Top 120 Andrea Dworkin Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Remember: Resist do not comply.”

— Andrea Dworkin

2. “I’m a radical feminist, not the fun kind.”

— Andrea Dworkin

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3. “Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of women hating.”

— Andrea Dworkin

4. “Sexism is the foundation on which all tyranny is built. Every social form of hierarchy and abuse is modeled on male-over-female domination.”

— Andrea Dworkin

5. “I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig.”

— Andrea Dworkin

6. “Under patriarchy, every woman’s son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.”

— Andrea Dworkin

7. “Feminism requires precisely what patriarchy destroys in women: unimpeachable bravery in confronting male power.”

— Andrea Dworkin

8. “I have to ask you to resist, not comply, to destroy the power men have over women, to refuse to accept it, to abhor it, and to do whatever is necessary despite its cost to you to change it.”

— Andrea Dworkin

9. “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.”

— Andrea Dworkin

10. “Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.”

— Andrea Dworkin

11. “Touch is the meaning of being human.”

— Andrea Dworkin

12. “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.”

— Andrea Dworkin

13. “We must refuse to submit to those institutions which are by definition sexist – marriage, the nuclear family, religions built on the myth of feminine evil.”

— Andrea Dworkin

14. “While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact.”

— Andrea Dworkin

15. “The universal religion – contempt for women.”

— Andrea Dworkin

16. “No phallic hero, no matter what he does to himself or to another to prove his courage, ever matches the solitary, existential courage of the woman who gives birth.”

— Andrea Dworkin

17. “I never met a man who wasn’t stupider than me.”

— Andrea Dworkin

18. “Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized.”

— Andrea Dworkin

19. “Men know everything – all of them – all the time – no matter how stupid or inexperienced or arrogant or ignorant they are.”

— Andrea Dworkin

20. “Men often react to women’s words – speaking and writing – as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women’s words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper. Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back. Most women have experienced enough dominance from men – control, violence, insult, contempt – that no threat seems empty.”

— Andrea Dworkin

21. “Money speaks, but it speaks with a male voice.”

— Andrea Dworkin

22. “The tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognize that they are committing suicide.”

— Andrea Dworkin

23. “Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically important to us that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence against us.”

— Andrea Dworkin

24. “Surely the freedom of women must mean more to us than the freedom of pimps.”

— Andrea Dworkin

25. “Could women’s liberation ever be a revolutionary movement, not rhetorically but on the ground?”

— Andrea Dworkin

26. “There is no place on earth, no day or night, no hour or minute, when one is not a Jew or a woman.”

— Andrea Dworkin

27. “On the Left, on the Right, in the Middle; Authors, statesmen, thieves; so-called humanists and self-declared fascists; the adventurous and the contemplative, in every realm of male expression and action, violence is experienced and articulated as love and freedom.”

— Andrea Dworkin

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

— Andrea Dworkin

29. “The object, the woman, goes out into the world formed as men have formed her to be used as men wish to use her. She is then a provocation. The object provokes its use. It provokes its use because of its form, determined by the one who is provoked. The carpenter makes a chair, sits on it, then blames the chair because he is not standing. When the object complains about the use to which she is put, she is told, simply and firmly, not to provoke.”

— Andrea Dworkin

30. “Pornography is the essential sexuality of male power: of hate, of ownership, of hierarchy; of sadism, of dominance.”

— Andrea Dworkin

31. “We have a double standard, which is to say, a man can show how much he cares by being violent-see, he’s jealous, he cares-a woman shows how much she cares by how much she’s willing to be hurt; by how much she will take; how much she will endure; how suicidal she’s prepared to be.”

— Andrea Dworkin

32. “Erotica is simply high-class pornography; better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer.”

— Andrea Dworkin

33. “Biological Superiority: The World’s Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea.”

— Andrea Dworkin

34. “Women’s fashion is a euphemism for fashion created by men for women.”

— Andrea Dworkin

35. “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.”

— Andrea Dworkin

36. “Families make possible the super-exploitation of women by training them to look upon their work outside the home as peripheral to their ‘true’ role.”

— Andrea Dworkin

37. “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.”

— Andrea Dworkin

38. “The common erotic project of destroying women makes it possible for men to unite into a brotherhood; this project is the only firm and trustworthy groundwork for cooperation among males and all male bonding is based on it.”

— Andrea Dworkin

39. “Violation is a synonym for intercourse.”

— Andrea Dworkin

40. “Women, for centuries not having access to pornography and now unable to bear looking at the muck on the supermarket shelves, are astonished. Women do not believe that men believe what pornography says about women. But they do. From the worst to the best of them, they do.”

— Andrea Dworkin

41. “If pornography releases sexual tension, why don’t we send recipe books to the starving?”

— Andrea Dworkin

42. “The essence of oppression is that one is defined from the outside by those who define themselves as superior by criteria of their own choice.”

— Andrea Dworkin

43. “Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name.”

— Andrea Dworkin

44. “Because feminism is a movement for liberation of the powerless by the powerless in a closed system based on their powerlessness, right-wing women judge it a futile movement. Frequently they also judge it a malicious movement in that it jeopardizes the bargains with power that they can make; feminism calls into question for the men confronted by it the sincerity of women who conform without political resistance.”

— Andrea Dworkin

45. “Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women’s bodies.”

— Andrea Dworkin

46. “Men characterize pornography as something mental because their minds, their thoughts, their dreams, their fantasies, are more real to them than women’s bodies or lives; in fact, men have used their social power to characterize a $10-billion-a-year trade in women as fantasy.”

— Andrea Dworkin

47. “Men have constructed female sexuality and in so doing have annihilated the chance for sexual intelligence in women. Sexual intelligence cannot live in the shallow, predestined sexuality men have counterfeiteed for women.”

— Andrea Dworkin

48. “Can women make use of men’s vulnerability not to marry but instead to destroy male power?”

— Andrea Dworkin

49. “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.”

— Andrea Dworkin

50. “Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.”

— Andrea Dworkin