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Top 30 Katha Pollitt Quotes (2025 Update)

Katha Pollitt Quote: “For me, to be a feminist is to answer the question ‘Are women human?’ with a yes.”

1. “For me, to be a feminist is to answer the question ‘Are women human?’ with a yes.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “Every inch of progress is won in struggle.”

2. “Every inch of progress is won in struggle.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “But “Trust Women” doesn’t mean that every woman is wise or good or has magical intuitive powers. It means that no one else can make a better decision, because no one else is living her life, and since she will have to live with that decision, not you, and not the state legislature or the Supreme Court, chances are she is doing her best in a tight spot.”

3. “But “Trust Women” doesn’t mean that every woman is wise or good or has magical intuitive powers. It means that no one else can make a better decision, because no one else is living her life, and since she will have to live with that decision, not you, and not the state legislature or the Supreme Court, chances are she is doing her best in a tight spot.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “While woman sheds the Blood of Life each moon at menstruation, man can only shed the blood of death through warfare and killing.”

4. “While woman sheds the Blood of Life each moon at menstruation, man can only shed the blood of death through warfare and killing.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war.”

5. “My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “Your DNA is not you. It is more like the basic instructions for you. DNA is to a person as a blueprint is to a house.”

6. “Your DNA is not you. It is more like the basic instructions for you. DNA is to a person as a blueprint is to a house.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “For me, religion is serious business – a farrago of authoritarian nonsense, misogyny and humble pie, the eternal enemy of human happiness and freedom.”

7. “For me, religion is serious business – a farrago of authoritarian nonsense, misogyny and humble pie, the eternal enemy of human happiness and freedom.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “Misogyny runs deeper than religion.”

8. “Misogyny runs deeper than religion.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “I’ve always believed in the Nero Wolfe theory of knowledge. You can just sit quietly in your room – according to Pascal, the activity that if practiced more assiduously would free humanity from most of its troubles, but that was before e-mail – and through sheer mental effort force the tiniest snippets of information to yield the entire story of which they are a fragment, because the whole truth is contained in every particle of it, the way every human cell contains our DNA.”

9. “I’ve always believed in the Nero Wolfe theory of knowledge. You can just sit quietly in your room – according to Pascal, the activity that if practiced more assiduously would free humanity from most of its troubles, but that was before e-mail – and through sheer mental effort force the tiniest snippets of information to yield the entire story of which they are a fragment, because the whole truth is contained in every particle of it, the way every human cell contains our DNA.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “In a better world, science teachers would teach creationism along with evolution as an exercise in critical thinking.”

10. “In a better world, science teachers would teach creationism along with evolution as an exercise in critical thinking.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “If a woman says, I am getting these breast implants to gain self confidence, then I have to ask, What kind of a society do we live in where a woman’s self-confidence depends on having a dangerous, expensive and painful operation on a perfectly healthy body?”

11. “If a woman says, I am getting these breast implants to gain self confidence, then I have to ask, What kind of a society do we live in where a woman’s self-confidence depends on having a dangerous, expensive and painful operation on a perfectly healthy body?”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “Why must the woman apologize for not having a baby just because she happened to get pregnant? It’s as if we think motherhood is the default setting for a woman’s life from first period to menopause, and she needs a note from God not to say yes to every zygote that knocks on her door.”

12. “Why must the woman apologize for not having a baby just because she happened to get pregnant? It’s as if we think motherhood is the default setting for a woman’s life from first period to menopause, and she needs a note from God not to say yes to every zygote that knocks on her door.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “Every gain women have made in the past two hundred years has been in the face of experts insisting they couldn’t do it and didn’t really want to.”

13. “Every gain women have made in the past two hundred years has been in the face of experts insisting they couldn’t do it and didn’t really want to.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “We live, I am trying to say, in an epidemic of male violence against women.”

14. “We live, I am trying to say, in an epidemic of male violence against women.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “One of the very important ideas of feminism for me has always been women helping and supporting each other.”

15. “One of the very important ideas of feminism for me has always been women helping and supporting each other.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “If you run into trouble doing what’s expected, people sympathize with you, while if you try something else and flop everyone says, You see?”

16. “If you run into trouble doing what’s expected, people sympathize with you, while if you try something else and flop everyone says, You see?”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “But now, with clinics disappearing, more and more women will have no choice but to turn to pills, as women do in Ireland and other countries where it is illegal for a woman to end a pregnancy. Some will end up in emergency rooms. Some will be injured. Some may die. This is what laws supposedly intended to protect women from “dangerous” clinics will have accomplished. This is what the so-called pro-life movement will have done for “life.”

17. “But now, with clinics disappearing, more and more women will have no choice but to turn to pills, as women do in Ireland and other countries where it is illegal for a woman to end a pregnancy. Some will end up in emergency rooms. Some will be injured. Some may die. This is what laws supposedly intended to protect women from “dangerous” clinics will have accomplished. This is what the so-called pro-life movement will have done for “life.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “What can that mean except that women’s sexuality is what really defines them, not their brains and gifts and individuality and character, and certainly not their wishes or their ambitions or their will?”

18. “What can that mean except that women’s sexuality is what really defines them, not their brains and gifts and individuality and character, and certainly not their wishes or their ambitions or their will?”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “You would almost think the people who have always opposed women’s independence and full participation in society were still at it. They can’t push women all the way back, but they can use women’s bodies to keep them under surveillance and control.”

19. “You would almost think the people who have always opposed women’s independence and full participation in society were still at it. They can’t push women all the way back, but they can use women’s bodies to keep them under surveillance and control.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “When your claim to be victims of secularism rests on Wal-Mart greeters wishing shoppers Happy Holidays, you are clearly a bunch of great big babies.”

20. “When your claim to be victims of secularism rests on Wal-Mart greeters wishing shoppers Happy Holidays, you are clearly a bunch of great big babies.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “We don’t like the idea that a man might be severely constrained for life by a single ejaculation. He has places to go and things to do. That a woman’s life may be stunted by unwanted childbearing is not so troubling. Childbearing, after all, is what women are for.”

21. “We don’t like the idea that a man might be severely constrained for life by a single ejaculation. He has places to go and things to do. That a woman’s life may be stunted by unwanted childbearing is not so troubling. Childbearing, after all, is what women are for.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “Old, in America, is not a good thing to be.”

22. “Old, in America, is not a good thing to be.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “For many people, feminism is one of those words of which, as St. Augustine said about time, they know the meaning as long as no one is asking.”

23. “For many people, feminism is one of those words of which, as St. Augustine said about time, they know the meaning as long as no one is asking.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “They can’t push women all the way back, but they can use women’s bodies to keep them under surveillance and control.”

24. “They can’t push women all the way back, but they can use women’s bodies to keep them under surveillance and control.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “We need to talk about ending a pregnancy as a common, even normal, event in the reproductive lives of women – and not just modern American women either, but women throughout history and all over the world, from ancient Egypt to medieval Catholic Europe, from today’s sprawling cities to rural villages barely touched by modern ideas about women’s roles and rights.”

25. “We need to talk about ending a pregnancy as a common, even normal, event in the reproductive lives of women – and not just modern American women either, but women throughout history and all over the world, from ancient Egypt to medieval Catholic Europe, from today’s sprawling cities to rural villages barely touched by modern ideas about women’s roles and rights.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “Our society encourages women to place a very high value on maternity as an essential part of female identity, both a high moral calling and the deepest source of satisfaction on earth. It’s not easy to redefine motherhood as handing your baby over to a stranger.”

26. “Our society encourages women to place a very high value on maternity as an essential part of female identity, both a high moral calling and the deepest source of satisfaction on earth. It’s not easy to redefine motherhood as handing your baby over to a stranger.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “Like Broadway, the novel, and G-d, feminism has been declared dead many times.”

27. “Like Broadway, the novel, and G-d, feminism has been declared dead many times.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “We tend to tell strangers what we think will make us sound good. I myself, to my utter amazement, informed a telephone pollster that I exercised regularly, a bare-faced lie.”

28. “We tend to tell strangers what we think will make us sound good. I myself, to my utter amazement, informed a telephone pollster that I exercised regularly, a bare-faced lie.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “In the months to come, I would look back on this time in my life almost as a kind of out-of-body travel, from which I had returned with nothing but a sense memory of having been somewhere inexpressibly exciting and far away. It wasn’t like a dream, exactly, although it had a dream’s strange internal logic. It was like looking through the window of an airplane at night, the way the city below appears so near, yet untouchable beyond the glass – a network of lights, flames, stars.”

29. “In the months to come, I would look back on this time in my life almost as a kind of out-of-body travel, from which I had returned with nothing but a sense memory of having been somewhere inexpressibly exciting and far away. It wasn’t like a dream, exactly, although it had a dream’s strange internal logic. It was like looking through the window of an airplane at night, the way the city below appears so near, yet untouchable beyond the glass – a network of lights, flames, stars.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “Even if we all decided to define personhood to include fertilized eggs and embryos and fetuses, they would not have the right to use a woman’s body against her will and at whatever cost to herself. Persons are not entitled to use one another like that: Even if I am the only person in the world who can save my child by donating a kidney, the decision is still mine to make.”

30. “Even if we all decided to define personhood to include fertilized eggs and embryos and fetuses, they would not have the right to use a woman’s body against her will and at whatever cost to herself. Persons are not entitled to use one another like that: Even if I am the only person in the world who can save my child by donating a kidney, the decision is still mine to make.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “A right includes the freedom to use it in ways others find distressing or even wrong.”

31. “A right includes the freedom to use it in ways others find distressing or even wrong.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “Justice Harry Blackmun’s majority opinion in Roe v. Wade was all about privacy, but the most private parts of a woman’s body and the most private decisions she will ever make have never been more public. Everyone gets to weigh in. Even, according to the five conservative Catholic men on the Supreme Court, her employer.”

32. “Justice Harry Blackmun’s majority opinion in Roe v. Wade was all about privacy, but the most private parts of a woman’s body and the most private decisions she will ever make have never been more public. Everyone gets to weigh in. Even, according to the five conservative Catholic men on the Supreme Court, her employer.”

— Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt Quote: “The extraordinary deference paid to physicians and their judgment preserved the idea that the woman’s desire to end a pregnancy was not enough in itself, it had to be approved by a respectable authority figure, at the time almost always a man.”

33. “The extraordinary deference paid to physicians and their judgment preserved the idea that the woman’s desire to end a pregnancy was not enough in itself, it had to be approved by a respectable authority figure, at the time almost always a man.”

— Katha Pollitt

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