Top 70 Kate Millett Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The complete destruction of traditional marriage and the nuclear family is the ‘revolutionary or utopian’ goal of feminism.”

— Kate Millett

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

— Kate Millett

3. “The lesbian is the archtypical feminist, because she’s not into men – she’s the independent woman par excellence.”

— Kate Millett

4. “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?”

— Kate Millett

5. “Psychiatry causes so much death.”

— Kate Millett

6. “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...”

— Kate Millett

7. “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.”

— Kate Millett

8. “Life is a publicity stunt. A shill. You’ve been had.”

— Kate Millett

9. “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.”

— Kate Millett

10. “Monogamy and prostitution go together.”

— Kate Millett

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

— Kate Millett

12. “I don’t believe in monogamy, possessing people, the rightness or inevitability of jealousy.”

— Kate Millett

13. “Whatever the “real” differences between the sexes may be, we are not likely to know them until the sexes are treated differently, that is alike.”

— Kate Millett

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

— Kate Millett

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

— Kate Millett

16. “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.”

— Kate Millett

17. “Isn’t privacy about keeping taboos in their place.”

— Kate Millett

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

— Kate Millett

19. “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.”

— Kate Millett

20. “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.”

— Kate Millett

21. “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.”

— Kate Millett

22. “Sexual politics obtains consent through the “socialization” of both sexes to basic patriarchal polities with regard to temperament, role, and status. As.”

— Kate Millett

23. “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.”

— Kate Millett

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

— Kate Millett

25. “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.”

— Kate Millett

26. “If knowledge is power, power is also knowledge, and a large factor in their subordinate position is the fairly systematic ignorance patriarchy imposes upon women.”

— Kate Millett

27. “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.”

— Kate Millett

28. “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.”

— Kate Millett

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

— Kate Millett

30. “The term “politics” shall refer to power-structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another. By.”

— Kate Millett

31. “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.”

— Kate Millett

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

— Kate Millett

33. “Under patriarchy the female did not herself develop the symbols by which she is described. As.”

— Kate Millett

34. “Hell, I don’t want to grow old at all. I never want to die.”

— Kate Millett

35. “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.”

— Kate Millett

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

— Kate Millett

37. “Let’s always be having an affair. Wherever we meet, however many times a year – let it always be an affair.”

— Kate Millett

38. “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.”

— Kate Millett

39. “My sister said, You’re making it hard for all us housewives in Nebraska.”

— Kate Millett

40. “Aren’t women prudes if they don’t and prostitutes if they do?”

— Kate Millett

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

— Kate Millett

42. “As women, we’re probably more protective of children. Also, we’ve been minors all of our history.”

— Kate Millett

43. “What I want is outrageous: all the possible pleasures of freedom. I want to go beyond the old system of possession, the notion of person as a thing owned. Like so many of us now, I’m experimenting with life, trying to get it right, to do it better, aware how often we’re merely rationalizing – but still trying to create a new kind of social existence.”

— Kate Millett

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

— Kate Millett

45. “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.”

— Kate Millett

46. “Governments who manipulate population growth have two choices: making maternity pleasant, or making it inescapable.”

— Kate Millett

47. “Perhaps patriarchy’s greatest psychological weapon is simply its universality and longevity. A.”

— Kate Millett

48. “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.”

— Kate Millett

49. “The subordinated group has inadequate redress through existing political institutions, and is deterred thereby from organizing into conventional political struggle and opposition.”

— Kate Millett

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

— Kate Millett