Simone de Beauvoir, Coco Chanel, Simone Veil… All these powerful women have left their mark on our collective memory. Today, their words still resonate and are an infinite source of inspiration. In the run-up to March 8, International Women’s Rights Day, discover some of the most inspiring feminist quotes…
The most striking feminist quotes:
1. “A free woman is exactly the opposite of a light woman” Simone de Beauvoir
2 “Feminism has never killed anyone. Machismo kills every day” Benoîte Groult
3. “No one is more arrogant towards women, more aggressive and contemptuous, than a man worried about his virility.” Simone de Beauvoir
4. “I consider myself a feminist… Isn’t that the word for someone who fights for women’s rights?” The Dalai Lama
5. “A woman who is not afraid of men scares them” Simone de Beauvoir
6. “The admission of women to perfect equality would be the surest mark of civilization, and it would double the intellectual forces of the human race.” Stendhal.
7. “Men and women should both have the right to be sensitive. Men and women should both have the right to be strong. It’s time to look at gender as a spectrum and no longer as two opposing ideals.” Emma Watson
8. “I still haven’t heard any men asking for advice on how to combine work and family life.” Gloria Steinem
9. “One is not born a woman: one becomes one.” Simone de Beauvoir
10. “What a mistake for a woman to wait for man to build the world she wants, instead of creating it herself.” Anais Nin.
11. “Calling women the weaker sex is a defamation, it’s man’s injustice to woman. If non-violence is the law of humanity, the future belongs to women.” Gandhi
12. “Don’t clear the table unless the men get up to do it too” Coco Chanel.
13. “A woman would truly be the equal of a man the day when, in an important position, an incompetent woman was appointed.” Françoise Giroud
14. “Woman is capable of all man’s exercises except peeing standing against a wall.” Colette
15. “Women, it is you who hold in your hands the salvation of the world.” Leo Tolstoy
16. “There is no limit to what we can accomplish as women.” Michelle Obama.
17. “It is through work that women have largely crossed the distance that separated them from the male; it is work alone that can guarantee them concrete freedom.” Simone de Beauvoir
18. “I’m not ashamed to dress like a woman. Because it’s no shame to be a woman.” Iggy Pop.
19. “Since a woman can be a mother, it was deduced that she should be one… And find happiness only in motherhood.” Elisabeth Badinter.
20. ” The principle of marriage is obscene because it transforms into rights and duties an exchange that should be based on a spontaneous impulse: it gives bodies, by vowing to grasp them in their generality, an instrumental and therefore degrading character.” Simone de Beauvoir
21.” My demand as a woman is that my difference be taken into account, that I not be forced to adapt to the male model.” Simone Veil.
22. “Because the ideal of the white woman, attractive but not a whore, well married but not self-effacing, hard-working but not too successful, so as not to crush her man, slim but not neurotic about food, staying indefinitely young without being disfigured by plastic surgeons, a fulfilled mother but not consumed by diapers and schoolwork, a good housewife but not a traditional bonniche, cultured but less than a man. This happy white woman we’re always being brandished in front of, the one we should make the effort to resemble, except that she seems to take a lot of trouble for very little, anyway I’ve never come across her, anywhere. I don’t think she exists.” Virginie Despentes
23. ” There is no limit to what we can accomplish as women. ” Michelle Obama
24. “Woman, wake up, the tocsin of reason is heard throughout the universe; recognize your rights.” Olympe de Gouges
25. “A man’s dislike of women is an attitude. Not liking men, in a woman, is a pathology.” Virginie Despentes.