"...remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation."
— Abigail Adams

"It's a good thing I was born a girl, otherwise I'd be a drag queen. "
— Dolly Parton

"Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. "
— Virginia Woolf

"I would rather trust a woman's instinct than a man's reason."
— Stanley Baldwin

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
— Eleanor Roosevelt (This is My Story)

"The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself."
— David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day)

"I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful."
— Michael Cunningham (A Home at the End of the World: A Novel)

"The most cursory examination of even the most progressive organs of information reveals a curious inability to recognize women as newsmakers, unless they are young or married to a head of state or naked or pregnant by some triumph of technology or perpetrators or victims of some hideous crime or any combiniation of the above. Women's issues are often disguised as people issues, unless they are relegated to the women's pages which amazingly still suvive. Senior figures are all male; even the few women who are deemed worthy of obituaries are shown in images from their youth, as if the last fourty years of their lives have been without achievement of any kind. If you analyse the by-lines in your morning paper, you will see that the senior editorial staff are all older men, supported by a rabble of junior females, the infinitely replacesable 'hackettes'."
— Germaine Greer (Whole Woman)

"said Jack matter-of-factly. "I'm a man. We're made to think more quickly."

...Aven swung her fist and clocked Jack square on the chin, knocking him backward into the balloon, which was still under repair.

...Aven rubbed her knuckles and looked at the others. "Sorry about that. I might have stopped myself from hitting him, but I didn't think of it quickly enough.""
— James A. Owen

"Usually when you see females in movies, they feel like they have these metallic structures around them, they are caged by male energy."
— Björk

"If you want to see a man come to his senses, try something like, Do you happen to carry a rubber in your wallet? Did I mention I'm not on the pill?"
— Catherine Ryan Hyde (Pay It Forward)

"Once upon a time there was a woman who was just like all women. And she married a man who was just like all men. And they had some children who were just like all children. And it rained all day.

The woman had to skewer the hole in the kitchen sink, when it was blocked up.

The man went to the pub every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The other nights he mended his broken bicycle, did the pool coupons, and longed for money and power.

The woman read love stories and longed for things to be different.

The children fought and yelled and played and had scabs on their knees.

In the end they all died."
— Elizabeth Smart (The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals)

"'You men,' she says. 'You durn men.'"
— William Faulkner

"Gender can be mixed, combined, chosen and tasted... I'll be in the kitchen today whipping up something new!"
— Cody Hooper-Kaufmann

"All men have parties and are pals who never let each other down. A pal can say terrible things which are forgotten the next day. A pal never forgives, he just forgets, and a woman forgives but never forgets. That's how it is. That's why women aren't allowed to have parties. Being forgiven is very unpleasant."
— Tove Jansson (A Winter Book: Selected Stories by Tove Jansson)

"If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? Half the world is feminine--why is there resentment at a female-oriented art? Nobody asks The Tale of Genji to be masculine! Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women's creativity (because they are not themselves at the center of creation, cannot bear children) that a woman writer of genius evokes murderous rage, must be brushed aside with a sneer as 'irrelevant'?"
— May Sarton (Journal of a Solitude)

"As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest feeling for them, and apart from my never wearing a skirt, saw nothing else in common between us."
— Jeanette Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit)

"It is as though they simply cannot contemplate the notion of a short, slight man who dresses and moves like a popular (mis)conception of a homosexual being attractive to millions of women."
— Dave Hill (Prince a Pop Life P)

"Perhaps eggs are like neurons, which also are not replenished in adulthood: they know too much. Eggs must plan the party. Sperm need only to show up- wearing top hat and tails, of course. "
— Natalie Angier (Woman: An Intimate Geography)

"Young men list music as their focus and means of identity -- before sport, before TV, before cinema -- while women cite fashion as most important, with music an ambivalent second."
— Lucy O'Brien (She Bop: The Definitive History of Women in Rock, Pop & Soul)

"I hated that the soldier doll had my name. I mean, please. I didn't play with him much. He was another Christmas present from my clueless grandparents. One time when they were visiting, my grandpa asked me if G.I. Joe had been in any wars lately. I said, "No, but he and Ken got married last week." Every Christmas since then, my grandparents have sent me a check."
— James Howe (Totally Joe)

"la femme est un homme comme les autres"
— Tejal Shah

"The fundamental condition of man is his verticality."
— Laura Fraser (An Italian Affair)

"Love knows no gender.--
while,unfortunately,closed-mindedness knows no end."
— Kaytrina

"Masculine and feminine stories cannot have the same ending."
— Milorad Pavic (Dictionary of the Khazars)

"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)

"Ruth believes that boys are not found around stables because what they like is taking things apart and putting them together again, and for this purpose horses are not so satisfactory as cars, motorcycles, and even bicycles, while girls adore horses because they are biological and have functions."
— Wallace Stegner (All the Little Live Things)

"When I was a girl
the books I read were by men.
"
— Sharon Doubiago (Hard Country)

"Man will never understand woman and vice versa. We are oil and water. An equal level can never be maintained, as one will always excel where the other doesn't, and that breeds resentment."
— Dionne Warwick

"Are boys encouraged to express sadness, fear, or anxiety? In general, our society gives boys permission for one emotion: anger. If a boy is hurt or upset, he may be comforted briefly, but then he is told to stop crying and "be a man." This message usually implies he should hide his feelings. Boys and men are supposed to be solid unemotional rocks. Demonstrations of emotions are seen as "silly." Anger is seen as a sign of strength. Males are considered to be standing up for their rights if they react to a frustrating or undesirable event with anger. Outrage is often the only reaction to an injustice that is allowed from boys."
— Meg Kennedy Dugan (It's My Life Now: Starting Over After an Abusive Relationship or Domestic Violence)

"In the grammar of the phallus -- the I, I, I -- [woman] can't utter female experience."
— Nancy Mairs (Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer)

"Supposing that originally there was nothing but one creator, how could ordinary binary sexual relations come into being?"
— Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)

"All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides,' and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)