Three Guineas Quotes

“Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes.”
― Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

“No guinea of earned money should go to rebuilding the college on the old plan just as certainly none could be spent upon building a college upon a new plan: therefore the guinea should be earmarked "Rags. Petrol. Matches." And this note should be attached to it. "Take this guinea and with it burn the college to the ground. Set fire to the old hypocrisies. Let the light of the burning building scare the nightingales and incarnadine the willows. And let the daughters of educated men dance round the fire and heap armful upon armful of dead leaves upon the flames. And let their mothers lean from the upper windows and cry, "Let it blaze! Let it blaze! For we have done with this 'education!”
― Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

“...the value of education is among the greatest of all human values...”
― Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

“The questions that we have to ask and to answer about that procession during this moment of transition are so important that they may well change the lives of men and women forever. For we have to ask ourselves, here and now, do we wish to join that procession, or don't we? On what terms shall we join that procession? Above all, where is it leading us, the procession of educated men?...Let us never cease from thinking--what is this "civilisation" in which we find ourselves? What are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What are these professions and why should we make money out of them? Where in short is it leading us, the procession of the sons of educated men?”
― Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

“For,” the outsider will say, “in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country.”
― Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

“What we have to do now, then, Sir, is to lay your request before the daughters of educated men and to ask them to help you to prevent war, not by advising their brothers how they shall protect culture and intellectual liberty, but simply by reading and writing their own tongue in such a way as to protect those rather abstract goddesses themselves.”
― Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

“She will find that she has no good reason to ask
her brother to fight on her behalf to protect “our” country. “‘Our country,’” she will say, “throughout the greater part of its history has treated me as a slave; it has denied me education or any share in its possessions. ‘Our’ country still ceases to be mine if I marry a foreigner. ‘Our’ country denies me the means of protecting myself, forces me to pay others a very large sum annually to protect me, and is so little able, even so, to protect me that Air Raid precautions are written on the wall. Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or ‘our’ country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share; but not to gratify my instincts, or to protect either myself or my country. For,” the outsider will say, “in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.”
― Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

“The public and private worlds are inseparably connected ... the tyrannies and servilities of one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.”
― Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

“Feminism', we have had to destroy.”
― Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

“en tant que femme je n ai pas de pays.
En tant que femme je ne désire aucun pays.
Mon pays a moi, femme, c est le monde entier.”
― Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

“listen not to the bark of the guns and the bray of the gramophones but to the voices of the poets, answering each other, assuring us of a unity that rubs out divisions as if they were chalk marks only; to discuss with you the capacity of the human spirit to overflow boundaries and make unity out of multiplicity.”
― Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

“quels soucis de gloire, quel intérêt, quelles satisfactions, et elles sont nombreuses, la lutte lui apporte?
Sans la guerre il n y aurait pas de débouchés pour les nombreuses qualités viriles développées par la lutte; se battre ainsi demeure une caractéristique du sexe masculin [...] c est, disent certains la contrepartie de l instinct maternel, qu il ne peuvent, eux, partager”
― Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

“Take this guinea then and use it, not to burn the house down, but to make its windows blaze. And let the daughters of uneducated women dance round the new house, the poor house, the house that stands in a narrow street where omnibuses pass and the street hawkers cry their wares, and let them sing, ‘We have done with war! We have done with tyranny!’ And their mothers will laugh from their graves, ‘It was for this that we suffered obloquy and contempt! Light up the windows of the new house, daughters! Let them blaze!”
― Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

“Tal como consta por experiencia, y hay muchos hechos que lo demuestran, las hijas de los hombres con educación siempre han ejercido el pensamiento sobre la marcha; no bajo verdes lámparas en mesas de estudio, no en claustros de aisladas universidades. Han pensado mientras vigilaban el puchero, mientras mecían la cuna. Así conquistaron para nosotras el derecho a nuestra flamante moneda de seis peniques. A nosotras nos corresponde seguir pensando. ¿Cómo vamos a gastar los seis peniques? Debemos pensar”
― Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

“Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference.”
― Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

“Such are the conditions attached to this guineas. You shall have it, to recapitulate, on condition that you help all properly qualified people, of whatever sex, class, or colour, to enter you profession.”
― Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

“This morning's collection contains the photograph of what might be a man's body, or a woman's; it is so mutilated that it might, on the other hand, be the body of a pig.”
― Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

“… dar veți fi de acord că o bătălie care irosește timpul este la fel de fatală ca bătălia care irosește sîngele. Veți fi de acord că o bătălie care costă bani e la fel de fatală ca cea care costă un picior sau o mînă. Veți fi de acord că o bătălie care-i forțează pe tineri să-și irosească puterile învîrtindu-se prin săli de comitete, cerînd favoruri, asumîndu-și o mască de reverență, pentru a-i acoperi ridicolul, face răni în spiritul uman pe care nici un chirurg nu le poate vindeca.”
― Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas