“Marjan. I have told him tales of good women and bad women, strong women and weak women, shy women and bold women, clever women and stupid women, honest women and women who betray. I m hoping that, by living inside their skins while he hears their stories, he ll understand over time that women are not all this way or that way. I m hoping he ll look at women as he does at men--that you must judge each of us on her own merits, and not condemn us or exalt us only because we belong to a particular sex.”
“Whoever claims any right that he is unwilling to accord to his fellow-men is dishonest and infamous.”
“Every man should stand under the blue and stars, under the infinite flag of nature, the peer of every other man.”
“It is difficult to exaggerate the adverse influence of the precepts and practices of religion upon the status and happiness of woman. Owing to the fact that upon women devolves the burden of motherhood, with all its accompanying disabilities, they always have been, and always must be, at a natural disadvantage in the struggle of life as compared with men.... With certain exceptions, women all the world over have been relegated to a position of inferiority in the community, greater or less according to the religion and the social organisation of the people; the more religious the people the lower the status of the women...”
“When all men give to all others all the rights they claim for themselves, this world will be civilized.”
“EQUAL RIGHTS and FREE DISCUSSION will be fearlessly advocated and maintained. Sectarian dogmas or tenets will be investigated and compared.”
“But sometimes...sometimes I wake with a mad thought in my head: What if that boy s life mattered as much as anyone else s, even Caesar s? What if I were offered a choice: to doom that boy to the misery of his fate, or to spare him, and by doing so, to wreck all Caesar s ambitions? I m haunted by that thought - which is ridiculous! It s self-evident that Caesar matters infinitely more than that Gaulish boy; one stands poised to rule the world, and the other is a miserable slae, if he even still lives. Some men are great, others are insignificant, and it behooves those of us who are in-between to ally ourselves with the greatest and to despise the smallest. To even begin to imagine that the Gaulish boy maters as much as Caesar is to presume that some mystical quality resides in every man and makes his life equal to that of any other, and surely the lesson life teaches us is quite the opposite! In stength and intellect, men are anything but equal, and the gods lavish their attention on some more than on others.”
“Equality is to be found only in the spiritual dignity of man”
“I had given up the church, more because of its complicity with slavery than from a full understanding of the foolishness of its creeds.”
“People always say that I didn t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
“Indeed, girls can be so in need of social approval that they confuse harassment for acceptance--thinking that any attention is better than none. Since many girls as well as boys buy the idea that sexual aggression and exploitation is normal masculine behavior, it may not even occur to them to demand to be treated as equals.”
“Gays, lesbians, straights, feminists, fascist pigs, communists, Hare Krishnas - none of them bother me. I don t care what banner they raise. But what I can t stand are hollow people. When I m with them I just can t bare it, and wind up saying things I shouldn t.”
“I shake my head at my friend. “Not only is they lines, but you know good as I do where them lines be drawn.” Aibileen shakes her head. “I used to believe in em. I don’t anymore. They in our heads. People like Miss Hilly is always trying to make us believe they there. But they ain’t.”
“Have not we affections and desires for sport, and frailty, as men have?”
“Sometimes, people call my way of speaking ranting. Why are you always ranting and screaming, they ask. But here’s the thing…the reason why I rant is because I am a voice for many women that cannot speak out to heads of state, UN officials, and those that influence systems of oppression. And so I rant. And I will not stop ranting until my mission of equality of all girls is achieved.”
“At the end of the day I have many answers for it. It has to do with my mom, who was an extraordinary woman, and a great feminist. It has to do with the people in my life. It has to do with a lot of different things, but -- I don t know! Because I m not just writing from the female characters for other people. I have a desire to see them in our culture -- that was not met for most of my childhood. Except occasionally by James Cameron. [From the 2011 San Diego Comic Con, in response to being asked why he writes strong female characters.]”
“We re not very different from one another, not different at all, in fact. We re all just people with the same needs, the same desires, the same feelings. It s a lie about us being different. It s something they cooked up so we d be fighting one another instead of them, the ones who keep us down and make their fortunes off our labor, the same ones who send us off to war when they get to fighting among themselves over the spoils. You ll find that out someday. They ll be calling on you to go to war for them, you can be sure of that, because there s going to be lots more wars in the future. I got in one myself, as you know. I saw men getting killed and wounded and crippled, and I must have killed a lot of men myself, and I m just sick every time I think of it. Why? Because we were fighting one another instead of those who d sent us out there. Oh, they re clever, those capitalists. It s hard to beat them at their game. They ve fooled us with words like patriotism and duty and honor, and they ve got us divided up into classes and religions so that each one of us figures he s better than the other. But it ll all change, arry. Believe me, it will. People get smarter. The human brain has a potential for development. Someday it will grow big enough so that everybody will see and understand the truth, and then we won t act like a bunch of sheep, and then that wall that separates the two sides of our street will crumble.”