Quotes About Empowerment

We have let Eros mean slavery, but Eros also has the power to set us free. We must demand the right to depict women's lives as we know them, not as we might like them to be. We must stop applying political prescriptions to creativity.

Mothers and daughters -- it's a comedy, but also a tragedy. We fill our daughters with all the chutzpah we wish for ourselves. We want them to be free as we were not. And then we resent them for being so free. We resent them for being what we have made! With granddaughters, it's so much easier. And great-granddaughters.

The greatest freedom I have now is that I no longer believe that anyone else can save my life. --Erica Jong, quoted by bell hooks in Communion The Female Search for Love

Every woman artist has to kill her own grandmother. She perches on our shoulder whispering, Don't embarrass the family.

You did not have to apologize for wanting to own your own soul. Your soul belonged to you—for better or worse. When all was said and done, it was all you had.

The real trouble about women is that they must always go on trying to adapt themselves to men's theories of women. —D. H. Lawrence

if sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it's because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body - and with it your own voice - and that's the most revolutionary insight of all

Non è necessario picchiare le donne se si riesce a farle sentire in colpa.

Io ti ho dato tutta la libertà che volevi.» «Questa è una contraddizione in termini. Una persona non è mai libera se la libertà le deve essere 'data'. Chi sei tu per 'darmi' la libertà?»

Women are the only exploited.....

Beware of the man who praises women's liberation. He's about to quit his job.

Meglio accendere la luce che lamentarsi del buio»

Freedom is not a constant attribute which we either have or have not. In fact, there is no such thing as freedom except as a word and an abstract concept. There is only one reality: the act of freeing ourselves in the process of making choices. In this process the degree of our capacity to make choices varies with each act, with our practice of life.

I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me. If

Freedom to creat and construct, to wonder and to venture. Such freedom requires that the individual be active and responsible, not a slave or a well-fed cog in the machine . . . It is not enough that men are not slaves; if social conditions further the existence of automatons, the result will not be love of life, but love of death.

As a child, every human being passes through a state of powerlessness, and truth is one of the strongest weapons of those who have no power.

If you love without calling forth love, that is, if your love as such does not produce love, if by means of an expression of life as a loving person you do not make of yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent, a misfortune.

no man must be the means for the ends of another man.

Die Liebe ist das Kind der Freiheit, niemals der Beherrschung

Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation. I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me. If I love the other person, I feel one with him or her, but with him as he is, not as I need him to be as an object for my use. It is clear that respect is possible only if I have achieved independence; if I can stand and walk without needing crutches, without

And I knew it was true, that my words were made of stones, that they would last and I would climb them.

She'd been doing the same things for so long: auditioning, seducing, preening. What if she turned it around, and let the world try to win her for a change?

There is always light. If only we're brave enough to see it. If only we're brave enough to be it."

I have no particular desire for a man's guidance. And if you think it will be your duty to guide me after we are wed, then you had better reconsider your role as a husband.