Top 120 Lindy West Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “It’s so pathetic, the tough-guy posturing, but so sinister, because, to put it plainly, that’s how black men die. Insecure, pee-pants white men assume that any disagreement is a life-threatening situation.”

— Lindy West

52. “There is no value in willfully ignoring hatred, and the lie that neutrality in the face of oppression is not a political stance is part of how we got here.”

— Lindy West

53. “It costs you nothing to err on the side of “care”.”

— Lindy West

54. “America loves to lie about itself, and Americans love to eat those lies up – anything that obliterates our sins, that tells us everything will be okay, that makes us the infallible, gallant protagonist in the story of Earth. We must root out the assumptions we swallow as fact and the facts we deny.”

— Lindy West

55. “Honestly, there is something seductive about being the kind of person who can just take it. Challenging myself to absorb more and more hate is a masochistic form of vanity.”

— Lindy West

56. “It’s hard to feel hurt or frightened when you’re flooded with pity.”

— Lindy West

57. “I had been erroneously led to believe that “veterinarian” was the grown-up term for “professional animal-petter.”

— Lindy West

58. “We cannot pander or wait for consensus; the world is too big and complicated and rigged. We are saying the things that people don’t like.”

— Lindy West

59. “We were just so bad at being together. He felt as guilty as I felt pathetic, and it made us closer, for a while.”

— Lindy West

60. “When I was twenty-two, and all I wanted was to blend in, that rejection was crushing and hopeless and lonely. Years later, when I was finally ready to stand out, the realization that the mainstream didn’t want me was freeing and galvanizing. It gave me something to fight for. It taught me that women are an army.”

— Lindy West

61. “If you really want change to happen, if you really want to “help” fat people, you need to understand that shaming an already-shamed population is, well, shameful.”

— Lindy West

62. “Fat people are not here as a foil to boost your own self-esteem. Fat people are not your inspiration poem. Fat people can be competent, beautiful, talented, and proud without your approval.”

— Lindy West

63. “I always thought that if I just never, ever acknowledged it – never wore a bathing suit, never objected to a fat joke on TV, stuck to ‘flattering’ clothes, never said the word ‘fat’ out loud – then maybe people wouldn’t notice. Maybe I could pass as thin, or at least obedient. But, I was slowly learning, you can’t advocate for yourself if you won’t admit what you are.”

— Lindy West

64. “Is there a woman who has lost her temper in public and didn’t face ridicule, temporary ruin, or both? Can you think of one?”

— Lindy West

65. “If you’re the very luckiest kind of astronaut ever, your big payoff is that you get to visit a barren airless wasteland for five minutes, do some more math, and then go home – ice cream not guaranteed.”

— Lindy West

66. “Dave brought a knife and a gun to a comedy show. Because of a disagreement about whether or not comedy clubs are safe for women. Because the way people talk onstage has no bearing on how they behave in real life. It’s.”

— Lindy West

67. “Passively attempting to earn my humanity by being smart, nice, friendly, and good at my job had gotten me nowhere; my private confrontation with Dan had gotten me nowhere; literally telling him ‘this harms me’ had gotten me nowhere; taking a quick, vague swipe at him on the blog had gotten me nowhere.”

— Lindy West

68. “Comedy, in particular, is a tremendously powerful lever of social change.”

— Lindy West

69. “He was, and then he wasn’t. One moment his body was the locus of his personhood, the next moment our memories had to pick up the slack.”

— Lindy West

70. “The reality is that there’s no such thing as political correctness; it’s a rhetorical device to depersonalize oppression. Being cognizant of and careful with historic trauma of others is what “political correctness” means. It means that the powerful should never attack the disempowered – not because it “offends” them or hurts their “feelings” but because it perpetuates toxic, oppressive systems.”

— Lindy West

71. “Being cognizant of and careful with the historic trauma of others is what “political correctness” means. It means that the powerful should never attack the disempowered – not because it “offends” them or hurts their “feelings” but because it perpetuates toxic, oppressive systems. Or, in plainer language, because it makes people’s lives worse. In tangible ways. For generations.”

— Lindy West

72. “Privilege means that it’s easy for white women to do each other favours. Privilege means that those of us who need it the least often get the most help.”

— Lindy West

73. “By 2019, the far Right’s unflagging message... has come to full fruition, its ultimate purpose revealed: to justify the stigmatization of care itself. It’s not just caring about the environment that’s effeminate and therefore despicable, it’s caring about anything. It’s care.”

— Lindy West

74. “The myth of the “liberal elite” strategically frames liberal values – environmentalism, racial and gender equality, gay and trans liberation, immigrants’ rights, the social safety net-as inherently frivolous, dishonest, a joke. By extension, the people who would benefit from the actualization of those values are “fake” Americans- the nation’s most vulnerable groups being called decadent effetes.”

— Lindy West

75. “Denying people access to value is an incredibly insidious form of emotional violence, one that our culture wields aggressively and liberally to keep marginalized groups small and quiet.”

— Lindy West

76. “We gobble up cable news’ insistence that both sides of an argument are equally valid and South Park’s insistence that both sides are equally stupid, because taking a firm stand on anything opens us up to criticism.”

— Lindy West

77. “A realistic ad campaign for adulthood would never sell.”

— Lindy West

78. “If you are one of those people who believes that racism is a thing of the past, never existed at all, or is defined simply as one person being mean to another person, you are claiming that white people genuinely earn – through ability alone, because anything else would be a systemic advantage – twenty times as much as black people.”

— Lindy West

79. “Puberty” was a fancy word for your genitals stabbing you in the back.”

— Lindy West

80. “The active ingredient in period stigma is misogyny.”

— Lindy West

81. “Shame is a tool of oppression, not change. Fat.”

— Lindy West

82. “People target advertisers because they’re tired of their hard-won consumer dollars going to pay sexists and racists and homophobes who got those jobs, at least partially, by coasting on the privileges and benefit of the doubt conferred by sexism and racism and homophobia.”

— Lindy West

83. “Like most fat people who’ve been lectured about diet and exercise since childhood, I actually know an inordinate amount about nutrition and fitness.”

— Lindy West

84. “And all those times that I tried so hard to get you to hang out with me, and I just wanted to be around you so much, I’ve never been more right about anything in my life. The only way I can think to say it is that you are better than I thought people could be.”

— Lindy West

85. “This is the only advice I can offer. Each time something like this happens, take a breath and ask yourself, honestly: Am I dead? Did I die? Is the world different? Has my soul splintered into a thousand shards and scattered to the winds? I think you’ll find, in nearly every case, that you are fine. Life rolls on. No one cares. Very few things – apart from death and crime – have real, irreversible stakes, and when something with real stakes happens, humiliation is the least of your worries.”

— Lindy West

86. “Not only are women expected to weather sexual violence, intimate partner violence, workplace discrimination, institutional subordination, the expectation of free domestic labor, the blame for our own victimization, and all the subtler, invisible cuts that undermine us daily, we are not even allowed to be angry about it.”

— Lindy West

87. “Like getting pregnant was my fault – as though my clinginess, my desperate need to be loved, my insistence that we were a ‘real’ couple and not two acquaintances who had grown kind of used to each other, had finally congealed into a hopeful, delusional little bundle and sunk its roots into my uterine wall.”

— Lindy West

88. “Those kids grew up to be the great, white, complacent center – the nonvoters, the apolitical, the ones who just stay out of it, as though inaction isn’t a political stance.”

— Lindy West

89. “Don’t trust anyone who promises you a new life. Pick-up artists, lifestyle gurus, pyramid-scheme face cream evangelists, Weight Watchers coaches: These people make their living off of your failures.”

— Lindy West

90. “We don’t need neutrality; we don’t need “nice.” It’s not enough to just stop being terrible. We need new work that actively challenges old assumptions, that offers radical models for how to conceive of ourselves and how to treat each other. We need artists and studios fighting for diversity because it’s the right thing to do.”

— Lindy West

91. “I felt something start to unclench deep inside me. What if my body didn’t have to be a secret? What if I was wrong all along – what if this was all a magic trick, and I could just decide I was valuable and it would be true? Why, instead had I left that decision in the hands of strangers who hated me? Denying people access to value is an incredibly insidious form of emotional violence, one that our culture wields aggressively and liberally to keep marginalized groups small and quiet.”

— Lindy West

92. “It seems that a lot of men are confusing being asked not to violate other people’s sexual boundaries with being forbidden to participate in basic human activities such as dancing, dating, chatting, walking around, going to work. and telling jokes.”

— Lindy West

93. “Yeah, personally I hate my period and think it’s annoying and gross, but it’s not more gross than anything else that comes out of a human body. It’s not more gross than feces, urine, pus, bile, vomit, or the grossest bodily fluid of them all – in my mother’s professional opinion – phlegm. And yet we are not horrified every time we go to the bathroom. We do not stigmatize people with stomach flu. The active ingredient in period stigma is misogyny. This.”

— Lindy West

94. “Women, it seemed, were obliged to be thick-skinned about their own rapes, while comics remained too thin-skinned to handle even mild criticism. I.”

— Lindy West

95. “But the reality is that there’s no such thing as political correctness; it’s a rhetorical device to depersonalize oppression.”

— Lindy West

96. “But they tell you that if you hate yourself hard enough, you can grab just a tail feather or two of perfection. Chasing perfection was your duty and your birthright, as a woman, and I would never know what it was like – this thing, this most important thing for girls.”

— Lindy West

97. “I know that trolls are fundamentally sad people; I know that I’ve already defeated them in every substantive arena – by being smart, by being happy, by being successful, by being listened to, by being loved.”

— Lindy West

98. “I didn’t want to carry and feed this artefact of my inherent unlovability – this physical proof that any permanent connection to me must be an accident.”

— Lindy West

99. “Shouldn’t it follow, then, that we can change ourselves by changing what we make?”

— Lindy West

100. “America’s original sin, our fundamental delusion: the bootstrap ethos, the notion that the comfortable deserve their place, that capitalism is an opportunity for the exploited to prove themselves, that success is a proportional reflection of hard work, that the rich are rich because they are good and smart.”

— Lindy West