Top 60 Laura Bates Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “After every dark night always comes a brighter day.”

— Laura Bates

2. “This is not a men vs women issue. It’s about people vs prejudice.”

— Laura Bates

3. “This is a battle that we will win. Because women are wittier, brighter, stronger and braver than a misogynistic and patriarchal world has given us credit for.”

— Laura Bates

4. “Women are silenced by both the invisibility and the acceptability of the problem.”

— Laura Bates

5. “Leaving women out of the story isn’t a simple slip-up. It is a consequence of a world that tells us they just aren’t quite as important. That their achievements don’t really count. It means that even now, some of us do still need reminding that women are people, too.”

— Laura Bates

6. “Disbelief is the first great silencer.”

— Laura Bates

7. “We are the granddaughters of the witches you burned. And we’re not putting up with it any more.”

— Laura Bates

8. “If Shakespeare saves the life of a violent criminal, through rehabilitation, then he saves the life of potential future victims.”

— Laura Bates

9. “Intersectionality means being aware of and acting on the fact that different forms of prejudice are connected, because they all stem from the same root of being ‘other’, ‘different’ or somehow ‘secondary’ to the ‘normal’, ‘ideal’ status quo.”

— Laura Bates

10. “O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams. – Hamlet, act 2, scene 2.”

— Laura Bates

11. “Sexism is often an invisible problem. This is partly because it’s so frequently manifest in situations where the only witnesses present are victim and perpetrator.”

— Laura Bates

12. “When you look in the mirror and cringe as a result of your shame, it is conscience. When you look in the mirror and cringe as a result of how people think of you, it is ego. Which of the two is more prevalent in your life?”

— Laura Bates

13. “Like war refugees, prisoners have lost everything: home, possessions, friends, and often family. For a prisoner, education has a special value as the one thing that no one can take from him.”

— Laura Bates

14. “Prison is being entrapped by those self-destructive ways of thinking.”

— Laura Bates

15. “What matters is your own psychological prison – and you can break those chains. What have you got to lose? What else do you have to do?”

— Laura Bates

16. “The dangerous ghetto environment I grew up in did not scare me, but bridges, elevators, even cars did. A thunderstorm would have me running into the basement, and any insect would have me running out of the house. I walked the dark streets alone at night but could not sleep without the reassuring sound of a little black-and-white TV – to the chagrin of my sister, with whom I shared a bedroom.”

— Laura Bates

17. “It is an absolute magic, and the magic has little to do with what Shakespeare has to say. You can memorize every cool quote and be as clueless as you were before reading. So it is not Shakespeare’s offering that invokes this evolution. The secret, the magic, is YOU!”

— Laura Bates

18. “The very fact that it is necessary in the twenty-first century to explain why it’s not okay to publicly debate whether or not women are “asking” for sexual assault is mind-boggling.”

— Laura Bates

19. “As the acknowledged leader of the group by now, he threw out another challenge. In his most daring move, he insisted that in the group’s creative adaptation of the play they change the ending. In their version, with the title “To Revenge or Not to Revenge,” Hamlet should choose not to kill.”

— Laura Bates

20. “It occurred to me that this was one of the few decisions that a segregated prisoner could make: to talk or not to talk. For Newton, that was the question.”

— Laura Bates

21. “Because it isn’t just about the individual incidents; it’s about the collective impact on everything else – the way you think about yourself, the way you approach public spaces and human interaction, the limits you place on your own aspirations and the things you stop yourself from doing before you even try because of bitter learned experience.”

— Laura Bates

22. “One of the cleverest and most insidious twists in the whole sorry tale is the way women are double bound by a gender-biased definition of professionalism and the threat of being labeled “whining.”

— Laura Bates

23. “Don’t make them read Shakespeare; they’re already in prison!”

— Laura Bates

24. “Why do we assume that educating a criminal is merely helping him commit more sophisticated crimes? Why can’t we assume that an education can give this person the tools to make more acceptable choices?”

— Laura Bates

25. “As long as we as a society continue to belittle and dismiss women’s accounts, disbelieve and question their stories, and blame them for their own assaults, we are playing right into the hands of those who silence victims by asking: “who would believe you anyways?“.”

— Laura Bates

26. “When I arrived from the outside world, they never asked me about the weather. It didn’t matter in there.”

— Laura Bates

27. “No single example of sexism automatically gives rise to a specific incident of misogynistic violence, the picture is far more complex than that. But when you step back and join the dots between each of the different examples outlined in this book, it is very hard to deny that the bigger picture reveals systemic and widespread inequality.”

— Laura Bates

28. “When I’m on the street, I’m not thinking about two weeks from now. I’m only thinking right now. I think for the great deal of troubled youth, it’s a common thing.”

— Laura Bates

29. “Women have always been the canaries in the coal mines, quietly singing. But we are so used to seeing them die at men’s hands, so used to justifying and excusing it as normal or “understandable,” that it wouldn’t occur to us to consider this enough of an aberration to raise alarm.”

— Laura Bates

30. “Each time a girl sees science toys under a ‘boys’ sign, she is told science is not suitable for her.”

— Laura Bates

31. “But if schools pull girls out of lessons and publicly shame them for exposing too much of their bodies, they are only preparing them for a sexist and unfair working world in which women are constantly judged and berated on their appearance. Men, by comparison, get a free pass.”

— Laura Bates

32. “Kevin, the only prisoner in the group who was not serving a murder sentence, summed it up by saying, “What a child experiences between the ages of seven and ten will determine his actions as a teenager and an adult.”

— Laura Bates

33. “You really need to learn to take a compliment... And it wasn’t just men who took this view; is was women, too – telling me I was getting worked up about nothing, or being oversensitive...”

— Laura Bates

34. “The incidents that go unwitnessed definitely help to keep sexism off the radar, and unacknowledged problem we don’t discuss. But so too do the regular occurrences that hide in plain sight, within a society that has normalized sexism and allowed it to become so ingrained that we no longer notice or object to it. Sexism is a socially acceptable prejudice and everybody is getting in on the act.”

— Laura Bates

35. “So every bondman in his own hand bears the power to cancel his captivity.”

— Laura Bates

36. “Hoffman: “Ultimately, here’s the question Macbeth needs to face, and it’s the question we all need to face: What does it profit a man if he gains the world but loses his soul? Seriously. You gain everything but you lose your humanity. This is what happens to Macbeth. And that’s what happens to us, out of the choices we make.”

— Laura Bates

37. “Why is a prisoner’s motivation to earn a degree so that he can return to his family sooner viewed more negatively than a campus student’s motivation to earn a degree so he can make more money?”

— Laura Bates

38. “Our second argument is “Why should we do good for bad people?” The answer is because “anything else would be bad.”

— Laura Bates

39. “What a child experiences between the ages of seven and ten will determine his actions as a teenager and an adult.” I.”

— Laura Bates

40. “There are never any victims who don’t matter, because this isn’t about men versus women.”

— Laura Bates

41. “If a guy is put off by you being a feminist, you need to ask yourself how put off you are by someone who doesn’t believe in equality for women.”

— Laura Bates

42. “Incels use the metaphor of the red pill to describe the moment a man’s blinkers fall away and he suddenly realizes that he has been lied to his whole life. The world that he has been forced to believe works in his favour is actually hopelessly stacked against him. Everything from our government to our wider society, is designed to promote women over men. The myth of male privilege, so the story goes...”

— Laura Bates

43. “It is not women, or even feminists, who have limited, frustrated, diminished, hurt, and damaged men but masculinity itself or, rather, our society’s constricting, toxic, self-defeating version of what it means to perform being a man. Yet every time anybody tries to make progress in tackling this particular version of masculinity, the MRM rises up as a united voice to condemn and undermine the attempt.”

— Laura Bates

44. “The impact of articles like this is to create a false equivalence between the violently misogynistic men’s rights community and the feminist movement, suggesting that disagreements between the two are a matter of balanced debate.”

— Laura Bates

45. “Women have always been the canaries in the coal mines, quietly singing.”

— Laura Bates

46. “It was not until 2013, for example, that scientists realized women’s bodies metabolized certain sleeping pills far more slowly than men, resulting in a dramatic reduction of the dosage instructions for women. Astonishingly, it was also not until 2013 that Swedish researchers created the world’s first female crash test dummy, meaning that all previous car designs had been based on best protecting the male form from injury.”

— Laura Bates

47. “One of the best places any woman who wants to change the world can start is when picking up a book.”

— Laura Bates

48. “Peterson is “a disturbing symptom of the malaise to which he promises a cure.”

— Laura Bates

49. “A fundamental part of the problem is that those whose lives are deeply, endlessly affected by it are not, by and large, those with the power to stop it.”

— Laura Bates

50. “Eighty percent of the reviewers and authors of reviewed books in the New York Review of Books in 2013 were men, as were almost 80 percent of the ‘notable deaths’ reported in the New York Times in 2012.”

— Laura Bates