Patriarchy Quotes

Well, the tyranny of masculinity and the tyranny of patriarchy I think has been much more deadly to men than it has to women. It hasn't killed our hearts. It's killed men's hearts. It's silenced them, it's cut them off. (Eve Ensler)
Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman. View quote
Andrea Dworkin
Patriarchy, routinely blamed for everything, produced the birth control pill, which did more to free contemporary women than feminism itself. View quote
Camille Paglia
What feminism calls patriarchy is simply civilization, an abstract system designed by men but augmented and now co-owned by women. View quote
Camille Paglia
The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem. View quote
Bell hooks
The crisis facing men is not the crisis of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity. Until we make this distinction clear, men will continue to fear that any critique of patriarchy represents a threat. View quote
Bell hooks
A sexual revolution begins with the emancipation of women, who are the chief victims of patriarchy, and also with the ending of homosexual oppression. View quote
Kate Millett
Patriarchy is a bully notion, which if you will notice never attacks a nation that can defend itself. Zionism is patriarchal and sets Judaism on its head. View quote
Roseanne Barr
After much diligent research, aided by other women, I gradually came to understand that beneath the familiar Goddesses of the patriarchy, there is a much more ancient Goddess. View quote
Carol P. Christ
Present-day students are often puzzled at the apparent contradictions of Southern slavery. One hears, on the one hand, of the staid and gentle patriarchy, the wide and sleepy plantations with lord and retainers, ease and happiness; on the other hand one hears of barbarous cruelty and unbridled power and wide oppression of men. Which is the true picture? The answer is simple: both are true. They are not opposite sides of the same shield; they are different shields. View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
Even nowadays an archaic sense of love-innocence recurs, however briefly, among most young men and women. Some few of these, who become poets, remain in love for the rest of their lives, watching the world with a detachment unknown to lawyers, politicians, financiers, and all other ministers of that blind and irresponsible successor to matriarchy and patriarchy - the mechanarchy. (Robert Graves)
Patriarchy is like the elephant in the room that we don't talk about, but how could it not affect the planet radically when it's the superstructure of human society? View quote
Ani DiFranco
Patriarchy is a fundamental imbalance underlying society And it's one we rarely address because it's so universal. But as I get older, I see that peace is a product of balance. View quote
Ani DiFranco
The feminists who are aware of the effects of patriarchy realize that we are all in the same boat from the dangers of patriarchy, and that the oppression of women is universal. View quote
Nawal El Saadawi
His heart was in the right place. He wanted a religion that could plausibly comfort widows and orphans without committing them to patriarchy, intolerance, fundamentalism, or weird dietary laws. He wanted a religion that wasn't in a perpetual fistfight with modern cosmology. View quote
Robert Charles Wilson
The Orestia shows that society is a defense against nature. Everything intelligible -- institutions, objects, persons, ideas -- is the result of Apollonian clarification, adjudication, and action. Western politics, science, psychology and art are creations of arrogant Apollo. Through every century, winning or losing, western mind has struggled to keep nature at bay. The Orestia's sexist transition from matriarchy to patriarchy records the rebellion every imagination must make against nature. Without that rebellion, we as a species are condemned to regression or stasis. Even rebelling, we cannot get far. But vying with fate is godlike. View quote
Camille Paglia
Even the most morbid of the rape ranters have a childlike faith in the perfectibility of the universe, which they see as blighted solely by nasty men. They simplistically project outward onto a mythical "patriarchy" their own inner conflicts and moral ambiguities. View quote
Camille Paglia
The power of patriarchy has been to make maleness feared and to make men feel that it is better to be feared that to be loved. Whether they can confess this or not, men know that just is not true. View quote
Bell hooks
Patriarchy has no gender. View quote
Bell hooks
What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy. View quote
Bell hooks
Why is it that many contemporary male thinkers, especially men of color, repudiate the imperialist legacy of Columbus but affirm dimensions of that legacy by their refusal to repudiate patriarchy? (Bell hooks)
Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, Amiri Baraka and other black male leaders have righteously supported patriarchy. They have all argued that it is absolutely necessary for black men to relegate black women to a subordinate position both in the political sphere and in home life. View quote
Bell hooks
There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected. View quote
Adrienne Rich
I wanted to make it clear that the show's about a matriarchy. I wanted it to be clear that power can be ugly, and a matriarchy is just as ugly as a patriarchy. It may look a little different, but power is bloody. View quote
Gillian Schieber Flynn
There is a war on men, and [feminists] are very open about it. They don't conceal it; they brag about it. You read all of their material – they're always saying they want to abolish the patriarchy. They said that husbands are not necessary in a marriage, they're not necessary in raising children. View quote
Phyllis Schlafly