Kate Millett Quotations

This country is becoming increasingly authoritarian. It's based on capital punishment.

What is the natural reaction when told you have a hopeless mental illness? That diagnosis does you in; that, and the humiliation of being there. I mean, the indignity you're subjected to. My God.

I'm slammed with an identity that can no longer say a word; mute with responsibility,

A sexual revolution begins with the emancipation of women, who are the chief victims of patriarchy, and also with the ending of homosexual oppression.

My sister said, You're making it hard for all us housewives in Nebraska.

The involuntary character of psychiatric treatment is at odds with the spirit and ethics of medicine itself.

It was horrifying. You wouldn't believe how people are treated there. You could see that these people had withdrawn so far that they just lived in their own minds. They did terrible things to themselves.

The concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit, since love is the only circumstance in which the female is (ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity.

Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different.

We are women. We are a subject people who have inherited an alien culture.

Politics is repetition. It is not change. Change is something beyond what we call politics. Change is the essence politics is supposed to be the means to bring into being.

Everybody believes in psychiatry; it's supposed to be for our own good. Let psychiatry prove that anybody has an illness, and I'd concede, but there is no physical proof.

Isn't privacy about keeping taboos in their place

Many women do not recognize themselves as discriminated against; no better proof could be found of the totality of their conditioning.

The great mass of women throughout history have been confined to the cultural level of animal life in providing the male with sexual outlet and exercising the animal functions of reproduction and care of the young.

We're more sexually repressed than men, having been given a much more strict puritanical code of behavior than men ever have.

However muted its present appearance may be, sexual dominion obtains nevertheless as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power

It would appear that love is dead. Or very likely in a bad way.

This is how psychiatry has functioned-as a kind of property arm of the government, who can put you away if your husband doesn't like you.

I saw hell. The hospital had divided and conquered pretty successfully.

You won't do any more housework Then you go to the bin.

With the first act of cruelty committed in the name of revolution, with the first murder, with the first purge and execution, we have lost the revolution.

Aren't women prudes if they don't and prostitutes if they do?

We are naive and moralistic women. We are human beings who find politics a blight upon the human condition. And do not know how one copes with it except through politics.

They weren't crazy. They were tired of being locked up. Even I could see that.

Men and women were declared equal one morning and everybody could divorce each other by postcard

In those days, when you got boxed, that was it. A lot of old people were there because somebody wanted the farm. It was about property. People are treated like property.

Mother had committed me for life. This is where I felt betrayed the most.

As women, we're probably more protective of children. Also, we've been minors all of our history

I was supposed to be women's lib, and now I'd exceeded it and gone over into international politics.

They are more beautiful than anything in the world, kinetic sculptures, perfect form in motion.

What is our freedom fight about? Is it about the liberation of children or just having sex with them?

What is the future of the woman's movement? How in the hell do I know? I don't run it.

We have to have an emancipation proclamation for children. What is at issue is children's rights; not the right of sexual access to children.

However muted its present appearance may be, sexual domination obtains nevertheless as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power

The care of children. . . is infinitely better left to the best-trained practitioners of both sexes who have chosen it as a vocation, rather than to harried and all too frequently unhappy persons with little time or taste for the work of educating minds.

Monogamy and prostitution go together.

Mystical state, madness, how it frightens people. How utterly crazy they become, remote, rude, peculiar, cruel, taunting, farouche as wild beasts who have smelled danger, the unthinkable.

How crazy craziness makes everyone, how irrationally afraid. The madness hidden in each of us, called to, identified, aroused like a lust. And against that the jaw sets. The more I fear my own insanity the more I must punish yours ...

Life is a publicity stunt. A shill. You've been had.

What is the future of the woman's movement How in the hell do I know I don't run it.

Ah, but depression - that is what we all hate. We the afflicted. Whereas the relatives and shrinks, the tribal ring, they rather welcome it: you are quiet and you suffer.

Hostility is expressed in a number of ways. One is laughter.

one of the blessings of adulthood is that one is no longer addressed as a thing.

Perhaps nothing is so depressing an index of the inhumanity of the male-supremacist mentality as the fact that the more genial human traits are assigned to the underclass: affection, response to sympathy, kindness, cheerfulness.

Prostitution is really the only crime in the penal law where two people are doing a thing mutually agreed upon and yet only one, the female partner, is subject to arrest.

I believe there's a killer in all of us. I know there's one inside me. When you know the killer in you and you know also that you do not want to kill, you have to set yourself upon a course of learning. Not to kill that killer then, but to control it.

We are naïve and moralistic women. We are human beings. Who find politics a blight upon the human condition. And do not know how one copes with it except through politics.

The whole bloody system is sick: the very notion of leadership, a balloon with a face painted upon it, elected and inflated by media's diabolic need to reduce ideas to personalities.

You may well ask how I expect to assert my privacy by resorting to the outrageous publicity of being one's actual self on paper. There's a possibility of it working if one chooses the terms, to wit: outshouting image-gimmick America through a quietly desperate search for self.

The care of children ..is infinitely better left to the best trained practitioners of both sexes who have chosen it as a vocation...[This] would further undermine family structure while contributing to the freedom of women.

It may be that a second wave of the sexual revolution might at last accomplish its aim of freeing half the race from its immemorial subordination--and in the process bring us all a great deal closer to humanity. It may be that we shall even be able to retire sex from the harsh realities of politics, but not until we have created a world we can bear out of the desert we inhabit.

Hell, I don't want to grow old at all. I never want to die.

A revolution is not the overturning of a cart, a reshuffling in the cards of state. It is a process, a swelling, a new growth in the race. If it is real, not simply a trauma, it is another ring in the tree of history, layer upon layer of invisible tissue composing the evidence of a circle.

I don't believe in monogamy, possessing people, the rightness or inevitability of jealousy.

No one should be adored, it's fundamentally immoral.

Coitus can scarcely be said to take place in a vacuum; although of itself it appears a biological and physical activity, it is set so deeply within the larger context of human affairs that it serves as a charged microcosm of the variety of attitudes and values to which culture subscribes. Among other things, it may serve as a model of sexual politics on an individual or personal plane.

In many patriarchies, language, as well as cultural tradition, reserve the human condition for the male. With the Indo-European languages this is a nearly inescapable habit of mind, for despite all the customary pretense that 'man' and 'humanity' are terms which apply equally to both sexes, the fact is hardly obscured that in practice, general application favors the male far more often than the female as referent, or even sole referent, for such designations.

The worst part about prostitution is that you're obliged not to sell sex only, but your humanity. That's the worst part of it: that what you're selling is your human dignity. Not really so much in bed, but in accepting the agreement - in becoming a bought person.

Everybody believes in psychiatry it's supposed to be for our own good. Let psychiatry prove that anybody has an illness, and I'd concede, but there is no physical proof.

Given the conditions under which you're a young person in this society, many things would be at least as important to you as your sexuality.

Psychiatry causes so much death

The lesbian is the archtypical feminist, because she's not into men - she's the independent woman par excellence.

The rationale which accompanies that imposition of male authority euphemistically referred to as 'the battle of the sexes' bears a certain resemblance to the formulas of nations at war, where any heinousness is justified on the grounds that the enemy is either an inferior [part of the] species or really not human at all.

Intercourse is an assertion of mastery, one that announces his own higher caste and proves it upon a victim who is expected to surrender, serve, and be satisfied.

People have a right to their own lives, and if you can't help somebody, you ought to get out of their way.

For it is precisely because certain groups have no representation in a number of recognized political structures that their position tends to be so stable, their oppression so continuous.

To be a rebel is not to be a revolutionary. It is more often by a way of spinning one's wheels deeper in sand.

[Madness] is the jail we could all end up in. And we know it. And watch our step. For a lifetime. We behave. A fantastic and entire system of social control, by the threat of example as effective over the general population as detention centers in dictatorships, the image of the madhouse floats through every mind for the course of its lifetime.

There are only moments. Live in this one. The happiness of these days.

The complete destruction of traditional marriage and the nuclear family is the 'revolutionary or utopian' goal of feminism.

The image of the woman as we know it is an image created by men and fashioned to suit their needs.

To love is simply to allow another to be, live, grow, expand, become. An appreciation that demands and expects nothing in return.

You have to be a little patient if you're an artist. People don't always get you the first time.

Perhaps patriarchy's greatest psychological weapon is simply its universality and longevity. ... Patriarchy has a still more tenacious or powerful hold through its successful habit of passing itself off as nature.

When one group rules another, the relationship between the two is political. When such an arrangement is carried out over a long period of time it develops an ideology (feudalism, racism, etc.). All historical civilizations are patriarchies: their ideology is male supremacy.

The enormous social change involved in a sexual revolution is basically a matter of altered consciousness, the exposure and elimination of social and psychological realities underlying political and cultural structures. We are speaking, then, of a cultural revolution, which, while it must necessarily involve the political and economic reorganization traditionally implied by the term revolution, must go far beyond this as well.

Let us stop being afraid. Of our own thoughts, our own minds. Of madness, our own or others'. Stop being afraid of the mind itself, its astonishing functions and fandangos, its complications and simplifications, the wonderful operation of its machinery--more wonderful because it is not machinery at all or predictable.

In sex one wants or does not want. And the grief, the sorrow of life is that one cannot make or coerce or persuade the wanting, cannot command it, cannot request it by mail order or finagle it through bureaucratic channels.

Homosexuality was invented by a straight world dealing with its own bisexuality.

During depression the world disappears. Language itself. One has nothing to say. Nothing. No small talk, no anecdotes. Nothing can be risked on the board of talk. Because the inner voice is so urgent in its own discourse: How shall I live? How shall I manage the future? Why should I go on?