Andrea Dworkin Quotes

Women's fashion is a euphemism for fashion created by men for women.

All personal, psychological, social, and institutionalized domination on this earth can be traced back to its source: the phallic identities of men.

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.

Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies.

Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge. Some of us have ventured out nevertheless, and so far we have not fallen off. It is my faith, my feminist faith, that we will not.

It is a tragedy beyond the power of language to convey when what has been imposed on women by force becomes a standard of freedom for women: and all the women say it is so.

Remember: Resist do not comply.

Writing is alchemy. Dross becomes gold. Experience is transformed. Pain is changed. Suffering may become song. The ordinary or horrible is pushed by the will of the writer into grace or redemption, a prophetic wail, a screed for justice, an elegy of sadness or sorrow. ... There is always a tension between experience and the thing that finally carries it forward, bears its weight, holds it in. Without that tension, one might as well write a shopping list.

For a mother the project of raising a boy is the most fulfilling project she can hope for.

Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the body can use.

Sex as desired by the class that dominates women is held by that class to be elemental, urgent, necessary, even if or even though it appears to require the repudiation of any claim women might have to full human standing. In the subordination of women, inequality itself is sexualized, made into the experience of sexual pleasure, essential to sexual desire.

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.

I dream that love without tyranny is possible

For a mother the project of raising a boy is the most fulfilling project she can hope for. She can watch him, as a child, play the games she was not allowed to play; she can invest in him her ideas, aspirations, ambitions, and values - or whatever she has left of them; she can watch her son, who came from her flesh and whose life was sustained by her work and devotion, embody her in the world. So while the project of raising a boy is fraught with ambivalence and leads inevitably to bitterness, it is the only project that allows a woman to be - to be through her son, to live through her son.

In my own life, I don't have intercourse. That is my choice.

When two individuals come together and leave their gender outside the bedroom door, then they make love.

One of the reasons that women are kept in a state of economic degradation- because that's what it is for most women- is because that is the best way to keep women sexually available.

I love, cherish, and respect women in my mind, in my heart, and in my soul. This love of women is the soil in which my life is rooted. It is the soil of our common life together. My life grows out of this soil. In any other soil, I would die. In whatever ways I am strong, I am strong because of the power and passion of this nurturant love.

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.

Romantic love, in pornography as in life, is the mythic celebration of female negation. For a woman, love is defined as her willingness to submit to her own annihilation.... The proof of love is that she is willing to be destroyed by the one whom she loves, for his sake. For the woman, love is always self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of identity, will, and bodily integrity, in order to fulfill and redeem the masculinity of her lover.