Mary Daly Quotes

#1. What men do to trees mirrors what they do to women.

Mary Daly

#2. It is impossible to Name and Act against oppression if there are no Nameable oppressors.

Mary Daly

#3. ...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

#4. One hundred percent of the bishops who oppose the repeal of anti-abortion laws are men and one hundred percent of the people who have abortions are women.

Mary Daly

#5. We will look upon the earth and her sister planets as being with us, not for us.

Mary Daly

#6. You guard against decay, in general, and stagnation, by moving, by continuing to move.

Mary Daly

#7. Cut off from the intuitive knowledge of ontological reason, technical knowledge is directionless and ultimately meaningless. When it dominates, life is deprived of an experience of depth, and it tends toward despair.

Mary Daly

#8. Few gynecologists recommend to their heterosexual patients the most foolpoof of solutions, namely, misterectomy.

Mary Daly

#9. I know that I will be punished just as much for being an itty-bitty feminist as for going the whole way. And so I go the whole way.

Mary Daly

#10. Why indeed must 'God' be a noun? Why not a verb - the most active and dynamic of all.

Mary Daly

#11. The liberation of language is rooted in the liberation of ourselves ...

Mary Daly

#12. If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males.

Mary Daly

#13. God's plan' is often a front for men's plans and a cover for inadequacy, ignorance, and evil.

Mary Daly

#14. 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

#15. Goddess is the deep Source of creating integrity and the Self-affirming be-ing of women.

Mary Daly

#16. I hope that in its richness, as well as in its incompleteness, Gyn/Ecology will continue to be a Labrys enabling women to learn from our mistakes and our successes, and cast our Lives as far as we can go, Now, in the Be-Dazzling Nineties.

Mary Daly

#17. Work is a substitute religious experience for many workaholics.

Mary Daly

#18. It is the creative potential itself in human beings that is the image of God.

Mary Daly

#19. I had explained that a woman's asking for equality in the church would be comparable to a black person's demanding equality in the Ku Klux Klan

Mary Daly

#20. If God is male, then male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination.

Mary Daly

#21. You become courageous by doing courageous acts ... Courage is a habit.

Mary Daly

#22. Courage to be is the key to revelatory power of the feminist revolution.

Mary Daly

#23. What the women do is become caretakers for the men. In those circumstances, I decided, and many others have, that there's a reality called women's space. There has to be a separate space for women.

Mary Daly

#24. Women have had the power of naming stolen from us.

Mary Daly

#25. Hags live. Women traveling into feminist time/space are creating Hag-ocracy, the place we govern. To govern is to steer, to pilot.

Mary Daly

#26. [W]omen under phallocratic rule are confined to the role of vessels/carriers, directed and controlled by men. Since that role is the basic base reversal of the very be-ing of Voyaging/Spiraling women, when we direct our own Crafts/Vessels we become reversers of that deadly reversal.

Mary Daly

#27. If God is male, then the male is God.

Mary Daly

#28. Male religion entombs women in sepulchres of silence in order to chant its own eternal and dreary dirge to a past that never was.

Mary Daly

#29. I urge you to sin. But not against these itty-bitty religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism-or their secular derivatives, Marxism, Maoism, Freudianism and Jungianism-whic h are all derivatives of the big religion of patriarchy. Sin against the infrastructure itself!

Mary Daly

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. Tokenism does not change stereotypes of social systems but works to preserve them, since it dulls the revolutionary impulse.

Mary Daly