Men create their own gods and thus have some slight understanding that they are self-fabricated. Women are much more susceptible, because they are completely oppressed by men; they take men at their word and believe in the gods that men have made up. The situation of women, their culture, makes them kneel more often before the gods that have been created by men than men themselves do, who know what they've done. To this extent, women will be more fanatical, whether it is for fascism or for totalitarianism.
Simone de BeauvoirAs soon as a woman re- fuses to be perfectly happy doing housework eight hours a day, society has a tendency to want to do a lobotomy on her.
Simone de BeauvoirThere is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning.
Simone de BeauvoirThe innumerable conflicts that set men and women against one another come from the fact that neither is prepared to assume all the consequences of this situation which the one has offered and the other accepted.
Simone de BeauvoirIf the writer is a woman, feminist or not, it will give the language something that it would not have if it had been used by a man.
Simone de Beauvoirit is only on posters and in advertisement pages that Americans have those chubby cheeks, expanding smiles, smooth looks, and faces flushed with well-being. In fact, almost all are at odds with themselves; drink offers a remedy for this inner malady of which boredom is the most usual sign: as drinking is accepted by society, it does not appear as a sign of their [Americans'] inability to adapt themselves; it is rather the adapted form of inadaptability.
Simone de Beauvoir