and so forth. The bitter irony of having been inducted into a masculine-contoured form of education is counterpointed by the inclusion of these fatuous subjects in her regimen. Sitting in her absurd version of masculine uniform making sponge fingers with inky hands, she must really feel like the punching bag of civilization.
Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch)

A Man ought no more to value himself for being wiser than a Woman, if he owes his Advantage to a better Education, than he ought to boast of his Courage for beating a Man when his hands were bound.
Mary Astell (An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex)
in The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

From all that has been said, it is apparent that we cannot speak of inferiority and superiority, but only of specific differences in aptitudes and personality between the sexes. These differences are largely the result of cultural and other experiential factors... the overlapping in all psychologocal characteristics is such that we need to consider men and women as individuals, rather than in terms of group stereotypes.
Anna Anastasi (Differential Psychology)
in The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

No men who think really deeply about women retain a high opinion of them; men either despise women or they have never thought seriously about them.
Otto Weininger (Sex and Character)
in The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role then we are lost indeed. If women can supply no counterbalance to the blindness of male drive the aggressive society will run to its lunatic extremes at ever-escalating speed. Who will safeguard the despised animal faculties of compassion, empathy, innocence and sensuality?... Most women who have arrived at positions of power in a man's world have done so by adopting masculine methods which are not incompatible with the masquerade of femininity... It is up to women to develop a form of genuine womanpower against which the Omnipotent Administrator in frilly knickers cannot prevail.
Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch)

I am 39 and have been submitting to corporal punishment from my husband ever since we married 15 years ago. We have both treated this matter of punishment as a normal sort of proceeding. It was not until recently, when we saw some letters in "Forum" that we realized there were people who had guilt complexes about spanking their mates.
     Our ideas are quite simple. My husband happens to believe that in marriage the husband should be the boss. I agree with him and I recognize that wrong-doing should be punished. We both think that the simplest, most convenient, most effective and most natural way for a man to punish the faults of his woman is to spank or whip her; but not too severely, certainly not brutally.
Letter in "Forum", vol. 2, no. 3
in The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

If marriage were a contract with safeguards and indemnities indicated in it it would still not provide emotional security. Its value would be that it did not appear to provide it, so that women would not be encouraged to rely absolutely upon a situation which had no intrinsic permanence. The housewife is an unpaid worker in her husband's house in return for the security of being a permanent employee: hers is the reductio ad absurdum of the case of the employee who accepts a lower wage in return for permanence of his employment. But the lowest paid employees can be and are laid off, and so are wives. They have no savings, no skills which they can bargain with elsewhere, and they must bear the stigma of having been sacked. The only alternative for the worker and the wife is to refuse to consider the bait of security and bargain openly. To do this a woman must have a different kind of security, the kind of personal security which enables her to consider insecurity as freedom.
Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch)

The man regards her as a receptacle into which he has emptied his sperm, a kind of human spittoon, and turns from her in disgust.
Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch)

The result [of the ignorance and isolation of most women] is that when wives come along to dinner parties they pervert civilized conversation about real issues into personal quarrels... This must not be taken to indicated that men have not their part to play in the battle. Their tactics are condescension and patronizing of a woman's attempts to contribute to a discussion, simple setting aside of her remarks or ignoring them, exaggerated courtliness to other women, extravagant praise of the cooking (for all the world as if they were constantly starved or poisoned at home), loving mockery of the little woman and so on. Because of their winning position, their techniques do not have to be strident or obscene or anti-social, and this fact itself can drive a woman to madness and direct aggression.
Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch)

Men are the enemy in much the same way that some crazed boy in uniform was the enemy of another like him in most respects except the uniform. One possible tactic is to try to get the uniforms off.
Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch)

Women should be kept in cages.
Norman Mailer

The prime responsibility of a woman is to be on earth long enough to find the best mate for herself and conceive children who will improve the species.
Norman Mailer

Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell; the ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because---without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called "feminine"---we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice; we had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery which is not true praise.
Charlotte Brönte (Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell in Wuthering Heights)

I have read about sixteen pages of your manuscript and it made me---smile. It is clever, well observed, honest; it stands on its own feet up to a point, and yet it is so typically feminine, by which I mean derivative and steeped in personal resentment.
Albert Einstein in a letter to a young girl (Ideas and Opinions)

Because the number of birth-giving machines and devices is fixed, all we can ask for is for them to do their best per head.
Hakuo Yanagisawa, Health Minister of Japan

If it's testosterone the public wants in a president, as an endocrinologist I can't recommend a 70-year-old man in the White House. They should get a 16-year-old boy instead. It seems the only thing the public doesn't want to see in a president is estrogen.
Estelle R. Ramey

Men were designed for short, nasty, brutal lives. Women are designed for long, miserable ones.
Estelle R. Ramey

Correspondent: How do you balance family with not being president?
Geraldine Ferraro: Well, it's a... with not being president?
Correspondent: (nods)
Geraldine Ferraro: Well, it's not that hard.
(The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, October 20, 2005)

No doubt exists that research on the abilities of females has made progress from the Victorian age when scientists argued that if women used their brains excessively, they would impair their fertility by draining off blood cells needed to support their menstrual cycle (Newsweek, 1981).
Sally M. Reis (We Can't Change What We Don't Recognize: Understanding the Special Needs of Gifted Females)

The younger girls interrupted each other with their questions and tumbled forward to see, touch and smell everything. The older girls, the ninth-graders, were different. They hung back. They didn't touch plants or shout out questions. They stood primly to the side, looking bored and even a little disgusted by the enthusiasm of their younger classmates. My friend asked herself, What's happened to these girls? What's gone wrong? She told me, "I wanted to shake them, to say, 'Wake up, come back. Is anybody home at your house?' "
Mary Pipher (Reviving Ophelia)

The world tells us what we are to be and shapes us by the ends it sets before us. To men it says, work. To us, it says, seem. The less a woman has in her head the lighter she is for carrying.
Olive Schreiner (The Story of an African Farm)
in Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher

All geniuses born women are lost to the public good.
Stendhal
in Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher

The male is by nature superior, the female, inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled.
Aristotle
in Social Inequality by Charles E. Hurst

Do you not know that you are each an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of your lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil's gateway; you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree; you are the first deserter of the divine law; you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You so carelessly destroyed man, God's image. On account of your desert, even the Son of God had to die.
Tertullian
in A History of God by Karen Armstrong

That's sexism, that is. Going around giving people girly presents just because they're a girl.
Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (Good Omens)

Trained by long study, my well-developed brain was thrown into confusion by contact with an inferior brain, and every attempt to bring it into tune with my wife's gave me spasms.
August Strindberg (The Vampire Wife)
in Masculine/Feminine: Readings in Sexual Mythology and the Liberation of Women, edited by Betty Roszak and Theodore Roszak

Man's biological function is to do; woman's is to be.
Robert Graves (Real Women)
in Masculine/Feminine: Readings in Sexual Mythology and the Liberation of Women, edited by Betty Roszak and Theodore Roszak

If we have come to think that the nursery and the kitchen are the natural sphere of woman, we have done so exactly as English children come to think that a cage is the natural sphere of a parrot--because they have never seen one anywhere else.
George Bernard Shaw (The Womanly Woman)
in Masculine/Feminine: Readings in Sexual Mythology and the Liberation of Women, edited by Betty Roszak and Theodore Roszak

When [William Stead] found Marie Bashkirtseff's account of herself utterly incompatible with the account of a woman's mind given to him by his ideal, he was confronted with the dilemma that either Marie was not a woman or else his ideal did not correspond to nature. He actually accepted the former alternative... "Marie," he said, "was artist, musician, wit, philosopher, student--anything you like but a natural woman with a heart to love, and a soul to find its supreme satisfaction in sacrifice for lover or for child."
George Bernard Shaw (The Womanly Woman)
in Masculine/Feminine: Readings in Sexual Mythology and the Liberation of Women, edited by Betty Roszak and Theodore Roszak

We are out to glorify war:
The only health-giver of the world!
Militarism! Patriotism!
The Destructive Arm of the Anarchist!
Ideas that kill!
Contempt for women!
Filippo Marinetti (Futurist Manifesto)
in "The Hard and the Soft: The Force of Feminism in Modern Times" by Theodore Roszak
in Masculine/Feminine: Readings in Sexual Mythology and the Liberation of Women, edited by Betty Roszak and Theodore Roszak

The first thing that strikes the careless observer is that women are unlike men. They are the "opposite sex"--(though why "opposite" I do not know; what is the "neighbouring sex"?). But the fundamental thing is that women are more like men than anything else in the world.
Dorothy Sayers (The Human-Not-Quite-Human)
in Masculine/Feminine: Readings in Sexual Mythology and the Liberation of Women, edited by Betty Roszak and Theodore Roszak

Let it all hang out. Let it seem bitchy, catty, dykey, frustrated, crazy, Solanasesque, nutty, frigid, ridiculous, bitter, embarrassing, man-hating, libelous, pure, unfair, envious, intuitive, low-down, stupid, petty, liberating. We are the women that men have warned us about.
Robin Morgan (Goodbye to All That)
in Masculine/Feminine: Readings in Sexual Mythology and the Liberation of Women, edited by Betty Roszak and Theodore Roszak

Church authorities of the fifteenth century, ever on the alert for the malevolence of the devil, used a popular handbook on the identification and treatment of witches, the Malleus Maleficarum, in searching out evil in the form of women. "What else is woman," says this medieval antisubversive activities manual, "but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature painted with fair colors?"... By mid-nineteenth century, the "evil of nature" had turned into an object of scorn, and Schopenhauer's indictment of women as "that undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race," denied women even their beauty, their "fair colors", along with their intellectual capacity.
Betty Roszak (The Human Continuum)
in Masculine/Feminine: Readings in Sexual Mythology and the Liberation of Women, edited by Betty Roszak and Theodore Roszak

And I said I wouldn't mind things changing if I became an astronaut, for example, which is one of the biggest changes you can imagine, apart from becoming a girl or dying.
Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time)

No, I'm no one's wife
but, oh, I love my life...
Chicago the Musical

Programming, like chess, women, and music, has the power to make men happy.
Gerald M. Weinberg (The Psychology of Computer Programming)

In any case, it seems quite frequent that when there is a woman on a programming team, she assumes the role of "team-mother"... There have been at least several teams where one of the women was openly referred to as the "team-mother" or "den-mother," and there is the persistent joke in computer circles which defines "software" as "a girl programmer."
Gerald M. Weinberg (The Psychology of Computer Programming)

One of the classic status symbols from which programming managers are not exempt is the secretary or the administrative assistant. The difference between these two titles is that secretaries are always female, and administrative assistants may be of either gender. The prettiest secretary may be a status symbol--though an ugly one may be taken as indicating that one's status is so high that one rates a competent secretary.
Gerald M. Weinberg (The Psychology of Computer Programming)

Asking for efficiency and adaptability in the same program is like asking for a beautiful and modest wife. Although beauty and modesty have been known to occur in the same woman, we'll probably have to settle for one or the other. At least that's better than neither.
Gerald M. Weinberg (The Psychology of Computer Programming)

Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.
Equal Rights Amendment (yet to be ratified)

Kinder, Kuche, Kirche [Children, Cooking, Church]
Nazi slogan regarding woman's role

Her modesty as to her writing, her vanity as to her person, her fears for her safety all seem to hint that what was said a short time ago about there being no change in Orlando the man and Orlando the woman, was ceasing to be altogether true. She was becoming a little more modest, as women are, of her brains, and a little more vain, as women are, of her person. Certain susceptibilities were asserting themselves, and others were diminishing. The change of clothes had, some philosophers will say, much to do with it. Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us. For example, when Captain Bartolus saw Orlando's skirt, he had an awning stretched for her immediately, pressed her to take another slice of beef, and invited her to go ashore with him in the long boat. These compliments would certainly not have been paid her had her skirts, instead of flowing, been cut tight to her legs in the fashion of breeches. And when we were paid compliments, it behoves us to make some return. Orlando curtseyed; she complied; she flattered the good man's humours as she would not have done had his neat breeches been a woman's skirts, and his braided coat a woman's satin bodice. Thus, there is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hears, our brains, our tongues to their liking... The man has his hand free to seize his sword; the woman must use hers to keep the satins from slipping from her shoulders. The man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made for his usese and fashioned to his liking. The woman takes a sidelong glance at it, full of subtlety, even of suspicion. Had they both worn the same clothes, it is possible that their outlook might have been the same too.
Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

She was married, true; but if one's husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it marriage? If one liked him, was it marriage? If one liked other people, was it marriage? And finally, if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to write poetry, was it marriage? She had her doubts.
Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

... but the truth is that when we write of a woman, everything is out of place--culminations and perorations; the accent never falls where it does with a man...
Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

When neither love nor hatred is in the game, a woman's game is mediocre.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)

When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexually.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)

Woman wants to become self-reliant--and for that reason she is beginning to enlighten men about "woman as such": this is one of the worst developments of the general uglification of Europe. For what must these clumsy attempts of women at scientific self-exposure bring to light! Woman has much reason for shame; so much pedantry, superficiality, schoolmarmishness, petty presumption, petty licentiousness and immodesty lies concealed in woman--one only needs to study her behavior with children!--and so far all this was at bottom best repressed and kept under control by fear of man. Woe when "the eternally boring in woman"--she is rich in that!--is permitted to venture forth! When she begins to unlearn thoroughly and on principle her prudence and art--of grace, of play, of chasing away worries, of lightening burdens and taking things lightly--and her subtle aptitude for agreeable desires!
     Even now female voices are heard which--holy Aristophenes!--are frightening: they threaten with medical explicitness what woman wants from man, first and last. Is it not in the worst taste when woman sets about becoming scientific that way? So far enlightenment of this sort was fortunately man's affair, man's lot--we remained "among ourselves" in this; and whatever women write about "woman," we may in the end reserve a healthy suspicion whether woman really wants enlightenment about herself--whether she can will it--
     Unless a woman seeks a new adornment for herself that way--I do think adorning herself is part of the Eternal-Feminine?--she surely wants to inspire fear of herself--perhaps she seeks mastery. But she does not wanttruth: what is truth to woman? From the beginning, nothing has been more alien, repugnant, and hostile to woman than truth--her great art is the lie, her highest concern is mere appearance and beauty. Let us men confess it: we honor and love precisely this art and this instinct in woman--we who have a hard time and for our relief like to associate with beings under whose hands, eyes, and tender follies our seriousness, our gravity and profundity almost appear to us like folly.
     Finally I pose the question: has ever a woman conceded profundity to a woman's head, or justice to a woman's heart? And is it not true that on the whole "woman" has so far been despised most by woman herself--and by no means by us?
     We men wish that woman should not go on compromising herself through enlightenment--just as it was man's thoughfulness and consideration for woman that found expression in the church decree: mulier taceat in ecclesia! [Woman should be slient in church.] It was for woman's good when Napoleon gave the all too eloquent Madame de Stael to understand: mulier taceat in politicis! [Woman should be silent when it comes to politics.] And I think it is a real friend of women that counsels them today: mulier taceat de muliere! [Woman should be silent about woman.]
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)

What inspires respect for woman, and often enough even fear, is her nature, which is more "natural" than man's, the genuine, cunning suppleness of a beast of prey, the tiger's claw under the glove, the naivete of her egoism, her uneducability and inner wildness, the incomprehensibility, scope, and movement of her desires and virtues--
     What, in spite of all fear, elicits pity for this dangerous and beautiful cat "woman" is that she appears to suffer more, to be more vulnerable, more in need of love, and more condemned to disappointment than any other animal. Fear and pity: with these feelings man has so far confronted woman, always with one foot in tragedy which tears to pieces as it enchants.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)

Men have so far treated women like birds who had strayed to them from some height: as something more refined and vulnerable, wilder, stranger, sweeter, and more soulful--but as something one has to lock up lest it fly away.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)

A bird with the form of a maiden, what more exquisite! Imagine that you have her with you. That would be Deruchette. The delicious creature! One would be tempted to say to her, "Good-day, Mademoiselle Goldfinch." One beholds no wings, but one hears the chirping. Sometimes she sings. By her chatter, she is below man; by her singing, above him. There is mystery in that song; a virgin is the envelope of an angel. When womanhood begins, the angel departs; later on she returns, bringing a little one to the mother. While awaiting life, she who will one day be a mother is for a long time a child, the little girl lingers in the maiden, and is a linnet. One thinks as one looks at her: "How amiable of her not to fly away!" The sweet, familiar being follows its own pleasure about the house, flits from branch to branch, that is to say, from room to room, enters, goes out, approaches, plumes its feathers or combs its hair, makes all sorts of little gentle noises, murmurs one knows not what ineffable thing in your ears. It questions and is answered; one interrogates it, it chirps in reply. One chatters with it. To chatter refreshes one after serious talk. This being has heaven in it. It is a celestial thought mingled with your black thought. You feel grateful to it for being so light, so fleeting, so fugitive, so intangible, and for having the goodness not to be invisible, when it might, so it seems, be impalpable. Here below, the beautiful is a necessity.
Victor Hugo (The Toilers of the Sea)

virago \vuh-RAH-go; vuh-RAY-go\, noun:
1. A woman of extraordinary stature, strength, and courage.
2. A woman regarded as loud, scolding, ill-tempered, quarrelsome, or overbearing.
Word of the Day (Dictionary.com, March 20, 2003)

Once immersed in the very pressing and particular problems of domesticity, many women feel frustrated and far apart from the great issues and stirring debate for which their education has given them understanding and relish. Once they wrote poetry. Now it's the laundry list. Once they discussed art and philosophy until late in the night. Now they are so tired they fall asleep as soon as the dishes are finished. There is, often, a sense of contraction, of closing horizons and lost opportunities. They had hoped to play their part in the crises of the age. But what they do is wash the diapers.
     The point is that whether we talk of Africa, Islam or Asia, women "never had it so good" as you. In short, far from the vocation of marriage and motherhood leading you away from the great issues of our day, it brings you back to their very center and places upon you an infinitely deeper and more intimate responsibility than that borne by the majority of those who hit the headlines and make the news and live in such a turmoil of great issues that they end by being totally unable to distinguish which issues are really great.
Adlai Stevenson (Smith College Commencement, 1955)

She was twelve years old when she told Eddie Willers that she would run the railroad when they grew up. She was fifteen when it occurred to her for the first time that women did not run railroads and that people might object. To hell with that, she thought--and never worried about it again.
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

More speculatively, Hayden urges that "female body odors may at times constitute a major handicap under primitive hunting conditions that generally require approaches to within 25 m of the prey."
Goodman, Griffin, Estioko-Griffin, Grove (The Compatibility of Hunting and Mothering Among the Agta Hunter-Gatherers of the Philippines)

If combat means living in a ditch, females have biological problems staying in a ditch for thirty days because they get infections and they don't have upper body strength. I mean, some do, but they're relatively rare. On the other hand, men are basically little piglets, you drop them in the ditch, they roll around in it, doesn't matter, you know. These things are very real. On the other hand, if combat means being on an Aegis-class cruiser managing the computer controls for twelve ships and their rockets, a female may be again dramatically better than a male who gets very, very frustrated sitting in a chair all the time because males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes.
Newt Gingrich

A spaniel, a woman and a walnut tree, the more they're beaten the better they be.
Old English proverb

The fact is, women are in chains, and their servitude is all the more debasing because they do not realize it.
Susan B. Anthony

Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.
Susan B. Anthony

The one dies while the other lives:
That makes the world so deeply beautiful.
Alban Berg (Vier Lieder, Op. 2)

Good manners and bad breath will get you nowhere.
Elvis Costello (New Lace Sleeves)

It might be very well if the Apollo Belvedere should suddenly glow all over into life, and step forward from the pedestal with that god-like air of his. But of the misbegotten changelings who call themselves men and prate intolerably over dinner-tables, I never saw one who seemed worthy to inspire love---no, nor read of any except Leonardo da Vinci and perhaps Goethe in his youth.
(Virginibus Puerisque)
in preface of The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci ed. by Edward MacCurdy

Men are not true to anything. They will have sex with a tree.
(Mixed Nuts)

I'm a virgin. I always have been.
(The 40-Year-Old Virgin)

I think about you when I go to the bathroom.
(Mosquito Coast)

I can't tell you how many people presume that I deal in a "new etiquette" that is required because of "the new sex." The new what? I know that it is widely believed that sex was invented in 1960 by two students from Berkeley--one of whom got a B-plus in life skills; the other being a graduate student whose degree was held up while the professors tried to duplicate the research--and that it only somewhat later caught on elsewhere. But I know that sex has been with us for some time, because it just so happens that I am actually a direct descendant, on both sides of my family, from people who practiced it. The only innovation of modern times seems to be discussing one's personal dissatisfactions with it at the dinner table.
Judith Martin (Common Courtesy: In Which Miss Manners Solves the Problem that Baffled Mr. Jefferson)

Lord, give me chastity, but not yet.
St. Augustine
in A History of God by Karen Armstrong

Okay, now let's have some fun. Let's talk about sex. Let's talk about women. Freud said he didn't know what women wanted. I know what women want: a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything.
     What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish people wouldn't get so mad at them.
     Why are so many people getting divorced today? It's because most of us don't have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to.
     A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The Navahos. The Kennedys.
     But most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the other person. The groom gets one more pal, but it's a woman. The woman gets one more person to talk to about everything, but it's a man.
     When a couple has an argument nowadays, they may think it's about money or power or sex or how to raise the kids or whatever. What they're really saying to each other, though without realizing it, is this: "You are not enough people!"
Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

Him that I love, I wish to be free--even from me.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh

You know, love is a happy time all throughout the universe. It's when the male part of the species goes to the female part of the species and says, "Hey, you want to go on a date?" And then she would say "Why, yes, I'd like to go on a date," if you're lucky. And then you go to a restaurant, and she gets something called a salad, and then he gets a big piece of beef, that he eats. And that to me, ladies and gentlemen, is love. Kinda makes you cry, doesn't it?
Brak

Yes, reason has been a part of organized religion, ever since two nudists took dietary advice from a talking snake.
(The Daily Show with Jon Stewart)

High levels of organic atheism are strongly correlated with high levels of societal health, such as low homicide rates, low poverty rates, low infant mortality rates, and low illiteracy rates, as well as high levels of educational attainment, per capita income, and gender equality. Most nations characterized by high degrees of individual and societal security have the highest rates of organic atheism, and conversely, nations characterized by low degrees of individual and societal security have the lowest rates of organic atheism. In some societies, particularly Europe, atheism is growing. However, throughout much of the world -- particularly nations with high birth rates -- atheism is barely discernable.
Phil Zuckerman (Atheism: Contemporary Numbers and Patterns)
in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism

Carl Sagan was certainly no believer, but he once told me, "An atheist has to know a lot more than I know."
Joel Achenbach (The Washington Post, 7/1/2007)

The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.
St. Augustine
in Practical Regression and Anova in R by Julian Faraway

Zanna (Arabic) Guesswork. Term used in the Koran for pointless theological speculation.
Karen Armstrong (A History of God)

The account of Creation, Calvin believed, was an example of balbutive (baby talk), which accommodated complex and mysterious processes to the mentality of simple people so that everybody could have faith in God.
Karen Armstrong (A History of God)

Puritanism did have a positive dimension: it gave people pride in their work, which had hitherto been experienced as a slavery but which was now seen as a "calling."
Karen Armstrong (A History of God)

Mrs. Peters's husband is a vicar called the Reverend Peters, and he comes to our school sometimes to talk to us, and I asked him where heaven was and he said, "It's not in our universe. It's another kind of place altogether."...
     I said that there wasn't anything outside the universe and there wasn't another kind of place altogether. Except that there might be if you went through a black hole, but a black hole is what is called a singularity, which means it is impossible to find out what is on the other side because the gravity of a black hole is so big that even electromagnetic waves like light can't get out of it, and electromagnetic waves are how we get information about things which are far away. And if heaven was on the other side of a black hole, dead people would have to be fired into space on rockets to get there, and they aren't or people would notice.
Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time)

Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.
Sinclair Lewis (Babbitt)

Pray, v.: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
Ambrose Bierce

'It's all trivial--your grouse, my hermit, Bernard's Byron. Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.'
Tom Stoppard (Arcadia)

"A revolution, what does that prove? That God is hard up. He makes a coup d'etat, because there is a solution of continuity between the present and the future, and because he, God, is unable to join the two ends. In fact, that confirms me in my conjectures about the condition of Jehovah's fortune; and to see so much discomfort above and below, so much rascality and odiousness and stinginess and distress in the heavens and on the earth, from the bird which has not a grain of millet to me who have not a hundred thousand livres of income, to see human destiny, which is very much worn out, and even royal destiny, which shows the warp, witness the Prince of Conde hung, to see winter, which is nothing but a rent in the zenith through which the wind blows, to see so many tatters even in the brand new purple of the morning on the tops of the hills, to see the dew drops, those false pearls, to see the frost, that paste, to see humanity ripped, and events patched, and so many spots on the sun, and so many holes in the moon, to see so much misery everywhere, I suspect that God is not rich. He keeps up appearances, it is true, but I feel the pinch."
Victor Hugo (Les Miserables)

O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall they be who pay you back
what you have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take your little ones
and dash them against the rock!
Psalm 137:8-9 (NRSV)

Whoever is found will be thrust through,
and whoever is caught will fall by the sword.
Their infants will be dashed to pieces
before their eyes;
their houses will be plundered,
and their wives ravished.
Isaiah 13:15-16 (NRSV)

Samaria shall bear her guilt,
because she has rebelled against her God;
they shall fall by the sword,
their little ones shall be dashed in pieces,
and their pregnant women ripped open.
Hosea 13:16 (NRSV)

If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey his father and mother, who does not heed them when they discipline him, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his town at the gate of that place. They shall say to the elders of his town, "This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard." Then all the men of the town shall stone him to death. So you shall purge the evil from your midst; and all Israel will hear, and be afraid.
Deuteronomy 21:18-21 (NRSV)

As the siege continued, famine in Samaria became so great that a donkey's head was sold for eighty shekels of silver, and one-fourth of a kab of dove's dung for five shekels of silver. Now as the king of Israel was walking on the city wall, a woman cried out to him, "Help, my lord king!" He said, "No! Let the Lord help you. How can I help you? From the threshing floor or from the wine press?" But then the king asked her, "What is your complaint?" She answered, "This woman said to me, 'Give up your son; we will eat him today, and we will eat my son tomorrow.' So we cooked my son and ate him. The next day I said to her, 'Give up your son and we will eat him.' But she has hidden her son."
2 Kings 6:25-29 (NRSV)

[Elisha] went up from there to Bethel; and while he was going up on the way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, "Go away, baldhead! Go away, baldhead!" When he turned around and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord. Then two she-bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys.
2 Kings 2:23-24 (NRSV)

At midnight the Lord struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the prisoner who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock. Pharaoh arose in the night, he and all his officials and all the Egyptians; and there was a loud cry in Egypt, for there was not a house without someone dead.
Exodus 12:29-30 (NRSV)

That slave who knew what his master wanted, but did not prepare himself or do what was wanted, will receive a severe beating. But the one who did not know and did what deserved a beating will receive a light beating.
Luke 12:47-48 (NRSV)

Moses became angry with the officers of the army, the commanders of thousands and the commanders of hundreds, who had come from service in the war. Moses said to them, "Have you allowed all the women to live? These women here, on Balaam's advice, made the Israelites act treacherously against the Lord in the affair of Peor, so that the plague came among the congregation of the Lord. Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves."
Numbers 31:14-18 (NRSV)

Then Abimelech went to Thebez, and encamped against Thebez, and took it. But there was a strong tower within the city, and all the men and women and all the lords of the city fled to it and shut themselves in; and they went to the roof of the tower. Abimelech came to the tower, and fought against it, and came near to the entrance of the tower to burn it with fire. But a certain woman threw an upper millstone on Abimelech's head, and crushed his skull. Immediately he called to the young man who carried his armor and said to him, "Draw your sword and kill me, so people will not say about me, 'A woman killed him.'" So the young man thrust him through, and he died.
Judges 9:50-54 (NRSV)

Now Sarai, Abram's wife, bore him no children. She had an Egyptian slave-girl whose name was Hagar, and Sarai said to Abram, "You see that the Lord has prevented me from bearing children; go in to my slave-girl; it may be that I shall obtain children by her." And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. So, after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram's wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her slave-girl, and gave her to her husband Abram as a wife. He went in to Hagar, and she conceived; and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress. Then Sarai said to Abram, "May the wrong done to me be on you! I gave my slave-girl to your embrace, and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked on me with contempt. May the Lord judge between you and me!" But Abram said to Sarai, "Your slave-girl is in your power; do to her as you please." Then Sarai dealt harshly with her, and she ran away from her.
     The angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur. And he said, "Hagar, slave-girl of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?" She said, "I am running away from my mistress Sarai." The angel of the Lord said to her, "Return to your mistress, and submit to her."
Genesis 16:1-9 (NRSV)

While they were enjoying themselves, the men of the city, a perverse lot, surrounded the house, and started pounding on the door. They said to the old man, the master of the house, "Bring out the man who came into your house, so that we may have intercourse with him." And the man, the master of the house, went out to them and said to them, "No, my brothers, do not act so wickedly. Since this man is my guest, do not do this vile thing. Here are my virgin daughter and his concubine; let me bring them out now. Ravish them and do whatever you want to them; but against this man do not do such a vile thing." But the men would not listen to him. So the man seized his concubine, and put her out to them. They wantonly raped her, and abused her all through the night until the morning. And as the dawn began to break, they let her go. As morning appeared, the woman came and fell down at the door of the man's house where her master was, until it was light.
     In the morning her master got up, opened the doors of the house, and when he went out to go on his way, there was his concubine lying at the door of the house, with her hands on the threshold. "Get up," he said to her, "we are going." But there was no answer. Then he put her on the donkey; and the man set out for his home. When he had entered his house, he took a knife, and grasping his concubine he cut iher into twelve pieces, limb by limb, and sent her throughout all the territory of Israel.
Judges 19:22-29 (NRSV)

Some time passed. David's son Absalom had a beautiful sister whose name was Tamar; and David's son Amnon fell in love with her. Amnon was so tormented that he made himself ill because of his sister Tamar, for she was a virgin and it seemed impossible to Amnon to do anything to her. But Amnon had a friend whose name was Jonadab, the son of David's brother Shimeah; and Jonadab was a very crafty man. He said to him, "O son of the king, why are you so haggard morning after morning? Will you not tell me?" Amnon said to him, "I love Tamar, my brother Absalom's sister." Jonadab said to him, "Lie down on your bed, and pretend to be ill; and when your father comes to see you, say to him, 'Let my sister Tamar come and give me something to eat, and prepare the food in my sight, so that I may see it and eat it from her hand.'" So Amnon lay down, and pretended to be ill; and when the king came to see him, Amnon said to the king, "Please let my sister Tamar come and make a couple of cakes in my sight, so that I may eat from her hand."
     Then David sent home to Tamar, saying, "Go to your brother Amnon's house, and prepare food for him." So Tamar went to her brother Amnon's house where he was lying down. She took dough, kneaded it, made cakes in his sight, and baked the cakes. Then she took the pan and set them out before him, but he refused to eat. Amnon said, "Send out everyone from me." So everyone went out from him. Then Amnon said to Tamar, "Bring the food into the chamber, so that I may eat from your hand." So Tamar took the cakes she had made, and brought them into the chamber to Amnon her brother. But when she brought them near him to eat, he took hold of her, and said to her, "Come, lie with me, my sister." She answered him, "No, my brother, do not force me, for such a thing is not done in Israel; do not do anything so vile! As for me, where could I carry my shame? And as for you, you would be as one of the scoundrels in Israel. Now therefore, I beg you, speak to the king; for he will not withhold me from you." But he would not listen to her; and being stronger than she, he forced her and lay with her.
     Then Amnon was seized with a very great loathing for her; indeed, his loathing was even greater than the lust he had felt for her. Amnon said to her, "Get out!"
2 Samuel 13:1-15 (NRSV)

The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to Aaron and say: No one of your offspring throughout their generations who has a blemish may approach to offer the food of his God. For no one who has a blemish shall draw near, one who is blind or lame, or one who has a mutilated face or a limb too long, or one who has a broken foot or a broken hand, or a hunchback, or a dwarf, or a man with a blemish in his eyes or an itching disease or scabs or crushed testicles.
Leviticus 21:16-20 (NRSV)

What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge--he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil--he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor--he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire--he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy--all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man's fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was--that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love--he was not man.
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

The implantation of goat testicles in a grown man, the implantation of goat testicles in place of ovaries in a woman--I mean, this is nutsy!
Diane Rehm (The Diane Rehm Show, 7 Feb. 2008)

Call for lethal injection boycott
Headline in BBC News

Male circumcision "cuts" HIV risk
Headline in BBC News

Let heaven and nature sin.
Let heaven and nature sing.
Let heaven, let heaven and nature sing.
Lyrics printed in bulletin at Christ United Methodist Church, Marietta, OH (Christmas Eve, 2004 and 2005)

If your pain is not relived, call your doctor.
Discharge instructions from Doctor's Community Hospital, Lanham, MD

What is "stressed" spelled backwards?
(For answer see page 203.)
Carlean Johnson (Six Ingredients or Less: Slow Cooker)

M&Ms---the little candy that melts your heart, but not in your hands.
NBC anchor at 2005 Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade (as the giant M&M balloon swung out of control, injuring two spectators)

Holocaust comes to life in Marietta
Headline in The Marietta Times

Never quote statistics because nine times out of ten they're wrong.
Marshall Kimball, Band Director

[giving instructions on marching formations] Woodwinds! Make that circle a sphere!
Marshall Kimball, Band Director

You cannot prevent others from having their own interests. But you can eat their cake while they are absent from the room.
Judith Martin (Miss Manners, 16 January 2008)

War is the admission of defeat in the face of conflicting interests: by war the issue is left to chance, and the tacit assumption that the best man will win is not at all justified. It might equally be argued that the worst, the most unscrupulous man will win, although history will continue the absurd game by finding him after all the best man.
Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch)

The natural desire of good men is knowledge.
     I know that many will call this a useless work, and they will be those of whom Demetrius said that he took no more account of the wind that produced the words in their mouths than of the wind that came out of their hinder parts: men whose only desire is for material riches and luxury and who are entirely destitute of the desire of wisdom, the sustenance and the only true riches of the soul. For as the soul is more worthy than the body so much are the soul's riches more worthy than those of the body. And often when I see one of these men take this work in hand I wonder whether he will not put it to his nose like the ape, and ask me whether it is something to eat.
Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, ed. Edward MacCurdy)

Lo some who can call themselves nothing more than a passage for food, producers of dung, fillers up of privies, for of them nothing else appears in the world, nor is there any virtue in their work, for nothing of them remains but full privies.
Leonardo da Vinci (The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, ed. Edward MacCurdy)

It was funny in a painful way. God had given him the desire to be a great Natural Philosopher---then put him on earth in the midst of Newton, Hooke, and Leibniz.
Neal Stephenson (Quicksilver)

"We are empiricists---we scorn the Scholastic way of memorizing old books and rejecting what is new---and that is good. But in pinning our hopes on the Philosophick Mercury we have decided in advance what it is that we seek to discover, and that is never right."
Neal Stephenson (Quicksilver)

Not evil, but longing for that which is better, more often directs the steps of the erring. Not evil, but goodness more often allures the feeling mind unused to reason.
Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie)

"It is a great mistake," he said, "to think that anybody is either an angel or a devil." When Dorothy expressed an opinion that with some people angelic tendencies were predominant, and with others diabolic tendencies, he assented; but declared that it was not always easy to tell the one tendency from the other.
Anthony Trollope (He Knew He Was Right)

This is obviously a man who does not know women to any real depth. If you see what I am saying.
Rachel Manteuffel

Someone has defined culture as that which gives ready-made answers to the problems of life.
Gordon W. Allport (The Nature of Prejudice)

Here is a list of topics that polite people do not bring into a social conversation:
     Sex; religion; politics; money; illness; the food before them at the moment and which foods they customarily eat or reject and why; anything else having to do with bodily functions; occupations, including their own and inquiries into anyone else's; the looks of anyone present---especially to note any changes, even improvements, since these people were last seen; and the possessions of anyone present, including their hosts' house and its contents and the clothing being worn by them and their guests, even favorably.
     Those are only the traditionally banned topics. Miss Manners has been steadily adding to the list of what is likely to be explosive or soporific.
     It is barely possible that the reasons for your divorce aren't covered under sex or money---nevertheless, the whole topic is socially banned. Perhaps neither religion nor politics adequately describes your feelings about how terribly people are treating animals, vegetables or minerals---also banned. So are descriptions of computer software and hardware, and recitals of the plots of movies or books.
     Do you begin to see why the world needs misbehaving athletes? Or, as everyone can be loudly heard to be thinking, fewer etiquette rules?
Judith Martin (Miss Manners' Basic Training: The Right Thing To Say)

Don't ever get angry at a man for stating the truth.
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

It's hard to work in groups when you're omnipotent.
Q (Star Trek)

On the other hand, it is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a biquadrate [fourth power] into two biquadrates, or generally any power except a square into two powers with the same exponent. I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this which however the margin is not large enough to contain.
Fermat (in the margin of Diophantus)

Because they don't know what time is.
They haven't experienced the silence
in which it passes
impartial disinterested
godlike.
Because they didn't invent it at all.
They only invented the clock.
And it doesn't go tick
and it doesn't go tock
and it doesn't go pip.
It doesn't go anything.
And it doesn't go anything for ever.
It just goes,
before them, after them, without
them,
above all without them...
Tom Stoppard (If You're Glad, I'll Be Frank)

So then he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue and so to propitiate the austere spirit of poetry whom still, though at a great distance, he could not help reverencing. "The sky is blue," he said, "the grass is green." Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. "Upon my word," he said (for he had fallen into the bad habit of speaking aloud), "I don't see that one's more true than another. Both are utterly false." And he despaired of being able to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is and fell into a deep dejection.
Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

The barking of a thousand dogs sounded in her ears. Carriage wheels rushed ceaselessly in a circle round her. Leaves sighed overhead. Now and again a braided skirt and a pair of tight scarlet trousers crossed the grass within a few steps of her. Once a gigantic rubber ball bounced on the newspaper. Violets, oranges, reds, and blues broke through the interstices of the leaves and sparkled in the emerald on her finger. She was distracted between the two. She looked at the paper and looked up; she looked at the sky and looked down. Life? Literature? One to be made into the other? But how monstrously difficult!
Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

The very fabric of life now, she thought as she rose, is magic. In the eighteenth century, we knew how everything was done; but here I rise through the air; I listen to voices in America; I see men flying--but how it's done, I can't even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns.
Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

Good God, it is easy to be kind, the difficulty is to be just.
Victor Hugo (Les Miserables)

She said he proposed something on their wedding night that even her own brother wouldn't have suggested.
James Thurber

Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any.
Mark Twain