Stereotypes Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Stereotypes. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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When a man gives his opinion, he's a man. When a woman gives her opinion, she's a bitch.
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Bette Davis
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I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.
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Jane Austen (Persuasion)
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In politics, If you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.
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Margaret Thatcher
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A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.
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Oscar Wilde
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As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.
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Virginia Woolf (Orlando)
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The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..
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Henry David Thoreau (Civil Disobedience and Other Essays)
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The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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Wendy," Peter Pan continued in a voice that no woman has ever yet been able to resist, "Wendy, one girl is more use than twenty boys.
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J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan)
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I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.
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Virginia Woolf (A Writer's Diary)
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He had no idea where the stereotype of dumb giggly blondes came from. Ever since he'd met Annabeth at the Grand Canyon last winter,when she'd marched toward him with that Give me Percy Jackson or I’ll kill you expression, Leo had thought of blondes as much too smart and much too dangerous.
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Rick Riordan (The Mark of Athena (The Heroes of Olympus, #3))
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Men learn to love the woman they are attracted to. Women learn to become attracted to the man they fall in love with.
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Woody Allen
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I don't fit into any stereotypes. And I like myself that way.
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C. JoyBell C.
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Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him -- or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them.
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Dorothy L. Sayers (Gaudy Night (Lord Peter Wimsey, #12))
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Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.
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Friedrich Nietzsche
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My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.
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Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman)
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The female mind is certainly a devious one, my lord." Vetinari looked at his secretary in surprise. "Well, of course it is. It has to deal with the male one.
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Terry Pratchett (Unseen Academicals (Discworld, #37; Rincewind, #8))
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I imagine hell like this: Italian punctuality, German humour and English wine.
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Peter Ustinov
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I am a rare species, not a stereotype.
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Ivan E. Coyote
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Once you label me you negate me.
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SΓΈren Kierkegaard
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Did you seriously just stamp your foot? I thought girls only did that on TV.
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Stephenie Meyer (Eclipse)
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I would rather trust a woman's instinct than a man's reason.
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Stanley Baldwin
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Men are more interesting in books than they are in real life.
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Mary Ann Shaffer (The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society)
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Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful.
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Margaret Mead
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Do you really believe ... that everything historians tell us about men – or about women – is actually true? You ought to consider the fact that these histories have been written by men, who never tell the truth except by accident.
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Moderata Fonte (The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe))
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Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.
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Virginia Woolf (A Room of One’s Own)
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Why do boys say someone acts like a girl as if it were an insult?
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Tamora Pierce (In the Hand of the Goddess (Song of the Lioness, #2))
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Why is it that all cars are women?" he asked. "Because they're fussy and demanding," answered Zee. "Because if they were men, they'd sit around and complain instead of getting the job done," I told him.
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Patricia Briggs (Silver Borne (Mercy Thompson, #5))
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[I]f we revert to history, we shall find that the women who have distinguished themselves have neither been the most beautiful nor the most gentle of their sex.
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Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman)
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Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
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Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman)
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Dude, I don’t want to talk about Lacey’s prom shoes. And I’ll tell you why: I have this thing that makes me really uninterested in prom shoes. It’s called a penis.
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John Green (Paper Towns)
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I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men." "Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.
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Jane Austen (Persuasion)
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You seem to be under the impression that there is a special breed of bad humans. There is no such thing as a stereotype bad man in this world. Under normal conditions, everybody is more or less good, or, at least, ordinary. But tempt them, and they may suddenly change. That is what is so frightening about men.
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Natsume Sōseki (Kokoro)
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Do you know what I did to the last guy that called me Tinkerbelle?" "Slept with him?" Darryl was silent for a second. "After that.
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Dani Alexander (Shattered Glass (Shattered Glass, #1))
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I knew I was different. I thought that I might be gay or something because I couldn't identify with any of the guys at all. None of them liked art or music. They just wanted to fight and get laid. It was many years ago but it gave me this real hatred for the average American macho male.
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Kurt Cobain
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A man does what he can; a woman does what a man cannot.
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Isabel Allende (InΓ©s of My Soul)
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If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women: they do not read them in a true light: they misapprehend them, both for good and evil: their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend.
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Charlotte BrontΓ« (Shirley)
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A stereotype becomes a stereotype when a significant percentage of the population appears to conform to it.
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Kelley Armstrong (Dime Store Magic (Women of the Otherworld, #3))
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Do you drink?" "Of course,I just said I was a writer.
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Stephen King
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The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says: "It's a girl.
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Shirley Chisholm
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She's a princess and you're a jock," he says. He thrusts his chin toward Bronwyn, then at Nate. "And you're a brain. And you're a criminal. You're all walking teen-movie stereotypes.
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Karen M. McManus (One of Us Is Lying (One of Us is Lying, #1))
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Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.
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Charlotte Whitton
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Women were created from the rib of man to be beside him, not from his head to top him, nor from his feet to be trampled by him, but from under his arm to be protected by him, near to his heart to be loved by him.
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Matthew Henry (An exposition of the Old and New Testament Volume 6)
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Women need to feel loved and men need to feel needed.
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Rita Mae Brown (Riding Shotgun)
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When I look at a person, I see a person - not a rank, not a class, not a title.
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Criss Jami (Killosophy)
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...sitting and waiting is one of the most miserable occupations known to man - not that it usually is known to men; women do it much more often.
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Diana Gabaldon (Dragonfly in Amber (Outlander, #2))
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She's a woman, you're a dude. You're not supposed to understand her. That's not what she's after.... She doesn't want you to understand her. She knows that's impossible. She just wants you to understand yourself. Everything else is negotiable.
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Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
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That’s what religion does. It points a finger. It causes wars. It breaks apart countries. It’s a petri dish for stereotypes to grow in. Religion’s not about being holy...Just holier-than-thous.
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Jodi Picoult (Change of Heart)
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For every door that’s been opened to me, I’ve tried to open my door to others. And here is what I have to say, finally: Let’s invite one another in. Maybe then we can begin to fear less, to make fewer wrong assumptions, to let go of the biases and stereotypes that unnecessarily divide us. Maybe we can better embrace the ways we are the same. It’s not about being perfect. It’s not about where you get yourself in the end. There’s power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there’s grace in being willing to know and hear others. This, for me, is how we become.
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Michelle Obama (Becoming)
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Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure.Ours is an entertainment seeking-nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one....This is the cause of that great sad American stereotype- the overstressed executive who goes on vacation, but who cannot relax.
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Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
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Boys who spent their weekends making banana nut muffins did not, as a rule, excel in the art of hand-to-hand combat.
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David Sedaris (Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim)
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The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
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Henry David Thoreau (Walden)
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Good God," I said. "This is the most stereotypical vampire food ever." "Only if it was raw. What do you think?" "It's good," I said reluctantly. Who knew that bacon would have made all the difference? "Really good. I think you have a promising future as a housewife while Lissa works and makes millions of dollars." "Funny, that's exactly my dream.
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Richelle Mead (Shadow Kiss (Vampire Academy, #3))
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Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it's okay to be a boy; for girls it's like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading.
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Ian McEwan (The Cement Garden)
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...One of the reasons so many women say "I'm not a feminist but..." (and then put forward a feminist position), is that in addition to being stereotyped as man-hating Amazons, feminists have also been cast as antifamily and antimotherhood.
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Susan J. Douglas
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There is no such thing as a woman who doesn’t work. There is only a woman who isn’t paid for her work.
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Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
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Girls can be athletic. Guys can have feelings. Girls can be smart. Guys can be creative. And vice versa. Gender is specific only to your reproductive organs (and sometimes not even to those), not your interest, likes, dislikes, goals, and ambitions.
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Connor Franta (A Work in Progress)
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I think fitting in is highly overrated. I’d rather just fit out... Fitting out means being who you are, even when people insist that you have to change. Fitting out means taking up space, not apologizing for yourself, and not agreeing with those who seek to label you with stereotypes.
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Golda Poretsky
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He shook his head. "The next time I hear a women going on about how neurotic men are, I'm going to remember this. You tell me you like my body, and what do I say? I say, thank you. Then I tell you I like yours and what do I hear? A long lists of grievances.
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Susan Elizabeth Phillips (Kiss an Angel)
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It is definitely annoying that straight (and white, for that matter) is the default, and that the only people who have to think about their identity are the ones who don't fit that mold. Straight people really should have to come out, and the more awkward it is, the better. Awkwardness should be a requirement.
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Becky Albertalli (Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (Simonverse, #1))
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Because you've got guy parts, you're automatically a better mechanic than me? I don't think so," Eve said, and bailed out of the passenger side.
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Rachel Caine (Fade Out (The Morganville Vampires, #7))
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..... it would be interesting to find out what goes on in that moment when someone looks at you and draws all sorts of conclusions.
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Malcolm Gladwell
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I’ve watched Lo become sober. I’ve watched Lily curb a relentless addiction. (I’m proud of you, sis.) I’ve watched Rose blaze her own trail and put fire to stereotypes. I’ve watched Connor fall in love. With more than just himself. I’ve watched Ryke Meadows unclip his shackles and rise again. And me. I’ve discovered who I am.
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Krista Ritchie (Long Way Down (Calloway Sisters, #4))
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The difference between the love of a man and the love of a woman is that a man will always give reasons for loving, but a woman gives no reasons for loving.
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Fulton J. Sheen (Life Is Worth Living)
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Women leave their marriages when they can't take any more. Men leave when they find someone new.
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J. Courtney Sullivan (Commencement)
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You ride as a man, fight as a man, and you think as a man-" "I think as a human being," she retorted hotly. "Men don't think any differently from women- they just make more noise about being able to.
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Tamora Pierce (The Woman Who Rides Like a Man (Song of the Lioness, #3))
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Conversation between a princess and an outlaw: "If I stand for fairy-tale balls and dragon bait--dragon bait--what do you stand for?" "Me? I stand for uncertainty, insecurity, bad taste, fun, and things that go boom in the night." "Franky, it seems to me that you've turned yourself into a stereotype." "You may be right. I don't care. As any car freak will tell you, the old models are the most beautiful, even if they aren't the most efficient. People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve." "Well, you may get off on being a beautiful stereotype, regardless of the social consequences, but my conscience won't allow it." "And I goddamn refuse to be dragon bait. I'm as capable of rescuing you as you are of rescuing me." "I'm an outlaw, not a hero. I never intended to rescue you. We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.
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Tom Robbins (Still Life with Woodpecker)
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Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn't. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not. Tap on it and it's hollow. Look under the shells: it's not there.
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Naomi Alderman (The Power)
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My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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I bet you anything that 10 times out of 10, Nicky, Vinny and Tony will beat the shit out of Todd, Kyle and Tucker.
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George Carlin
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Not everyone has to ride off into the sunset with a man. Some of us just want a tan.
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Mandy Hale (The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass)
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A man once asked me ... how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. "Well," said the man, "I shouldn't have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing." I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.
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Dorothy L. Sayers (Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society)
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The show's writers had peppered the piece with words like "savage," "wild," and "animalistic." What bullshit. Show me the animal that kills for the thrill of watching something die. Why does the stereotype of the animalistic killer persist? Because humans like it. It neatly explains things for them, moving humans to the top of the evolutionary ladder and putting killers down among mythological man-beast monsters like werewolves. The truth is, if a werewolf behaved like this psychopath it wouldn't be because he was part animal, but because he was still too human. Only humans kill for sport.
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Kelley Armstrong (Bitten (Otherworld, #1))
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I wondered, for the very first time, if maybe I was doing this whole thing wrong. If maybe I'd allowed myself to be blinded by my own anger to the exclusion of all else. If maybe, just maybe, I'd been so determined not to be stereotyped that I'd begun to stereotype everyone around me.
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Tahereh Mafi (A Very Large Expanse of Sea)
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It’s remarkable how a stereotype functions as an actual trap. How many β€œangry black women” have been caught in the circular logic of that phrase? When you aren’t being listened to, why wouldn’t you get louder? If you’re written off as angry or emotional, doesn’t that just cause more of the same?
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Michelle Obama (Becoming)
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the wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others. When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better. To be loving we willingly hear the other’s truth, and most important, we affirm the value of truth telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love.
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bell hooks (All About Love: New Visions)
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He always thought of the sea as 'la mar' which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fishermen, those who used buoys as floats for their lines and had motorboats, bought when the shark livers had brought much money, spoke of her as 'el mar' which is masculine.They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favours, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought.
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Ernest Hemingway (The Old Man and the Sea)
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I think people would live a bit longer if they didn't know how old they were. Age puts restrictions on things.
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Karl Pilkington
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It makes utter sense to stay healthy and strong, to be as nourishing to the body as possible. Yet I would have to agree, there is in many women a 'hungry' one inside. But rather than hungry to be a certain size, shape, or height, rather than hungry to fit the stereotype; women are hungry for basic regard from the culture surrounding them. The 'hungry' one inside is longing to be treated respectfully, to be accepted and in the very least, to be met without stereotyping.
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Clarissa Pinkola EstΓ©s (Women Who Run With the Wolves)
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Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.
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J. Nozipo Maraire
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Just as women's bodies are softer than men's, so their understanding is sharper.
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Christine de Pizan
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All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
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John Irving (The World According to Garp)
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The problem with labels is that they lead to stereotypes and stereotypes lead to generalizations and generalizations lead to assumptions and assumptions lead back to stereotypes. It’s a vicious cycle, and after you go around and around a bunch of times you end up believing that all vegans only eat cabbage and all gay people love musicals.
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Ellen DeGeneres
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She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance - a misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a wellβˆ’informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.
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Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)
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Calling it lunacy makes it easier to explain away the things we don't understand.
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Megan Chance (The Spiritualist)
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Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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We are much too much inclined in these days to divide people into permanent categories, forgetting that a category only exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is served.
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Dorothy L. Sayers (Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society)
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What we ask is to be human individuals, however peculiar and unexpected. It is no good saying: "You are a little girl and therefore you ought to like dolls"; if the answer is, "But I don't," there is no more to be said.
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Dorothy L. Sayers (Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society)
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The rule seemed to be that a great woman must either die unwed ... or find a still greater man to marry her. ... The great man, on the other hand, could marry where he liked, not being restricted to great women; indeed, it was often found sweet and commendable in him to choose a woman of no sort of greatness at all.
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Dorothy L. Sayers (Gaudy Night (Lord Peter Wimsey, #12))
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In fact, there is perhaps only one human being in a thousand who is passionately interested in his job for the job's sake. The difference is that if that one person in a thousand is a man, we say, simply, that he is passionately keen on his job; if she is a woman, we say she is a freak.
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Dorothy L. Sayers (Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society)
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It is time to effect a revolution in female manners - time to restore to them their lost dignity - and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world. It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners.
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Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman)
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Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems were for alcoholics, and Mores were for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren't.
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David Sedaris (When You Are Engulfed in Flames)
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In reaction against the age-old slogan, "woman is the weaker vessel," or the still more offensive, "woman is a divine creature," we have, I think, allowed ourselves to drift into asserting that "a woman is as good as a man," without always pausing to think what exactly we mean by that. What, I feel, we ought to mean is something so obvious that it is apt to escape attention altogether, viz: (...) that a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual. What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.
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Dorothy L. Sayers (Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society)
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Was it love or wasn't it that she felt for Carol? And how absurd it was that she didn't even know. She had heard about girls falling in love, and she knew what kind of people they were and what they looked like. Neither she nor Carol looked like that. Yet the way she felt about Carol passed all the tests for love and fitted all the descriptions.
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Patricia Highsmith (The Price of Salt)
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There is no deception on the part of the woman, where a man bewilders himself: if he deludes his own wits, I can certainly acquit the women. Whatever man allows his mind to dwell upon the imprint his imagination has foolishly taken of women, is fanning the flames within himself -- and, since the woman knows nothing about it, she is not to blame. For if a man incites himself to drown, and will not restrain himself, it is not the water's fault.
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John Gower (Confessio Amantis, Volume 1)
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16 Things Romance Readers Are Tired Of Hearin 1. All Romance books are exactly the same. 2. The endings are so predictable. 3. You know romance doesn't happen like that in real life. 4. You're setting unrealistic expectations for yourself about love. 5. Real men don't have abs like that. 6.So you think you're going to go on a lot of dates? 7. So you think you're going to fall in love with an ex-boyfriend? 8. ...or a billionaire? 9. ...or a duke? 10. So you'll stop reading romances when you have a boyfriend, right? 11. It's basically mommy porn, right? 12. I could write a romance book. 13. Do you only read female authors? 14. I saw the Notebook once. 15. Is Danielle Steel your favorite author? 16. Do you read REAL books?
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Bookbub Bulletin
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It is extraordinarily entertaining to watch the historians of the past ... entangling themselves in what they were pleased to call the "problem" of Queen Elizabeth. They invented the most complicated and astonishing reasons both for her success as a sovereign and for her tortuous matrimonial policy. She was the tool of Burleigh, she was the tool of Leicester, she was the fool of Essex; she was diseased, she was deformed, she was a man in disguise. She was a mystery, and must have some extraordinary solution. Only recently has it occrurred to a few enlightened people that the solution might be quite simple after all. She might be one of the rare people were born into the right job and put that job first.
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Dorothy L. Sayers (Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society)
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There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers and yet must needs call forth sleep from her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure their pain.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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Wine and women make wise men dote and forsake God's law and do wrong." However, the fault is not in the wine, and often not in the woman. The fault is in the one who misuses the wine or the woman or other of God's crations. Even if you get drunk on the wine and through this greed you lapse into lechery, the wine is not to blame but you are, in being unable or unwilling to discipline yourself. And even if you look at a woman and become caught up in her beauty and assent to sin [= adultery; extramarital sex], the woman is not to blame nor is the beauty given her by God to be disparaged: rather, you are to blame for not keeping your heart more clear of wicked thoughts. ... If you feel yourself tempted by the sight of a woman, control your gaze better ... You are free to leave her. Nothing constrains you to commit lechery but your own lecherous heart.
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Anonymous (Dives and Pauper)
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Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.
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Toni Morrison (Beloved (Beloved Trilogy, #1))
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Yet if women are so flighty, fickle, changeable, susceptible, and inconstant (as some clerks would have us believe), why is it that their suitors have to resort to such trickery to have their way with them? And why don't women quickly succumb to them, without the need for all this skill and ingenuity in conquering them? For there is no need to go to war for a castle that is already captured. (...) Therefore, since it is necessary to call on such skill, ingenuity, and effort in order to seduce a woman, whether of high or humble birth, the logical conclusion to draw is that women are by no means as fickle as some men claim, or as easily influenced in their behaviour. And if anyone tells me that books are full of women like these, it is this very reply, frequently given, which causes me to complain. My response is that women did not write these books nor include the material which attacks them and their morals. Those who plead their cause in the absence of an opponent can invent to their heart's content, can pontificate without taking into account the opposite point of view and keep the best arguments for themselves, for aggressors are always quick to attack those who have no means of defence. But if women had written these books, I know full well the subject would have been handled differently. They know that they stand wrongfully accused, and that the cake has not been divided up equally, for the strongest take the lion's share, and the one who does the sharing out keeps the biggest portion for himself.
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Christine de Pizan (Der Sendbrief vom Liebesgott / The Letter of the God of Love (L'Epistre au Dieu d'Amours))