Quotes by Naomi Wolf

“Dissident Natan Sharansky writes that there are two kinds of states -- "fear societies" and "free societies," two kinds of consciousness. The consciousness derived of oppression is despairing, fata...”

“Until recently the locus of sexual fantasy was peopled with images actually glimpsed or were sensations actually felt, or private imaginings taken from suggestions in the real world, a dream well w...”

“You do not win by struggling to the top of a caste system, you win by refusing to be trapped within one at all.”

“The human beings at the helm of the new nation [USA], whatever their limitations [slave owners, anti-democracy], were truly revolutionary. The theory of liberty born in that era, the seed of the id...”

“For I conclude that the enemy is not lipstick, but guilt itself; that we deserve lipstick, if we want it, AND free speech; we deserve to be sexual AND serious--or whatever we please; we are entitle...”

“The last thing the consumer index wants men and women to do is to figure out how to love one another: The $1.5 trillion retail-sales industry depends on sexual estrangement between men and women, a...”

“Possibilities for women have become so open-ended that they threaten to destabilize the institutions on which a male-dominated culture has depended, and a collective panic reaction on the part of b...”

“The Rites of Beauty also seduce women by meeting their current hunger for color and poetry. As they make their way into male public space that is often prosaic and emotionally dead, beauty's sacram...”

“Advertisers are the West's courteous censors.”

“Economist Marvin Harris described women as a "literate and docile" labor pool, and "therefore desirable candidates for the information- and people-processing jobs thrown up by modern service indust...”

“Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only the relations of men to women, but the relation of women to themselves.' Critic John Berger's well-known quote ha...”

“Economist Marvin Harris described women as a 'literate and docile' labor pool, and 'therefore desirable candidates for the information- and people-processing jobs thrown up by modern service indust...”

“What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired.”

“We conceived of the planet as female, an all-giving Mother Nature, just as we conceived of the female body, infinitely alterable by and for man; we serve both ourselves and our hopes for the planet...”

“Women are mere beauties in mens culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable, artless ingenue.”

“An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that justify the institution of slavery. The contemporary economy depends right now on the representation of women within the be...”

“By the 1980s beauty had come to play in womens status-seeking the same role as money plays in that of men: a defensive proof to aggressive competitors of womanhood or manhood. Since both value syst...”

“Health makes good propaganda.”

“To ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality.”

“...When we quietly go about our business as our rights are plundered, when we yield to passivity and switch on the wii and hand over our power, we are not acting like true Americans. Indeed, at tho...”