Phyllis Chesler Quotes

#1. A harem is not a brothel, as so many Westerners erroneously believe. It is merely the women's living quarters. Male relatives can join them
but no male nonrelatives may do so. It is hardly a den of eroticism.

Phyllis Chesler

#2. Many 'natural' events - like early death, disease, hardship - are neither desirable nor necessary.

Phyllis Chesler

#3. How sad that men would base an entire civilization on the principle of paternity, upon the legal owership and presumed responsibility for children, and then never really get to know their sons and daughters very well.

Phyllis Chesler

#4. Only the powerless live in a money culture and know nothing about money.

Phyllis Chesler

#5. All men are not rapists - but almost all rapists are men.

Phyllis Chesler

#6. Women must begin to "save" themselves and their daughters before they "save" their husbands and their sons; before they "save" the whole world.

Phyllis Chesler

#7. For most women, being seen, having others pay attention to you, is imagined and experienced as more desirable and more powerful than commanding an army or seizing control of the means of production and reproduction.

Phyllis Chesler

#8. Ideal mental health, like freedom, exists for one person only if it exists for all people.

Phyllis Chesler

#9. Time is life. Anyone who wastes my time is killing me. Please don't!

Phyllis Chesler

#10. For every marriage that is made in Heaven, there is a marriage made in Hell.

Phyllis Chesler

#11. Afghans excel at fighting Afghans. This is what Afghans do, even when they are not being invaded by foreign powers. They fight each other, tribe against tribe, brother against brother, half-brother against half-brother, cousin against cousin, uncle against nephew, father against son.

Phyllis Chesler

#12. Most mother-women give up whatever ghost of a unique and human self they may have when they 'marry' and raise children.

Phyllis Chesler

#13. Exile ... might be the largest new state created by the twentieth century and the psychology of the twenty-first century.

Phyllis Chesler

#14. Women ... do not have to forsake the "wisdom of the heart" and become men. They need only transfer the primary force of their supportiveness to themselves and to each other but never to the point of self-sacrifice.

Phyllis Chesler

#15. Jews have always yearned for Jerusalem, from which they'd been exiled many times, but they also yearned for each and every one of the countries where they had been persecuted and where their ancestors once lived and are still buried.

Phyllis Chesler

#16. [On highly politicized Islamists:] In the name of freedom they demand the right to renounce freedom. In the language of tolerance they demand that intolerance be granted a dignified place at the table.

Phyllis Chesler

#17. Goddesses never die. They slip in and out of the world's cities, in and out of our dreams, century after century, answering to different names, dressed differently, perhaps even disguised, perhaps idle and unemployed, their official altars abandoned, their temples feared or simply forgotten.

Phyllis Chesler

#18. It is impossible for a Westerner to imagine the deadening torpor of a protected life under house arrest. Eventually, one is grateful for the smallest outing outdoors
a lovely picnic in a burqa, being allowed to watch the men and boys fly kites or swim.

Phyllis Chesler

#19. Sons or fathers, poor men or rich men, sacred or secular: all are homosexual in their worship of everything phallic.

Phyllis Chesler

#20. It is no accident that stock exchange floors - in addition to bedroom floors - bring out the noisy blood, the flushed cheek, and the passionate cries of men. Most men are making love when they make 'magical' amounts of money.

Phyllis Chesler

#21. Good people in the West have often failed to distinguish between Islam and Islamism ...

Phyllis Chesler

#22. If it were natural for father to care for their sons, they would not need so many laws commanding them to do so.

Phyllis Chesler

#23. Women must convert their love for and reliance on strength and skill in others to a love for all manner of strength and skill in themselves

Phyllis Chesler

#24. Perhaps only some young women, perhaps only a minority of all women, will be able to effect such changes through consciousness alone, through the strength of understanding, which, if transformed into wisdom, always means the performance of necessary actions.

Phyllis Chesler