Top 150 Naomi Wolf Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A Mother who radiates self-love and self-acceptance actually VACCINATES her daughter against low self-esteem.”

— Naomi Wolf

2. “We as women are trained to see ourselves as cheap imitations of fashion photographs, rather than seeing fashion photographs as cheap imitations of women.”

— Naomi Wolf

3. “Obstacles, of course, are developmentally necessary: they teach kids strategy, patience, critical thinking, resilience and resourcefulness.”

— Naomi Wolf

4. “Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.”

— Naomi Wolf

5. “Health makes good propaganda.”

— Naomi Wolf

6. “Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria.”

— Naomi Wolf

7. “It’s human nature to abuse power, no matter who you are.”

— Naomi Wolf

8. “What, after all, is the narrative of the American Dream? It was a discourse formulated between the 1880s and the 1920s in the United States during the great waves of migration and expansion and reforms of the Progressive Era.”

— Naomi Wolf

9. “I’m a big believer in debate and difference of opinion.”

— Naomi Wolf

10. “For I conclude that the enemy is not lipstick, but guilt itself; that we deserve lipstick, if we want it, AND free speech; we deserve to be sexual AND serious – or whatever we please; we are entitled to wear cowboy boots to our own revolution.”

— Naomi Wolf

11. “Only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth, and that is not speaking.”

— Naomi Wolf

12. “Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria or your own unfeminine inadequacy. Women have learned to submit to pain by hearing authority figures – doctors, priests, psychiatrists – tell us that what we feel is not pain.”

— Naomi Wolf

13. “The economics of industrialized countries would collapse if women didn’t do the work they do for free: According to economist Marilyn Waring, throughout the West it generates between 25 and 40 percent of the gross national product.”

— Naomi Wolf

14. “As women demanded access to power, the power structure used the beauty myth materially to undermine women’s advancement.”

— Naomi Wolf

15. “Most urgently, women’s identity must be premised upon our ‘beauty’ so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of self-esteem exposed to the air.”

— Naomi Wolf

16. “It is fairly well-known what has been behind that climate change denial in America: vast sums pumped into an ignorance industry by the oil and gas lobbies.”

— Naomi Wolf

17. “It is never smart, even in a strong democracy, to declare some debate off limits. In a weakening democracy it is catastrophic.”

— Naomi Wolf

18. “Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden and name her “Health”: if public discourse were really concerned with women’s health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth.”

— Naomi Wolf

19. “Women’s flesh is evidence of a God-given wrongness; whereas fat men are fat gods.”

— Naomi Wolf

20. “A consequence of female self-love is that the woman grows convinced of social worth. Her love for her body will be unqualified, which is the basis of female identification. If a woman loves her own body, she doesn’t grudge what other women do with theirs; if she loves femaleness, she champions its rights.”

— Naomi Wolf

21. “Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men’s eyes when deciding what provokes it.”

— Naomi Wolf

22. “A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.”

— Naomi Wolf

23. “The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.”

— Naomi Wolf

24. “Beauty” is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact. In assigning value to women in a vertical hierarchy according to a culturally imposed physical standard, it is an expression of power relations in which women must unnaturally compete for resources that men have appropriated for themselves.”

— Naomi Wolf

25. “Culture stereotypes women to fit the myth by flattening the feminine into beauty-without-intelligence or intelligence-without-beauty; women are allowed a mind or a body but not both.”

— Naomi Wolf

26. “Beauty discrimination has become necessary, not from the perception that women will not be good enough, but that they will be, as they have been, twice as good.”

— Naomi Wolf

27. “The beauty myth is not about women at all. It is about men’s institutions and institutional power.”

— Naomi Wolf

28. “She wins who calls herself beautiful and challenges the world to change to truly see her.”

— Naomi Wolf

29. “The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold. Or, if your ad revenue or your seven-figure salary or your privileged sexual status depend on it, it is an operable condition.”

— Naomi Wolf

30. “Women who are beautiful or who achieve beauty according to the imposed standards are rewarded; those who cannot or choose not to be beautiful are punished, economically and socially.”

— Naomi Wolf

31. “Female thinness and youth are not in themselves next to godliness in this culture. Society really doesn’t care about women’s appearance per se. What genuinely matters is that women remain willing to let others tell them what they can and cannot have. Women are watched, in other words, not to make sure that they will “be good,” but to make sure that they will know they are being watched.”

— Naomi Wolf

32. “To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren’t is to learn inequality in little ways all day long.”

— Naomi Wolf

33. “When I was a baby feminist, leading feminist thinkers were insisting that if women ran the world, there would be no sadism or war.”

— Naomi Wolf

34. “What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men?”

— Naomi Wolf

35. “Cosmetic surgery processes the bodies of woman-made women, who make up the vast majority of its patient pool, into man-made women.”

— Naomi Wolf

36. “Of course a woman who decides to work full time as a mother in the home can be happy and deserves full respect from us. Motherhood is one of the most challenging and creative jobs anyone can do. The goal is to remake the world so that our choices are not so stark.”

— Naomi Wolf

37. “Aging in women is ‘unbeautiful’ since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be broken.”

— Naomi Wolf

38. “What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired.”

— Naomi Wolf

39. “There is this giant void in the culture about women in that age group as heroines, as romantic beings, as sexual beings and as creative beings, and there’s not that void for men. Women don’t stop being all those things as their lives continue into those decades.”

— Naomi Wolf

40. “Women are mere “beauties” in men’s culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable, artless ingenue.”

— Naomi Wolf

41. “Today a woman must ignore her reflection in the eyes of her lover, since he might admire her, and seek it in the gaze of the God of Beauty, in whose perception she is never complete.”

— Naomi Wolf

42. “Peaceful, lawful protest – if it is effective – is innately disruptive of ‘business as usual.’ That is why it is effective.”

— Naomi Wolf

43. “The qualities that a given period calls beautiful in women are merely symbols of the female behavior that that period considers desirable: The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behavior and not appearance.”

— Naomi Wolf

44. “The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon them.”

— Naomi Wolf

45. “It has been said that each generation must win its own struggle to be free. -Robert F. Kennedy.”

— Naomi Wolf

46. “The real issue has nothing to do with whether women wear makeup or don’t, gain weight or lose it, have surgery or shun it, dress up or down, make our clothing and faces and bodies into works of art or ignore adornment altogether. The real problem is our lack of choice.”

— Naomi Wolf

47. “Sexiness is no longer defined just as whether we are desirable, but also what we desire. The more liberated women become – economically, politically, and personally – the more erotic we are. Freedom is a lot sexier than dependency.”

— Naomi Wolf

48. “The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.”

— Naomi Wolf

49. “A utopian future for the Internet could be secured if the heavy-duty influencers – and the grassroots influencers tweeting along – can create a new global organization peopled with defenders of Internet freedom.”

— Naomi Wolf

50. “I argue that we deserve the choice to do whatever we want with our faces and bodies without being punished by an ideology that is using attitudes, economic pressure, and even legal judgments regarding women’s appearance to undermine us psychologically and politically.”

— Naomi Wolf