Top 120 Andrea Dworkin Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “When I say that we must establish values with originate in sisterhood, I mean to say that we must not accept, even for a moment, male notions of what non-violence is. These notions have never condemned the systematic violence against us. The men who hold these notions have never renounced the male behaviours, privileges, values and conceits which are in and of themselves acts of violence against us.”

— Andrea Dworkin

52. “Women intend to save themselves when sacrificing some women, but only the freedom of all women protects any woman.”

— Andrea Dworkin

53. “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

54. “Greatness is not synonymous with perfection or popularity. In the long-arc narratives of male genius that reach far beyond a lifetime, greatness is established despite, and in the glaring light of, great flaws. Great men are by definition to be reckoned with and honored for the dilemmas they force us to confront, while the ways to castigate a woman of brilliance and ambition are second-nature and sometimes fatal, whether she’s deemed evil or merely, as they say, problematic.”

— Andrea Dworkin

55. “Freedom is not an abstaction, nor is a little of it enough. A little more is not enough either. Having less, being less, empoverished in freedom and rights, women then invariably have less self-respect: less self-respect than any human being needs to live a brave and honest life.”

— Andrea Dworkin

56. “I have been asked, politely and not so politely, why I am myself. This is an accounting any woman will be called on to give if she asserts her will.”

— Andrea Dworkin

57. “The spread of religious fundamentalism throughout the world right now is men retrenching to undo the civil and social advances of women; to reestablish male power as a fundamental reality by reestablishing gender as an absolute. This requires rigorous tightening of restraints on male sexual behavior as well as intensifying civil and sexual controls on women.”

— Andrea Dworkin

58. “Only the toughest among women will make the necessary next moves, the revolutionary moves, and among prostituted women one finds the toughest if not always the best. If prostituted women worked together to end male supremacy, it would end. Surviving degradation is an ongoing process that gives you rights, honor and knowledge, because you earn them.”

— Andrea Dworkin

59. “The cultural institutions which embody and enforce those interlocked aberrations-for instance, law, art, religion, nation-states, the family, tribe, or commune based on father-right-these institutions are real and they must be destroyed.”

— Andrea Dworkin

60. “You damn well better believe that you’re involved in this tragedy and that it’s your tragedy too. Because you’re turned into little soldier boys from the day that you are born and everything that you learn about how to avoid the humanity of women becomes part of the militarism of the country in which you live and the world in which you live.”

— Andrea Dworkin

61. “I will say here what I have never said before: my pacifism was not challenged by the beating and torture I experienced in marriage some thirty years ago; I finally got away not because I knew that he would kill me but because I thought I would kill him.”

— Andrea Dworkin

62. “Male dominance in society always means that out of public sight, in the private, ahistorical world of men with women, men are sexually dominating women.”

— Andrea Dworkin

63. “Truth is harder to bear than ignorance, and so ignorance is valued more – also because the status quo depends on it; but love depends on self-knowledge and self-knowledge depends on being able to bear the truth.”

— Andrea Dworkin

64. “You think intercourse is a private act; it’s not, it’s a social act. Men are sexually predatory in life; and women are sexually manipulative. When two individuals come together and leave their gender outside the bedroom door, then they make love.”

— Andrea Dworkin

65. “One of the differences between marriage and prostitution is that in marriage you only have to make a deal with one man.”

— Andrea Dworkin

66. “No woman could have been Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized.”

— Andrea Dworkin

67. “Pornography incarnates male supremacy. It is the DNA of male dominance. Every rule of sexual abuse, every nuance of sexual sadism, every highway and byway of sexual exploitation, is encoded in it.”

— Andrea Dworkin

68. “Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species.”

— Andrea Dworkin

69. “The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable.”

— Andrea Dworkin

70. “The fact that we are all trained to be mothers from infancy on means that we are all trained to devote our lives to men, whether they are our sons or not; that we are all trained to force other women to exemplify the lack of qualities which characterizes the cultural construct of femininity.”

— Andrea Dworkin

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

— Andrea Dworkin

72. “Institutionalised in sports, the military, acculturated sexuality, the history and mythology of heroism, violence is taught to boys until they becomes its advocates.”

— Andrea Dworkin

73. “How can anyone love someone who is less than a full person, unless love itself is domination per se?”

— Andrea Dworkin

74. “The annihilation of a woman’s personality, individuality, will, character, is prerequisite to male sexuality.”

— Andrea Dworkin

75. “Women are objects, commodities, some deemed more expensive than others. But it is only by asserting one’s humanness every time, in all situations, that one becomes someone as opposed to something. That, after all is the core of our struggle.”

— Andrea Dworkin

76. “The traditional flowers of courtship are the traditional flowers of the grave, delivered to the victim before the kill. The cadaver is dressed up and made up and laid down and ritually violated and consecrated to an eternity of being used.”

— Andrea Dworkin

77. “The utopian male concept which is the premise of male pornography is this – since manhood is established and confirmed over and against the brutalized bodies of women, men need not aggress against each other; in other words, women absorb male aggression so that men are safe from it.”

— Andrea Dworkin

78. “No woman needs intercourse; few women escape it.”

— Andrea Dworkin

79. “The creative mind is intelligence in action in the world.”

— Andrea Dworkin

80. “The man takes a body that is not his, claims it, sows his so-called seed, reaps a harvest – he colonizes a female body, robs it of its natural resources, controls it.”

— Andrea Dworkin

81. “In my own life, I don’t have intercourse. That is my choice.”

— Andrea Dworkin

82. “I also had nightmares. Somehow all the feelings I didn’t feel when each thing had actually happened to me I did feel when I slept.”

— Andrea Dworkin

83. “I dream that love without tyranny is possible.”

— Andrea Dworkin

84. “Social outrage is power protecting itself; it is not morality.”

— Andrea Dworkin

85. “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.”

— Andrea Dworkin

86. “Men use the night to erase us.”

— Andrea Dworkin

87. “In the world men seem to exercise power, but all of that comes to nothing in the face of the lust provoked by a woman. Whatever he does to her, she is still more powerful than he is because he wants her, he needs her, he is being driven by a desire for her. In the sexual woman-superior model, power is articulated as being intrinsically female because power is redefined beyond reason, beyond coherence: as if power is in the corpse that draws the vultures.”

— Andrea Dworkin

88. “Childbearing is glorified in part because women die from it.”

— Andrea Dworkin

89. “To be rapeable, a position that is social, not biological, defines what a woman is.”

— Andrea Dworkin

90. “There is nothing as dangerous as an unembodied principle: no matter what blood flows, the principle comes first. The First Amendment absolutists operate precisely on unembodied principle...”

— Andrea Dworkin

91. “Feminism exists so that no woman ever has to face her abuser in isolation, alone.”

— Andrea Dworkin

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

— Andrea Dworkin

93. “Being a Jew, one learns to believe in the reality of cruelty and one learns to recognize indifference to human suffering as a fact.”

— Andrea Dworkin

94. “We as women know that there are no disembodied processes; that all history originates in human flesh; that all oppression is inflicted by the body of one against the body of another; that all social change is built on the bone and muscle, and out of the flesh and blood, of human creators.”

— Andrea Dworkin

95. “Men are distinguished from women by their commitment to do violence rather than to be victimized by it.”

— Andrea Dworkin

96. “Much of society is set up specifically to assist people in their process of ignoring the horrors of the world.”

— Andrea Dworkin

97. “I listened; I wrote; I learned. I do not know why so many women trusted me enough to speak to me, but underneath anything I write one can hear the percussive sound of their heartbeats. If one has to pick one kind of pedagogy over all others, I pick listening. It breaks down prejudices and stereotypes; it widens self-imposed limits; it takes one into another’s life, her hard times and, if there is any, her joy too.”

— Andrea Dworkin

98. “The Right in the United States today is a social and political movement controlled almost totally by men but built largely on the fear and ignorance of women.”

— Andrea Dworkin

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

— Andrea Dworkin

100. “It’s not as if there’s an empty patch that one can see and so one can say, ‘There’s my ignorance; it’s about ten by ten and a dozen feet high and someday someone will fill in the empty patch.”

— Andrea Dworkin