“A high degree of intellectual refinement in the female is the surest pledge society can have for the improvement of the male.”

A fool is often as dangerous to deal with as a knave, and always more incorrigible.

He that studies books alone, will know how things ought to be; and he that studies men, will know how things are.

Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions.

It is better to meet danger than to wait for it. He that is on a lee shore, and foresees a hurricane, stands out to sea and encounters a storm to avoid a shipwreck.

Doubt is the vestibule of faith.

The awkwardness and embarrassment which all feel on beginning to write, when they themselves are the theme, ought to serve as a hint to author’s that self is a subject they ought very rarely to descant upon.

Insults are engendered from vulgar minds, like toadstools from a dunghill.

That writer does the most who gives his reader the most knowledge and takes from him the least time.

Theories are private property, but truth is common stock.

Sturdy beggars can bear stout denials.

None are so fond of secrets as those who do not mean to keep them.

Let those who would affect singularity with success first determine to be very virtuous, and they will be sure to be very singular.

That is fine benevolence, finely executed, which, like the Nile, comes from hidden sources.

That is true beauty which has not only a substance, but a spirit; a beauty that we must intimately know, justly to appreciate.

Liberty will not descend to a people; a people must raise themselves to liberty; it is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed.

Some persons will tell you, with an air of the miraculous, that they recovered although they were given over; whereas they might with more reason have said, they recovered because they were given over.

Pakistani feature films are all about catering to the male ego and male fantasy.

If, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens.

The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics.

We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn’t themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too “political,” “merely” oral and thus unreliable.

The revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.

Much male fear of feminism is infantilism–the longing to remain the mother’s son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him.

There’s been real hostility toward political poetry in the U.S., hostility or, at best, incomprehension. I’m speaking of those who have institutional power over what gets published, over grants andprizes and reviewing.

Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother.