Top 77 Kate Millett Quotes
#1. I don't believe in monogamy, possessing people, the rightness or inevitability of jealousy.
Kate Millett
#2. The great mass of women throughout history have been confined to the cultural level of animal life in providing the male with sexual outlet and exercising the animal functions of reproduction and care of the young.
Kate Millett
#3. As women, we're probably more protective of children. Also, we've been minors all of our history.
Kate Millett
#4. The concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit, since love is the only circumstance in which the female is (ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity.
Kate Millett
#5. No one should be adored, it's fundamentally immoral.
Kate Millett
#6. A sexual revolution begins with the emancipation of women, who are the chief victims of patriarchy, and also with the ending of homosexual oppression.
Kate Millett
#7. To be a rebel is not to be a revolutionary. It is more often by a way of spinning one's wheels deeper in sand.
Kate Millett
#8. We are naive and moralistic women. We are human beings who find politics a blight upon the human condition. And do not know how one copes with it except through politics.
Kate Millett
#9. Everybody believes in psychiatry; it's supposed to be for our own good. Let psychiatry prove that anybody has an illness, and I'd concede, but there is no physical proof.
Kate Millett
#10. Whatever the "real" differences between the sexes may be, we are not likely to know them until the sexes are treated differently, that is alike.
Kate Millett
#11. In those days, when you got boxed, that was it. A lot of old people were there because somebody wanted the farm. It was about property. People are treated like property.
Kate Millett
#12. One of the blessings of adulthood is that one is no longer addressed as a thing.
Kate Millett
#13. Perhaps nothing is so depressing an index of the inhumanity of the male-supremacist mentality as the fact that the more genial human traits are assigned to the underclass: affection, response to sympathy, kindness, cheerfulness.
Kate Millett
#14. How crazy craziness makes everyone, how irrationally afraid. The madness hidden in each of us, called to, identified, aroused like a lust. And against that the jaw sets. The more I fear my own insanity the more I must punish yours ...
Kate Millett
#15. Probably one should never feel such gaiety or such despair. Better to operate on an even keep like Friedan and Gloria and the others.
Kate Millett
#16. Homosexuality was invented by a straight world dealing with its own bisexuality.
Kate Millett
#17. Prostitution is really the only crime in the penal law where two people are doing a thing mutually agreed upon and yet only one, the female partner, is subject to arrest.
Kate Millett
#18. You have to be a little patient if you're an artist. People don't always get you the first time.
Kate Millett
#19. The involuntary character of psychiatric treatment is at odds with the spirit and ethics of medicine itself.
Kate Millett
#20. Patriarchy, reformed or unreformed, is patriarchy still: its worst abuses purged or foresworn, it might actually be more stable and secure than before.
Kate Millett
#21. Mystical state, madness, how it frightens people. How utterly crazy they become, remote, rude, peculiar, cruel, taunting, farouche as wild beasts who have smelled danger, the unthinkable.
Kate Millett
#22. Given the conditions under which you're a young person in this society, many things would be at least as important to you as your sexuality.
Kate Millett
#24. What is the future of the woman's movement? How in the hell do I know? I don't run it.
Kate Millett
#25. Hell, I don't want to grow old at all. I never want to die.
Kate Millett
#26. I saw hell. The hospital had divided and conquered pretty successfully.
Kate Millett
#27. A revolution is not the overturning of a cart, a reshuffling in the cards of state. It is a process, a swelling, a new growth in the race. If it is real, not simply a trauma, it is another ring in the tree of history, layer upon layer of invisible tissue composing the evidence of a circle.
Kate Millett
#28. The lesbian is the archtypical feminist, because she's not into men - she's the independent woman par excellence.
Kate Millett
#29. I believe there's a killer in all of us. I know there's one inside me. When you know the killer in you and you know also that you do not want to kill, you have to set yourself upon a course of learning. Not to kill that killer then, but to control it.
Kate Millett
#30. They are more beautiful than anything in the world, kinetic sculptures, perfect form in motion.
Kate Millett
#31. You may well ask how I expect to assert my privacy by resorting to the outrageous publicity of being one's actual self on paper. There's a possibility of it working if one chooses the terms, to wit: outshouting image-gimmick America through a quietly desperate search for self.
Kate Millett
#32. Mother had committed me for life. This is where I felt betrayed the most.
Kate Millett
#33. The image of the woman as we know it is an image created by men and fashioned to suit their needs.
Kate Millett
#34. Perhaps patriarchy's greatest psychological weapon is simply its universality and longevity ... Patriarchy has a still more tenacious or powerful hold through its successful habit of passing itself off as nature.
Kate Millett
#35. Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different.
Kate Millett
#36. It was horrifying. You wouldn't believe how people are treated there. You could see that these people had withdrawn so far that they just lived in their own minds. They did terrible things to themselves.
Kate Millett
#37. This is how psychiatry has functioned-as a kind of property arm of the government, who can put you away if your husband doesn't like you.
Kate Millett
#38. To love is simply to allow another to be, live, grow, expand, become. An appreciation that demands and expects nothing in return.
Kate Millett
#39. The subordinated group has inadequate redress through existing political institutions, and is deterred thereby from organizing into conventional political struggle and opposition.
Kate Millett
#40. Isn't privacy about keeping taboos in their place?
Kate Millett
#41. What is the natural reaction when told you have a hopeless mental illness? That diagnosis does you in; that, and the humiliation of being there. I mean, the indignity you're subjected to. My God.
Kate Millett
#42. This country is becoming increasingly authoritarian. It's based on capital punishment.
Kate Millett
#43. We're more sexually repressed than men, having been given a much more strict puritanical code of behavior than men ever have.
Kate Millett
#44. What is our freedom fight about? Is it about the liberation of children or just having sex with them?
Kate Millett
#45. However muted its present appearance may be, sexual dominion obtains nevertheless as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power.
Kate Millett
#46. Many women do not recognize themselves as discriminated against; no better proof could be found of the totality of their conditioning.
Kate Millett
#47. During depression the world disappears. Language itself. One has nothing to say. Nothing. No small talk, no anecdotes. Nothing can be risked on the board of talk. Because the inner voice is so urgent in its own discourse: How shall I live? How shall I manage the future? Why should I go on?
Kate Millett
#48. People have a right to their own lives, and if you can't help somebody, you ought to get out of their way.
Kate Millett
#49. My sister said, You're making it hard for all us housewives in Nebraska.
Kate Millett
#51. Listening to the sound of the water, her sound, her lovely body glistening through the room a moment from now. There are only moments. Live in this one. The happiness of these days.
Kate Millett
#52. Men and women were declared equal one morning and everybody could divorce each other by postcard.
Kate Millett
#53. Under patriarchy the female did not herself develop the symbols by which she is described. As
Kate Millett
#54. We are women. We are a subject people who have inherited an alien culture.
Kate Millett
#55. I'm slammed with an identity that can no longer say a word; mute with responsibility.
Kate Millett
#56. It would appear that love is dead. Or very likely in a bad way.
Kate Millett
#57. Hostility is expressed in a number of ways. One is laughter.
Kate Millett
#58. In sex one wants or does not want. And the grief, the sorrow of life is that one cannot make or coerce or persuade the wanting, cannot command it, cannot request it by mail order or finagle it through bureaucratic channels.
Kate Millett
#59. Girl next to me at the baggage counter said she wrote her way to liberation. How did you handle first person narrative, I asked her. And said she knew the hole of depression, had been there. But I am out now, I escaped, I told her. 'You will fall into it again,' she said. Already I was sliding.
Kate Millett
#60. You won't do any more housework? Then you go to the bin.
Kate Millett
#61. The derogation of feminine status in lesser males is a consistent patriarchal trait. Like
Kate Millett
#62. The complete destruction of traditional marriage and the nuclear family is the 'revolutionary or utopian' goal of feminism.
Kate Millett
#63. The whole bloody system is sick: the very notion of leadership, a balloon with a face painted upon it, elected and inflated by media's diabolic need to reduce ideas to personalities.
Kate Millett
#64. When one group rules another, the relationship between the two is political. When such an arrangement is carried out over a long period of time it develops an ideology (feudalism, racism, etc.). All historical civilizations are patriarchies: their ideology is male supremacy.
Kate Millett
#65. Intercourse is an assertion of mastery, one that announces his own higher caste and proves it upon a victim who is expected to surrender, serve, and be satisfied.
Kate Millett
#66. Let's always be having an affair. Wherever we meet, however many times a year - let it always be an affair.
Kate Millett
#67. The worst part about prostitution is that you're obliged not to sell sex only, but your humanity. That's the worst part of it: that what you're selling is your human dignity. Not really so much in bed, but in accepting the agreement - in becoming a bought person.
Kate Millett
#68. For it is precisely because certain groups have no representation in a number of recognized political structures that their position tends to be so stable, their oppression so continuous.
Kate Millett
#69. With the first act of cruelty committed in the name of revolution, with the first murder, with the first purge and execution, we have lost the revolution.
Kate Millett
#70. They weren't crazy. They were tired of being locked up. Even I could see that.
Kate Millett
#71. Ah, but depression - that is what we all hate. We the afflicted. Whereas the relatives and shrinks, the tribal ring, they rather welcome it: you are quiet and you suffer.
Kate Millett
#72. The care of children ..is infinitely better left to the best trained practitioners of both sexes who have chosen it as a vocation ... [This] would further undermine family structure while contributing to the freedom of women.
Kate Millett
#73. Life is a publicity stunt. A shill. You've been had.
Kate Millett
#74. Aren't women prudes if they don't and prostitutes if they do?
Kate Millett
#75. Their chattel status continues in their loss of name, their obligation to adopt the husband's domicile, and the general legal assumption that marriage involves an exchange of the female's domestic service and (sexual) consortium in return for financial support.31
Kate Millett
#76. I was supposed to be women's lib, and now I'd exceeded it and gone over into international politics.
Kate Millett
#77. Politics is repetition. It is not change. Change is something beyond what we call politics. Change is the essence politics is supposed to be the means to bring into being.
Kate Millett
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