Quotes from Andrea Dworkin

The new pornography industry is held, by leftist males, to be inherently radical. Sex is claimed by the Left as a leftist phenomenon; the trade in women is most of sex. The politics of liberation are claimed as indigenous to the Left by the Left; central to the politics of liberation is the mass-marketing of material that depicts women being used as whores.

I am one of those serious women.

pornography is the orchestrated destruction of women's bodies and souls; rape, battery, incest, and prostitution animate it; dehumanization and sadism characterize it; it is war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, and human worth; it is tyranny. Each woman who has survived knows from the experience of her own life that pornography is captivity—the woman trapped in the picture used on the woman trapped wherever he's got her.

Much of society is set up specifically to assist people in their process of ignoring the horrors of the world.

Books were my church but even more my native land, my place of refuge, my DP camp. I was an exile early on, but exile welcomed me; it was were I belonged.

The beauty of a Jewish education is that you learn how to argue.

I hope for nothing; I fear nothing; I am free.

I listened; I wrote; I learned. I do not know why so many women trusted me enough to speak to me, but underneath anything I write one can hear the percussive sound of their heartbeats. If one has to pick one kind of pedagogy over all others, I pick listening. It breaks down prejudices and stereotypes; it widens self-imposed limits; it takes one into another's life, her hard times and, if there is any, her joy too.

How did I become who I am? I have a heart easily hurt. I believed that cruelty was most often caused by ignorance. I thought that if everybody knew, everything would be different. I was a silly child who believed in the revolution. [...] I can`t be bought or intimidated because I`m already cut down in the middle. I walk with women whispering in my ears. Every time I cry there`s a name attached to each tear. [...] I long to touch my sisters; I wish I could take away the pain.

It was the pornographers, not feminists, who punished women in the public square, as puritans had, for being sexual.

The spread of religious fundamentalism throughout the world right now is men retrenching to undo the civil and social advances of women; to reestablish male power as a fundamental reality by reestablishing gender as an absolute. This requires rigorous tightening of restraints on male sexual behavior as well as intensifying civil and sexual controls on women.

Men on Women For men, their right to control and abuse the bodies of women is the one comforting constant in a world rigged to blow up but they do not know when." "Coitus as punishment for the happiness of being together" which is profound and moving.

RIDDLE: Q: Why haven't women made great works of art? A: Because they are great works of art.

And yes, I mean it. A man who sticks his cock in an infant`s mouth belongs to Himmler`s circle of hell.

Sitting with Ricki [Abrams], talking with Ricki, I made a vow to her: that I would use everything I knew, including from prostitution, to make the women`s movement stronger and better; that I`d give my life to the movement and for the movement. I promised to honour-bound to the well-being of women, to do anything necessary for that well-being. I promised to live and to die if need be for women. I made that vow some thirty years ago, and I have not betrayed it yet.

people ask, well, dont sweet things happen? yes, indeed, many sweet things, but sweet doesnt keep you from dying, making love doesnt keep you from dying unless you get paid, writing doesnt keep you from dying unless you get paid, being wise doesnt keep you from dying unless you get paid, facts are facts, being poor makes you face facts which also does not keep you from dying

Des Pres says it is easier to kill if "the victim exhibits self disgust; if he cannot lift his eyes for humiliation, or if lifted they show only emptiness... " There is some pornography in which women are that abject, that easy to kill, that close to being dead already.

Greatness is not synonymous with perfection or popularity. In the long-arc narratives of male genius that reach far beyond a lifetime, greatness is established despite, and in the glaring light of, great flaws. Great men are by definition to be reckoned with and honored for the dilemmas they force us to confront, while the ways to castigate a woman of brilliance and ambition are second-nature and sometimes fatal, whether she's deemed evil or merely, as they say, problematic.

What I've learned is that women suffer from terrible shame and the shame comes from having been complicit in abuse because one wants to live.

to permit writers to use forms which violate convention just might permit writers to develop forms which would teach people to think differently: not to think about different things, but to think in different ways.

there is a great deal at stake here, many writers fight this battle and most lose it. what is at stake for the writer? freedom of invention, freedom to tell the truth, in all its particulars, freedom to imagine new structures.

Rape is no excess, no aberration, no accident, no mistake--it embodies sexuality as the the culture defines it.

The numbers grow as the technology and its accessibility grow. The technology by its very nature encourages more and more passive acquiescence to the graphic depictions. Passivity makes the already credulous consumer more credulous. He comes to the pornography a believer; he goes away from it a missionary.

A man wants what a woman has - sex. He can steal it, persuade her to give it away, rent it, , lease it over the long term, or own it outright.