Mary Daly Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Mary Daly. Here they are! All 44 of them:

The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es-,’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a [person] trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin'.
Mary Daly
There are and will be those who think I have gone overboard. Let them rest assured that this assessment is correct, probably beyond their wildest imagination, and that I will continue to do so.
Mary Daly
Every woman who has come to consciousness can recall an almost endless series of oppressive, violating, insulting, assaulting acts against her Self. Every woman is battered by such assaults - is on a psychic level, a battered woman.
Mary Daly (Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism)
It is the creative potential itself in human beings that is the image of God.
Mary Daly
Mary Daly, author of Beyond God the Father, points out that the model of the universe in which a male God rules the cosmos from outside serves to legitimize male control of social institutions.
Starhawk (The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religions of the Great Goddess)
God's plan' is often a front for men's plans and a cover for inadequacy, ignorance, and evil.
Mary Daly
It is impossible to Name and Act against oppression if there are no Nameable oppressors.
Mary Daly
Courage to be is the key to revelatory power of the feminist revolution.
Mary Daly
If God is male, then male is God.
Mary Daly (Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation)
What men do to trees mirrors what they do to women.
Mary Daly (Quintessence...Realizing the Archaic Future: A Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto)
Why indeed must “God” be a noun? Why not a verb... the most active and dynamic of all? MARY DALY THEOLOGIAN
Julia Cameron (The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity)
We are aware that the gods of patriarchy are pale derivatives and reversals of ancient yet always Present Goddess(es). We suspect that phallocentric writers and artists who have even a glimmer of insight are sometimes made uncomfortable by their own state of deception. Those who have any awareness of the heinous crime of reversal which is patriarchy must be in a state of deep conflict and fear of...Her.
Mary Daly (Quintessence...Realizing the Archaic Future: A Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto)
nd that, in a thimble, is patriarchy. Mary Daly puts it more elegantly and succinctly: “As long as god is male,” she says, “the male is God.” Which is why changing our view of God has everything to do with changing the world.
Sonia Johnson
Originally, it was believed that witches possessed the power of glamour and according to the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, witches by their glamour could cause the male 'member' to disappear. In modern usage, this meaning has almost disappeared into the background and the power of the term is masked and suffocated by such foreground images as those associated with glamour magazine.
Mary Daly (Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism)
Mary Daly, a theologian, writes, “Courage is like—it’s a habitus, a habit, a virtue: You get it by courageous acts. It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging.
Brené Brown (The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are)
Enmerson's interest is in the workshop phase, the birthing stage of art, not the museum moment, the embalming phase. Poetry mimics Creation and is therefore sacred. More precisely, just as God may indeed be a verb (as Mary Daly insists), poetry is the act of creating. The process of poetry also mimics the process of nature. 'This expression or naming is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature is a certain self-regulated motion or change.' Another aspect of nature is genius, which, as Emerson observes, 'is the activity which repairs the decays of things.
Robert D. Richardson Jr. (First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process)
Granted, vegetarian naming wrests meat eating from a context of acceptance; this does not invalidate its mission. One thing must be acknowledged about vegetarian naming as exemplified in the above examples: these are true words. The dissonance they produce is not due to their being false, but to their being too accurate. These words do not adhere to our common discourse which presumes the edibility of animals. Just as feminists proclaimed that 'rape is violence, not sex,' vegetarians wish to name the violence of meat eating. Both groups challenge commonly used terms. Mary Daly calls the phrase 'forcible rape' a reversal by redundancy because it implies that all rapes are not forcible. This example highlights the role of language in masking violence, in this case an adjective deflects attention from the violence inherent in the meaning of the noun. The adjective confers a certain benignity on the word 'rape.' Similarly, the phrase 'humane slaughter' confers a certain benignity on the term 'slaughter.' Daly would call this the process of 'simple inversion': 'the usage of terms and phrases to label...activities as the opposite of what they really are.' The use of adjectives in the phrases 'humane slaughter' and 'forcible rape' promotes a conceptual misfocusing that relativizes these acts of violence. Additionally, as we ponder how the end is achieved, 'forcibly,' 'humanely,' our attention is continously framed so that the absent referents--women, animals--do not appear. Just as all rapes are forcible, all slaughter of animals for food is inhumane regardless of what it is called.
Carol J. Adams (The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory)
Since patriarchy is the perpetual poorhouse in which women are stored/restored, afflicted with poverty of spirit, imagination, intellect, passion, physical vigor, as well as economic poverty, it is clear - and clearer than ever - that we have basically Nothing to loose.
Mary Daly (Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation)
...the essential task of feminism is not to go looking around for a ready-made theory and then try to make it relevant to our (little?) "issue" or "problem". This is self-depreciating in the extreme, a fact that is obvious if one realises that feminism is cosmic in its dimensions.
Mary Daly
The very word philosophy terrifies many women. In Quintessence I strive to exorcise this patriarchally embedded fear that undermines our intelligence and passion. We were all philosophers when we were five years old. Re-Calling our connections with nature at that age, many women can Re-member our sense of wonder and our urgent need to know. We were always asking “Why?” This state of mind can be called Wonderlust—meaning a strong and unconquerable longing for Elemental adventure and knowledge. What happened to our Wonderlust? Our visions, dreams, and far-out questions have been stunted by phallocratic society and its institutions. When we come into contact with our own deep and passionate intellectuality, we become intolerably threatening to the patriarchy. This is why there is an overwhelming taboo against women becoming philosophers, that is, seekers of wisdom on our own terms/turf. Philosophy—of our own kind, for our own kind—is a source of wholeness and power that rightfully belongs to women. Breaking the patriarchal taboo against it—against us—we break out of the state of deception. Moreover, we open gateway after gateway into our own Other-world, our Homeland. From this perspective we can See, Name, and Act to end the atrocities perpetrated against ourSelves and all the Biophilic beings.
Mary Daly (Quintessence...Realizing the Archaic Future: A Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto)
Another kind of transcendence myth has been dramatization of human life in terms of conflict and vindication. This focuses upon the situation of oppression and the struggle for liberation. It is a short-circuited transcendence when the struggle against oppression becomes an end in itself, the focal point of all meaning. There is an inherent contradiction in the idea that those devoted to a cause have found their whole meaning in the struggle, so that the desired victory becomes implicitly an undesirable meaninglessness. Such a truncated vision is one of the pitfalls of theologies of the oppressed. Sometimes black theology, for example that of James Cone, resounds with a cry for vengeance and is fiercely biblical and patriarchal. It transcends religion as a crutch (the separation and return of much old-fashioned Negro spirituality) but tends to settle for being religion as a gun. Tailored to fit only the situation of racial oppression, it inspires a will to vindication but leaves unexplored other dimensions of liberation. It does not get beyond the sexist models internalized by the self and controlling society — models that are at the root of racism and that perpetuate it. The Black God and the Black Messiah apparently are merely the same patriarchs after a pigmentation operation — their behavior unaltered.
Mary Daly (Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation)
While holding onto the awareness, then, that we must not fall into shaping our identity as victims, we have to tell ourselves the "flat-out truth," as my grandmother used to call it. And the flat-out truth is that we have come into a world, into a church or faith tradition, that for millennia has believed us inferior. It is a tradition permeated by an authoritarian attitude that devalues, diminishes, rejects, and limits women and the feminine. But seeing truth can be dangerous. Philosopher Mary Daly reminds us, "It isn't prudent for women to see all of this. Seeing means that everything changes: the old identifications and the old securities are gone." The question, she says, is whether women can forgo prudence in favor of courage.
Sue Monk Kidd (The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine)
But seeing such truth can be dangerous. Philosopher Mary Daly reminds us, “It isn’t prudent for women to see all of this. Seeing means that everything changes: the old identifications and the old securities are gone.”21 The question, she says, is whether women can forgo prudence in favor of courage. That was the question that followed me as I made my way into the new year.
Sue Monk Kidd (The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine)
The method that is required is not one of correlation but of liberation. Even the term “method” must be reinterpreted and in fact wrenched out of its usual semantic field, for the emerging creativity in women is by no means a merely cerebral process. In order to understand the implications of this process it is necessary to grasp the fundamental fact that women have had the power of naming stolen from us. We have not been free to use our power to name ourselves, the world or God. The old naming was not the product of dialogue- a fact inadvertently admitted in the genesis story of Adam’s naming the animals and the women. Women are now realizing that the universal imposing of names by men has been false because partial. That is, inadequate words have been taken as adequate.
Mary Daly (Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation)
Its's not enough to keep people from dying. We have to save the life that they want to return to, the one they had before they came to us." This was critical care nurse Mary Ann Barnes-Daly's mantra...
Wes Ely (Every Deep-Drawn Breath: A Critical Care Doctor on Healing, Recovery, and Transforming Medicine in the ICU)
The seduction of women - including feminists - into confusion by Dionysian boundary violation happens under a variety of circumstances. A comment element seems to be an invitation to "freedom". The feminine Dionysian male guru or therapist invites women to spiritual or sexual liberation, at the cost of loss of Self in male-dicated behavior. Male propagation of the idea that men, too are feminine - particularly through feminine behavior by males - distracts attention from the fact that femininity is a man-made construct, having essentially nothing to do with femaleness.
Mary Daly (Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism)
The goddess is not an out-there force among the far stars or beyond death, but is here and now and living. In philosopher Mary Daly's concept of active creation, she is a verb rather than none and is women's Be-ing. Since the goddess is everyone within and all around us, the powers of divinity and creation are both individual and shared by all. She is the power to make of women's lives what women will. With the tenant, "Thou Art Goddess", free of choice is a central issue; women take charge of who they are and what they do, not with blame or guilt, but with responsibility for their actions and choices.
Diane Stein (The Women's Spirituality Book)
We understand deeply that until all women are free no man can be free. Even when we believe that we've taken everything into consideration we acknowledge that we may be behaving as badly and as snoolishly as our forefathers. We are learning to recognize this as a culturally inherited blind spot that leads inevitably to the destruction of women and all life on Earth, including ourselves. Moreover: We resolve to accept counsel when criticism is offered regarding our deficiencies and to make every effort to improve. We resolve not to unduly burden our Sisters by insisting that they teach us, correct us, and explain to us. We resolve to respect Women's Space. We resolve to encourage all women to activate the fullness of their potential and never stand in the way. We resolve to take responsibility for our share of domestic chores and childcare. We resolve to meet together regularly as men to learn how to transform our violent tendencies. We resolve to eradicate all eroticism that depends upon a paradigm of dominance and submission. We resolve to continue diligently the process of forgetting “how to be a man.” Statement from the Biophilic Brotherhood, dated January 1, 2019 BE
Mary Daly (Quintessence...Realizing the Archaic Future: A Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto)
The females, in the terrifying, exhilarating experience of becoming rather than reflecting, would discover that they too have been effected by the dynamics of the Mirror World. Having learned only to mirror, they would find in themselves reflections of sickness in their masters. They would find themselves doing the same things, fighting the same way. Looking inside for something there, they would be confused by what would at first appear to be an endless Hall of Mirrors. What to copy? What model to imitate? Where to look? What is a mere mirror to do? But wait - How could a mere mirror even frame such a question? The question itself is the beginning of an answer that keeps unfolding itself. The question-answer is a verb, and when one begins to move in the current of the verb, of the Verb, she knows that she is not a mirror. Once she knows this she knows it s so deeply that she cannot completely forget. She knows it so deeply she has to say it to her sisters. What if more and more of her sisters should begin to hear and to see and to speak? This would be a disaster. It would throw the whole society backward into the future. Without Magnifying Mirrors all around, men would have to look inside and outside. They would start to look inside, wondering what was wrong with them. They would have to look outside because without the mirrors they would begin to receive impressions from real Things out there. They would even have to look at women, instead of reflections. This would be confusing and they would be forced to look inside again, only to have the harrowing experience of finding *there* the Eternal Woman, the Perfect Parakeet. Desperately looking outside again, they would find that the Parakeet is no longer *out there*. Dashing back inside, males would find other horrors: All of the Others - the whole crowd - would be in there: the lazy niggers, the dirty Chicanos, the greedy Jews, faggots and dykes, plus the entire crowd of Communists and the backward population of the Third World. Looking outward again, mirrorless males would be forced to see - people. Where to go? Paroxysm toward the Omega Point? But without the Magnifying Mirror even that last refuge is gone. What to do for relief? Send more bombing missions? But no. It is pointless to be killing The Enemy after you find out The Enemy is yourself.
Mary Daly (Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation)
I have chosen to use the terms lesbian existence and lesbian continuum because the word lesbianism has a clinical and limiting ring Lesbian existence suggests both the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of that existence I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range—through each woman’s life and throughout history—of woman-identified experience; not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman. If we expand it to embrace many more forms of primary intensity between and among women, including the sharing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giving and receiving of practical and political support; if we can also hear in it such associations as marriage resistance and the ‘haggard’ behavior identified by Mary Daly (obsolete meanings ‘intractable,’ ‘willful,’ ‘wanton,’ and ‘unchaste’ a woman reluctant to yield to wooing’)—we begin to grasp breadths of female history and psychology that have lain out of reach as a consequence of limited, mostly clinical, definitions of ‘lesbianism.’ Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life It is also a direct or indirect attack on male right of access to women But it is more than these, although we may first begin to perceive it as a form of nay-saying to patriarchy, an act or resistance It has of course included role playing, self-hatred, breakdown, alcoholism, suicide, and intrawoman violence; we romanticize at our peril what it means to love and act against the grain, and under heavy penalties; and lesbian existence has been lived (unlike, say, Jewish or Catholic existence) without access to any knowledge of a tradition, a continuity, a social underpinning The destruction of records and memorabilia and letters documenting the realities of lesbian existence must be taken very seriously as a means of keeping heterosexuality compulsory for women, since what has been kept from our knowledge is joy, sensuality, courage, and community, as well as guilt, self-betrayal, and pain.
Adrienne Rich (Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence)
Mano mėgiamiausi poetai? Karalius Dovydas, Karalius Saliamonas, Ekleziastas; Lamartine, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Lautreamont, Valéry, Marie Noël, Jouve; Angelus Silesius, Goethe, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, George, Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Traki, Langgasser; Leopardi, Campana, Montale; San Juan de la Cruz, Garcia Lorca, Blake, Keats, Hopkins, Yeats; Donelaitis, Maironis, Putinas, Aistis (pirmos 4 knygos). Bet mano preferencijos nuolat kinta Mano mėgiamiausi tapytojai? Piero della Francesca, Benozzo Gozzoli, Botticelli, Tiziano, Piero di Cosimo, Magnasco; Claude Lorrain, Georges de la Tour, Watteau, Fragonard, Chardin, Manet, Renoir, Soutine, Duffy, Chagall, Sérafine; Brueghel (Senasis), Memling, Hobbema, Vermeer; Dürer, Lucas Cranach (Senasis), Kokoschka; Gainsborough, Palmer; El Greco, Velazquez, Goya, Dali; Galdikas, Samuolis, Vizgirda, Valeška, Gudaitis.
Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas (Dienoraščio fragmentai 1938-1975)
The freedom to fall out of Eden will cost a mirror-shattering experience.
Mary Daly (Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation)
The power of sisterhood is not war-power. There have been and will be conflicts, but the Final cause causes no by conflict but by attraction.
Mary Daly (Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation)
The exploitative sexual caste system could not be perpetuated without the consent of the victims as well as of the dominant sex, and such consent if obtained through sex role socialization - a conditioning process which beings to operate the moment we are born, and which is enforced by most institutions. Parents, friends, teachers, textbook authors and illustrators, advertisers, those who control the mass media, toy and clothes manufacturers, professionals such a doctors and psychologists - all contribute to the socialization process. This happens through dynamics that are largely uncalculated and unconscious, yet which reinforce the assumptions, attitudes, stereotypes, customs, and arrangements of sexually hierarchical society. The fact of womne's low caste status has been - and is - disguised. It is masked, first of all, by sex role segregation, as in a ghetto, for it makes possible the delusion that women should be "equal but different". Sexual caste is hidden also by the fact that women have various forms of *derivative status* as a consequence of relationships with men. That is, women have duality of status, and the derivative aspect of this status - for example, as daughters and wives - divides us against each other and encourages identification with patriarchal institutions which serve the interests of men at the expense of women. Finally sexual caste is hidden by ideologies that bestow false identities upon women and men. Patriarchal religion has served to perpetuate all of these dynamics of delusion, naming them "natural" and bestowing its supernatural blessings upon them. The system has been advertised as "according to the divine plan".
Mary Daly (Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation)
Woman as sinner The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a [person] trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin’. Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology
Lucy H. Pearce (Burning Woman)
Mary Daly is a radical feminist philosopher and theologian. In 1973 she published God the Father, in which se maintained that the function of God in all religions is to "act as a legitimating paradigm for the institution of patriarchy".
Cathia Jenainati (Introducing Feminism: A Graphic Guide)
...tokenism does not change stereotypes or social systems but works to preserve them, since it dulls the revolutionary impulse.
Mary Daly (Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation)
In Hawaii, many were especially helpful and supportive of this project, but nobody more than Mary Kennedy and Frank “Bamboo” Opperman. My landlords became close friends, and their Mokuleia compound will always hold a special place in my heart. Mokuleia equestrian Michael Daly was also extremely helpful to both Mike Ritter and myself. Another special thanks goes to Duc Nguyen and Minh Nga Vu, the proprietors of Duc’s Bistro. The restaurant provided a safe harbor at a very tumultuous time in the project. Their generosity, grace, and delicious
Peter Maguire (Thai Stick: Surfers, Scammers, and the Untold Story of the Marijuana Trade)
You don't get where you are despite things. You get where you are because of things, so treat each of the little things you do, even if they seem sideways or backwards to others, as an integral part of who you're going to become, how you will lead, how you will contribute. That's the narrative. You're in control of your own narrative.
Mary Daly
Mary Daly said, 'If God is male, then the male is God.' We can update this saying in light of whiteness and say, ‘If God is a white male, then the white male is God.
Grace Ji-Sun Kim (When God Became White: Dismantling Whiteness for a More Just Christianity)
The feminist movement is the greatest single hope for the survival of spiritual consciousness on this planet
Mary Daly (Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation)
IF W.I.T.C.H. IS an example of feminist politics borrowing from the realm of mythos, then it should come as no surprise that feminist spirituality began to get more civic-minded in turn. Though there is evidence that some American Pagan covens existed as early as the 1930s, and Gardnerian Wicca had reached the States by the 1960s, the 1970s brought about a new style of witchcraft that was intent on “combining political and spiritual concerns as if they were two streams of a single river,” as Margot Adler put it. It took the framework of Wicca but gave it a much fuller emphasis on worshipping goddesses and honoring the female body. It also more blatantly reclaimed the witch as an icon of resistance against the patriarchy, following the sentiments of earlier pro-witch thinkers like Matilda Joslyn Gage and Margaret Murray, and the writings of radical feminists like Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin.
Pam Grossman (Waking the Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic, and Power (Witchcraft Bestseller))
Export Credit Guarantees.‘After all, Madame Nhu is asking a thousand dollars an interview, in this case we can insist on five and get it. Damn it, this is The Man . . . ’ The brain dulls. An exhibition of atrocity photographs rouses a flicker of interest. Meanwhile, the quasars burn dimly from the dark peaks of the universe. Standing across the room from Catherine Austin, who watches him with guarded eyes, he hears himself addressed as ‘Paul’, as if waiting for clandestine messages from the resistance headquarters of World War III. Five Hundred Feet High. The Madonnas move across London like immense clouds. Painted on clapboard in the Mantegna style, their composed faces gaze down on the crowds watching from the streets below. Several hundred pass by, vanishing into the haze over the Queen Mary Reservoir, Staines, like a procession of marine deities. Some remarkable entrepreneur has arranged this tour de force; in advertising circles everyone is talking about the mysterious international agency that now has the Vatican account. At the Institute Dr Nathan is trying to sidestep the Late Renaissance. ‘Mannerism bores me. Whatever happens,’ he confides to Catherine Austin, ‘we must keep him off Dali and Ernst.’ Gioconda. As the slides moved through the projector the women’s photographs, in profile and full face, jerked one by one across the screen. ‘A characteristic of the criminally insane,’ Dr Nathan remarked, ‘is the lack of tone and rigidity of the facial mask.’ The audience fell silent. An extraordinary woman had appeared on the screen. The planes of her face seemed to lead towards some invisible focus, projecting an image that lingered on the walls, as if they were inhabiting her skull. In her eyes glowed the forms of archangels. ‘That one?’ Dr Nathan asked quietly. ‘Your mother? I see.
J.G. Ballard (The Atrocity Exhibition)
Mary Daly so provocatively noted the incipient nature of this danger when she exclaimed: “If God is male, then the male is God.”7
Gary M. Burge (Theology Questions Everyone Asks: Christian Faith in Plain Language)