Top 100 Dworkin Quotes
#1. It was said that Dworkin himself had penned the Book in his saner days, and that long passages had come direct from the Unicorn. I don't know. I wasn't there. It is also said that we are descended of Dworkin and the Unicorn, which gives rise to some unusual mental images.
Roger Zelazny
#2. Dworkin, for example, argues that our law includes not only norms found in treaties, customs, constitutions, statutes, and cases, but also moral principles that provide the best justification for the norms found there.5 On his account the things justified by moral
H. L. A. Hart
#3. Instead of being lionized and admired for her genius, instead of being able to earn a decent living as a writer, Andrea Dworkin was misrepresented and demonized.
Catharine MacKinnon
#4. Time, too, is a function of Shadow, and even Dworkin did not know all of its ins and outs. Or perhaps he did. Maybe that is what drove him mad.
Roger Zelazny
#5. To say that 'wealth in America is so unfairly distributed in America,' as Ronald Dworkin does, is grossly misleading when most wealth in the United States is not distributed: at all. People create it, earn it, save it, and spend it.
Thomas Sowell
#6. Clearly, only very unequal intellectual and moral standing could justify having equality imposed, whether the people want it or not, as Dworkin suggests, and only very unequal power would make it possible.
Thomas Sowell
#7. Besides the money aspect, I guess I was curious about sex work. In the way that most people are, but also because ever since I was a teen I had read feminist writers like Dworkin and Mackinnon and the way they wrote about sex work had an enormous impact on me. Was it really as horrible as they said?
Marie Calloway
#8. As a writer and as a human being, Susan Dworkin has always had the
ability to draw us into new dreams of justice, and to make them
irresistibly practical, humorous and human. She makes clear that
progress and pleasure go together.
Gloria Steinem
#9. Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name.
Andrea Dworkin
#10. The cultural institutions which embody and enforce those interlocked aberrations-for instance, law, art, religion, nation-states, the family, tribe, or commune based on father-right-these institutions are real and they must be destroyed.
Andrea Dworkin
#11. Men are distinguished from women by their commitment to do violence rather than to be victimized by it.
Andrea Dworkin
#12. No phallic hero, no matter what he does to himself or to another to prove his courage, ever matches the solitary, existential courage of the woman who gives birth.
Andrea Dworkin
#13. The tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognize that they are committing suicide.
Andrea Dworkin
#14. The annihilation of a woman's personality, individuality, will, character, is prerequisite to male sexuality.
Andrea Dworkin
#15. Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of women hating.
Andrea Dworkin
#18. A commitment to sexual equality with men is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.
Andrea Dworkin
#19. Feminism requires precisely what patriarchy destroys in women: unimpeachable bravery in confronting male power
Andrea Dworkin
#20. It's not as if there's an empty patch that one can see and so one can say, 'There's my ignorance; it's about ten by ten and a dozen feet high and someday someone will fill in the empty patch.
Andrea Dworkin
#22. On the Left, on the Right, in the Middle; Authors, statesmen, thieves; so-called humanists and self-declared fascists; the adventurous and the contemplative, in every realm of male expression and action, violence is experienced and articulated as love and freedom.
Andrea Dworkin
#23. Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.
Andrea Dworkin
#24. Feminist art may ... though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme ... should we call it 'joy'?
Andrea Dworkin
#25. I have been asked, politely and not so politely, why I am myself. This is an accounting any woman will be called on to give if she asserts her will.
Andrea Dworkin
#27. I didn't believe any words were dirty until I heard the white boys say cunt.
Andrea Dworkin
#28. Sexism is the foundation on which all tyranny is built. Every social form of hierarchy and abuse is modeled on male-over-female domination.
Andrea Dworkin
#29. Childbearing is glorified in part because women die from it.
Andrea Dworkin
#30. Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species.
Andrea Dworkin
#31. Erotica is simply high-class pornography; better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer.
Andrea Dworkin
#32. Men have constructed female sexuality and in so doing have annihilated the chance for sexual intelligence in women. Sexual intelligence cannot live in the shallow, predestined sexuality men have counterfeiteed for women.
Andrea Dworkin
#33. Families make possible the super-exploitation of women by training them to look upon their work outside the home as peripheral to their 'true' role.
Andrea Dworkin
#34. Women, for centuries not having access to pornography and now unable to bear looking at the muck on the supermarket shelves, are astonished. Women do not believe that men believe what pornography says about women. But they do. From the worst to the best of them, they do.
Andrea Dworkin
#35. How can anyone love someone who is less than a full person, unless love itself is domination per se?
Andrea Dworkin
#36. You think intercourse is a private act; it's not, it's a social act. Men are sexually predatory in life; and women are sexually manipulative. When two individuals come together and leave their gender outside the bedroom door, then they make love.
Andrea Dworkin
#37. One of the differences between marriage and prostitution is that in marriage you only have to make a deal with one man.
Andrea Dworkin
#38. Institutionalised in sports, the military, acculturated sexuality, the history and mythology of heroism, violence is taught to boys until they becomes its advocates.
Andrea Dworkin
#39. With the possible exception of the Shakers, it is difficult to think of an American movement that has failed more spectacularly than antipornography feminism.
Andrea Dworkin
#40. Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the body can use.
Andrea Dworkin
#42. Without dignity our lives are only blinks of duration. But if we manage to lead a good life well, we create something more. We write a subscript to our mortality. We make our lives tiny diamonds in the cosmic sands.
Ronald Dworkin
#44. I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig.
Andrea Dworkin
#45. Being a Jew, one learns to believe in the reality of cruelty and one learns to recognize indifference to human suffering as a fact.
Andrea Dworkin
#46. The creative mind is intelligence in action in the world.
Andrea Dworkin
#48. We must refuse to submit to those institutions which are by definition sexist - marriage, the nuclear family, religions built on the myth of feminine evil.
Andrea Dworkin
#49. We as women know that there are no disembodied processes; that all history originates in human flesh; that all oppression is inflicted by the body of one against the body of another; that all social change is built on the bone and muscle, and out of the flesh and blood, of human creators.
Andrea Dworkin
#50. The utopian male concept which is the premise of male pornography is this
since manhood is established and confirmed over and against the brutalized bodies of women, men need not aggress against each other; in other words, women absorb male aggression so that men are safe from it.
Andrea Dworkin
#51. Only when manhood is dead - and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it - only then will we know what it is to be free.
Andrea Dworkin
#52. If pornography releases sexual tension, why don't we send recipe books to the starving?
Andrea Dworkin
#54. The traditional flowers of courtship are the traditional flowers of the grave, delivered to the victim before the kill. The cadaver is dressed up and made up and laid down and ritually violated and consecrated to an eternity of being used.
Andrea Dworkin
#56. Men know everything - all of them - all the time - no matter how stupid or inexperienced or arrogant or ignorant they are.
Andrea Dworkin
#57. Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.' (Leviticus 18:22). That means simply that it is foul to do to other men what men habitually, proudly, manfully do to women: use them as inanimate, empty, concave things; fuck them into submission; subordinate them through sex.
Andrea Dworkin
#58. Truth is harder to bear than ignorance, and so ignorance is valued more
also because the status quo depends on it; but love depends on self-knowledge and self-knowledge depends on being able to bear the truth.
Andrea Dworkin
#59. The hurting of women is ... basic to the sexual pleasure of men.
Andrea Dworkin
#60. Monroe, the consummate sexual doll, is empowered to act but afraid to act, perhaps because no amount of acting, however inspired,can convince the actor herself that her ideal female life is not a dreadful form of dying.
Andrea Dworkin
#61. Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine.
Andrea Dworkin
#62. We are born into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed ... We are programmed by the culture as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous way through the scientist's maze, and that programming operates on every level of choice and action.
Andrea Dworkin
#63. What about Adolf Hitler?"
"Oh, him. He's not a thinker. He's just a ranter and raver."
"There may come a time," said Pepi, "when people cannot tell the difference.
Susan Dworkin
#64. The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable.
Andrea Dworkin
#65. Integrity is the key to understanding legal practice. Law's empire is defined by attitude, not territory or power or process.
Ronald Dworkin
#66. Woman is not born: she is made. In the making, her humanity is destroyed. She becomes symbol of this, symbol of that: mother of the earth, slut of the universe; but she never becomes herself because it is forbidden for her to do so.
Andrea Dworkin
#67. Pornography is the essential sexuality of male power: of hate, of ownership, of hierarchy; of sadism, of dominance.
Andrea Dworkin
#68. If you want a definition of what a coward is, it's needing to push a whole class of people down so that you can walk on top of them.
Andrea Dworkin
#69. Surely the freedom of women must mean more to us than the freedom of pimps.
Andrea Dworkin
#72. While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact.
Andrea Dworkin
#73. Freedom is not an abstaction, nor is a little of it enough. A little more is not enough either. Having less, being less, empoverished in freedom and rights, women then invariably have less self-respect: less self-respect than any human being needs to live a brave and honest life.
Andrea Dworkin
#74. There is no place on earth, no day or night, no hour or minute, when one is not a Jew or a woman.
Andrea Dworkin
#75. I also had nightmares. Somehow all the feelings I didn't feel when each thing had actually happened to me I did feel when I slept.
Andrea Dworkin
#76. There is nothing as dangerous as an unembodied principle: no matter what blood flows, the principle comes first. The First Amendment absolutists operate precisely on unembodied principle ...
Andrea Dworkin
#77. The argument between wives and whores is an old one; each one thinking that whatever she is, at least she is not the other.
Andrea Dworkin
#78. And on that day, the day of truce, that day when not one woman is raped, we will begin the real practice of equality, because we can't begin it before that day. Before that day it means nothing, because it is nothing; It is not real; It is not true.
Andrea Dworkin
#79. The common erotic project of destroying women makes it possible for men to unite into a brotherhood; this project is the only firm and trustworthy groundwork for cooperation among males and all male bonding is based on it.
Andrea Dworkin
#80. In my own life, I don't have intercourse. That is my choice.
Andrea Dworkin
#81. As long as there is rape ... there is not going to be any peace or justice or equality or freedom. You are not going to become what you want to become or who you want to become. You are not going to live in the world you want to live in.
Andrea Dworkin
#82. Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies.
Andrea Dworkin
#83. The fact that we are all trained to be mothers from infancy on means that we are all trained to devote our lives to men, whether they are our sons or not; that we are all trained to force other women to exemplify the lack of qualities which characterizes the cultural construct of femininity.
Andrea Dworkin
#84. 'Women's fashion' is a euphemism for fashion created by men for women.
Andrea Dworkin
#85. There is a great deal at stake here, many writers fight this battle and most lose it. what is at stake for the writer? freedom of invention, freedom to tell the truth, in all its particulars, freedom to imagine new structures.
Andrea Dworkin
#86. Biological Superiority: The World's Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea.
Andrea Dworkin
#87. One can know everything and still be unable to accept the fact that sex and murder are fused in the male consciousness, so that the one without the imminent possibly of the other is unthinkable and impossible.
Andrea Dworkin
#88. Men on "Women"
For men, their right to control and abuse the bodies of women is the one comforting constant in a world rigged to blow up but they do not know when."
"Coitus as punishment for the happiness of being together" which is profound and moving.
Andrea Dworkin
#89. What is shocking and wrong is not [Lord Devlin's] idea that the community's morality counts, but his idea of what counts as the community's morality.
Ronald Dworkin
#90. By the time we are women, fear is as familiar to us as air; it is our element. We live in it, we inhale it, we exhale it, and most of the time we do not even notice it.
Andrea Dworkin
#91. Death has dominion because it is not only the start of nothing but the end of everything, and how we think and talk about dying - the emphasis we put on dying with 'dignity' - shows how important it is that life ends appropriately, that death keeps faith with the way we have lived it.
Ronald Dworkin
#92. Being stigmatied by sex is being marked by its meaning in a human life of loneliness and imperfection, where some pain is indelible.
Andrea Dworkin
#93. Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized.
Andrea Dworkin
#94. To permit writers to use forms which violate convention just might permit writers to develop forms which would teach people to think differently: not to think about different things, but to think in different ways.
Andrea Dworkin
#95. We have a double standard, which is to say, a man can show how much he cares by being violent-see, he's jealous, he cares-a woman shows how much she cares by how much she's willing to be hurt; by how much she will take; how much she will endure; how suicidal she's prepared to be.
Andrea Dworkin
#96. Feminism exists so that no woman ever has to face her abuser in isolation, alone.
Andrea Dworkin
#97. I have spent 20
years writing these books. Had I wanted to say men are beasts and
scream, that takes 30 seconds.
Andrea Dworkin
#98. One needs either equality or political and economic superiority.
Andrea Dworkin
#99. Balanced' is a code for 'denied': a right to free speech that must be 'balanced' against so exhaustive a list of other supposed values means a right that can be exercised only when those in power judge that the speech in question is innocuous to them.
Ronald Dworkin
#100. All personal, psychological, social, and institutionalized domination on this earth can be traced back to its source: the phallic identities of men.
Andrea Dworkin
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
