quotes by Naomi Wolf

"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

"A Mother who radiates self-love and self-acceptance actually VACCINATES her daughter against low self-esteem. "
— Naomi Wolf

"Here's what we're not taught [about the Declaration and Constitution]: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. If you understand them truly now, they still are. You are not taught - and it is a disgrace that you aren't - that these men and women were radicals for liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging, God-given order of nations; and that they were willing to die to make that desperate vision into a reality for people like us, whom they would never live to see. "
— Naomi Wolf (The End of America: A Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot)

"We should be telling girls what they already know but rarely see affirmed: that the lives they lead inside their own self-contained bodies; the skills they attain through their own concentration and rigor, and the unique phase in their lives during which they may explore boys and eroticism at their own pace - these are magical. And they constitute the entrance point to a life cycle of a sexuality that should be held sacred."
— Naomi Wolf (Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood)

"The anthropologist Margaret Mead concluded in 1948, after observing seven different ethnic groups in the Pacific Islands, that different cultires made different forms of female sexual experience seem normal and desirable. The capacity for orgasm in women, she found, is a learned response, which a given culture can help or can fail to help its women to develop. Mead believed that a woman's sexual fulfillment, and the positive meaning of her sexuality in her own mind, depend upon three factors:
1: She must live in a culture that recognizes female desire as being of value;
2: Her culture must allow her to understand her sexual anatomy;
3: And her culture must teach the various sexual skills that give women orgasms."
— Naomi Wolf (Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood)

"A mother who radiates self love and self acceptance actually vaccinates her daughter [or son] against low self esteem.
-Naomi Wolf"
— Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women)

"...When we quietly go about our business as our rights are plundered, when we yield to passivity and switch on the wii and hand over our power, we are not acting like true Americans. Indeed, at those moments we are giving up our citizenship."
— Naomi Wolf (Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries)

"Dissident Natan Sharansky writes that there are two kinds of states -- "fear societies" and "free societies," two kinds of consciousness. The consciousness derived of oppression is despairing, fatalistic, and fearful of inquiry. It is mistrustful of the self and forced to trust external authority. It is premised on a dearth of self-respect. It is cramped.

In contrast, the consciousness of freedom is one of expansiveness, trust of the self, and hope. It is a consciousness of limitless inquiry. It builds up in a citizen a wealth of self-respect."
— Naomi Wolf (Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries)

"Today, women have access to the technological capacity to do anything to our bodies in the struggle for "beauty", but we have yet to evolve a mentality beyond the old rules, to let them imagine that this combat among women is not inevitable. Surgeons can now do anything. We have not yet reached the age in which we can defend ourselves with an unwillingness to have "anything" done. This is a dangerous time. New possibilities for women quickly become new obligations. "
— Naomi Wolf

"It has been said that each generation must win its own struggle to be free. -Robert F. Kennedy"
— Naomi Wolf (Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries)

"It is their mores, then, that make the Americans of the United States...capable of maintaining the rule of democracy.... Too much importance is attached to laws and too little to mores.... I am convinced that the luckiest of geographical circumstances and the best of laws cannot maintain a constitution in spite of mores, whereas the latter can turn even the most unfavorable circumstances...to advantage.... If I have not succeeded in making the reader feel the importance I attach to the practical experience of the Americans, to their habits, laws, and, in a word, their mores, I have failed in the main object of my work. -Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in American"
— Naomi Wolf (Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries)

"The human beings at the helm of the new nation [USA], whatever their limitations [slave owners, anti-democracy], were truly revolutionary. The theory of liberty born in that era, the seed of the idea, was perfect.

More important, the idea itself carried within it the moral power to correct the contradictions in its execution that were obvious from the very birth of the new nation."
— Naomi Wolf (Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries)

"It seemed to me, watching, that if you were dextrous enough to gift-wrap an independent-minded amphibian, you could just about manage a condom."
— Naomi Wolf (Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood)

"Some women have become far too proscriptive of other women's pleasures and private arrangements, and the definition of feminism has become ideologically overloaded."
— Naomi Wolf (Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How to Use It)

"Poststructuralism. . . . is a form of literary criticism that uses elaborate wordplay to prove its central premise, that all language is internally contradictory and has no fixed meaning."
— Naomi Wolf (Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How to Use It)

"The proof that the One Stone Solution is political lies in what women feel when they eat 'too much': guilt. Why should guilt be the operative emotion, and female fat be a moral issue articulated with words like good and bad? If our culture's fixation on female fatness of thinness were about sex, it would be a private issue between a woman and her lover; if it were about health, between a woman and herself. Public debate would be far more hysterically focused on male fat than on female, since more men [40 percent] are medically overweight than women [32 percent] and too much fat is far more dangerous for men than for women...

...But female fat is the subject of public passion, and women feel guilty about female fat, because we implicitly recognize that under the myth, women's bodies are not our own but society's, and that thinness is not a private aesthetic, but hunger a social concession exacted by the community."
— Naomi Wolf