Phyllis Chesler Quotes

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.

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

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

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

Feminism is a way of understanding reality, not just a series of things to do. Feminism challenges our predilection for one right answer, one right God, one size fits all.

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

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

Sexual pleasure is not a sin. Nor is it a sacrament. It is your right as a human being to exercise as you see fit. It's amazing that I feel the need to say this, but, given our times, I do.

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

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

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.

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.

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

for every marriage that is made in Heaven, there is a marriage made in Hell.

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

Should or can there be a single standard of behavior for both sexes? Is there such a thing as a biologically rooted female culture that should remain separate from male culture, partly because it is different than or superior to male culture? 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.

children need truly evolved people - not other, larger children - as parents. Therefore, don't have a child until you've forged your own identity, can support yourself, and have already begun the work of creating or maintaining an extended family.

I am not saying that a female-dominated or Amazon society based on the oppression of men is any more "just" than is a male-dominated society based on the oppression of women. I am merely pointing out in what ways it is better for women. [¶] Perhaps someday a choice between forms of injustice will not be necessary.

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.

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

If women take their bodies seriously and ideally we should then its full expression, in terms of pleasure, maternity, and physical strength, seems to fare better when women control the means of production and reproduction. From this point of view, it is simply not in women's interest to support patriarchy or even a fabled "equality" with men. That women do so is more a sign of powerlessness than of any biologically based "superior" wisdom.

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

[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.

The West has funded the war against itself by buying Arab oil. It is as simple and as tragic as that.

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.