I think that The Second Sex will seem an old, dated book, after a while. But nonetheless, a book which will have made its contribution. At least, I hope so.

That's what I consider true generosity. You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.

Let women be provided with living strength of their own. Let them have the means to attack the world and wrest from it their own subsistence, and their dependence will be abolished -- that of man also.

Many things would be changed for Americans if they would only admit that there is ill-luck in this world and that misfortune is not a priori a crime.

The 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.

As long as the family and the myth of the family ... have not been destroyed, women will still be oppressed.

Picasso never thought of himself as avant-garde. I just find it a bad way to think of yourself.