Top 35 Marilyn French Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Men stumble over pebbles, never over mountains.”

— Marilyn French

Featured in: Nature Quotes

2. “All men are rapists and that’s all they are.”

— Marilyn French

3. “To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.”

— Marilyn French

4. “Women are afraid in a world in which almost half the population bears the guise of the predator, in which no factor – age, dress, or color – distinguishes a man who will harm a woman from one who will not.”

— Marilyn French

5. “Men seem unable to feel equal to women: they must be superior or they are inferior.”

— Marilyn French

6. “Never underestimate the power of helplessness!”

— Marilyn French

7. “Survival is an art. It requires the dulling of the mind and the senses, and a delicate attunement to waiting, without insisting on precision about just what it is you are waiting for.”

— Marilyn French

8. “There is no power greater than the power of passive dependency.”

— Marilyn French

9. “Control over a woman is the only form of dominance most men possess, for most men are merely subjects of more powerful men.”

— Marilyn French

10. “Oh, God, why don’t I remember that a little chaos is good for the soul?”

— Marilyn French

11. “My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of western civilization, to make it a feminist world.”

— Marilyn French

12. “When they kept you out it was because you were black; when they let you in, it is because you are black. That’s progress?”

— Marilyn French

13. “I’d discovered you never know yourself until you’re tested and that you don’t even know you’re being tested until afterwards, and that in fact there isn’t anyone giving the test except yourself.”

— Marilyn French

14. “Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that. It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion and self-destruction. You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you can’t even think straight.”

— Marilyn French

15. “Nothing is ever simple. What do you do when you discover you like parts of the role you’re trying to escape?”

— Marilyn French

16. “Fear is a question. What are you afraid of and why? Our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.”

— Marilyn French

17. “Men’s need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness; we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it.”

— Marilyn French

18. “There was no justice, there was only life. And life she had.”

— Marilyn French

19. “Even disasters – there are always disasters when you travel – can be turned into adventures.”

— Marilyn French

20. “I have opened all the doors in my head. I have opened all the pores in my body. But only the tide rolls in.”

— Marilyn French

21. “She drowned in words that could not teach her how to swim.”

— Marilyn French

22. “It’s strange how men feel they have the right to criticize a woman’s appearance to her face.”

— Marilyn French

23. “There’s power to: and everyone should have that, but everyone doesn’t. Power to play Bach, or tennis, or boccie if you like. And there’s power over; and no one should have that, but people do.”

— Marilyn French

24. “The view of life as a struggle for power generates a language in which life has no significance and only power matters.”

— Marilyn French

25. “Desire consumes you, it takes you over. You forget yourself completely. All you can think about is the other, the one you desire, your self is just a fire.”

— Marilyn French

26. “I believe that all human beings are equal. I believe that no one has the right to authority over anyone else.”

— Marilyn French

27. “The same men who are blind and deaf to feminism are acutely sensitive to what threatens their dominance and privilege.”

— Marilyn French

28. “The very notion of superiority of one kind over another will have to disappear, although differences among kind will remain.”

— Marilyn French

29. “All the women I know feel a little like outlaws.”

— Marilyn French

30. “Losing the future is the best thing that ever happened to me.”

— Marilyn French

31. “For many people, morality means a set of rules governing the disposition on one’s genital organs; or a set of injunctions against lying, stealing, or killing except when such acts are sanctioned by church or state.”

— Marilyn French

32. “In a great gasp, puts her head in her hands again and cries as if her throat were a cave, as if the howling winds came from her belly, she cries like a storm that will never end.”

— Marilyn French

33. “I’ve known for a long time that hypocrisy is the secret of sanity. You mustn’t let them know you know.”

— Marilyn French

34. “Anyone determined to find another person or group inferior can always find whole lists of grounds that demonstrate inferiority because we are all inferior to the ideals of humanness we have erected.”

— Marilyn French

35. “It isn’t success after all, is it, if it isn’t an expression of your deepest energies?”

— Marilyn French

36. “In Harlem the government pushes heroin to keep the blacks down and doctors by the thousands give barbiturates and tranquilizers to all the housewives: keep the natives quiet. when the drugs don’t work anymore, they put the blacks in jail and us in here. Don’t make noise. I read a poem once, it had a line, something like ‘You keep stiller when every time you move something jangles’.”

— Marilyn French

37. “Some people use bullfights, some the Mass, some art in order to ritualize or transform death into life or at least meaning. But my terror is that life itself is a ritual transforming everything into death.”

— Marilyn French

38. “She was dizzy with her own feelings, her own voice. She was flying around on a carnival machine that would not stop, she could not make it stop and she screamed and screamed.”

— Marilyn French