Katha Pollitt Quotes

Quotes about:

• When you consider that God could have commanded anything he wanted--anything!--the Ten [Commandments] have got to rank as one of the great missed moral opportunities of all time. How different history would have been had he clearly and unmistakably forbidden war, tyranny, taking over other people's countries, slavery, exploitation of workers, cruelty to children, wife-beating, stoning, treating women--or anyone--as chattel or inferior beings.

  Katha Pollitt

  God, Country, Children

  40 Copy quote

• Young women need to know that abortion rights and abortion access are not presents bestowed or retracted by powerful men (or women) - Presidents, Supreme Court justices, legislators, lobbyists - but freedoms won, as freedom always is, by people struggling on their own behalf.

  Katha Pollitt

  Powerful, Struggle, Men

  Katha Pollitt (2007). “Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture”, p.308, Modern Library

  52 Copy quote

• A feminist is a person who answers 'yes' to the question 'Are women human?' Feminism is not about whether women are better than, worse than or identical with men...It's about justice, fairness, and access to the broad range of human experience.

  Katha Pollitt

  Men, Justice, Feminist

  25 Copy quote

• Can currently existing religion be disentangled from the misogyny of its texts, its traditions, and its practices? ... a resounding NO: misogyny not only pervades the major faiths, it's baked in.

  Katha Pollitt

  Practice, Tradition, Misogyny

  22 Copy quote

• When it comes to ideas - and religions are, among other things, ideas - there is no right not to be offended. ... In fact, if you need laws ... to protect your faith, maybe your faith is weak.

  Katha Pollitt

  Law, Ideas, Needs

  18 Copy quote

• Whether you look at Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism, wherever a distinction of sex is made, it is to the advantage of men. If you think of religions as if they were novels, the authors are men, and so are the major characters.

  Katha Pollitt

  Sex, Character, Buddhism

  18 Copy quote

• Why must the woman apologize for not having a baby just because she happened to get pregnant? It's as if we think motherhood is the default setting for a woman's life from first period to menopause, and she needs a note from God not to say yes to every zygote that knocks on her door.

  Katha Pollitt

  Baby, Motherhood, Thinking

  Katha Pollitt (2014). “Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights”, p.10, Picador

  11 Copy quote

• Misogyny runs deeper than religion.

  Katha Pollitt

  Running, Misogyny, Deeper

  19 Copy quote

• When your claim to be victims of secularism rests on Wal-Mart greeters wishing shoppers Happy Holidays, you are clearly a bunch of great big babies.

  Katha Pollitt

  Baby, Holiday, Wish

  14 Copy quote

• We need to say that women have sex, have abortions, are at peace with the decision and move on with their lives. We need to say that is their right, and, moreover, it’s good for everyone that they have this right: The whole society benefits when motherhood is voluntary. When we gloss over these truths we unintentionally promote the very stigma we’re trying to combat.

  Katha Pollitt

  Sex, Moving, Motherhood

  "How to Really Defend Planned Parenthood". www.nytimes.com. August 5, 2015.

  13 Copy quote

• For me, religion is serious business - a farrago of authoritarian nonsense, misogyny and humble pie, the eternal enemy of human happiness and freedom.

  Katha Pollitt

  Humble, Pie, Enemy

  Katha Pollitt (2007). “Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture”, p.29, Modern Library

  5 Copy quote

• I'm anticlerical, not antireligion. If somebody believes there is God, I'm not interested in trying to persuade that person there is no intelligent design to the universe. Where I become interested and wake up is about the temporal power of religion, things like prayer in schools, or Catholic-secular hospital mergers.

  Katha Pollitt

  Prayer, Believe, School

  15 Copy quote

• ... on the whole 'blasphemy' has been a force for good in human history. It is part of the process by which millions of people have come to reject theocracy and think for themselves.

  Katha Pollitt

  Thinking, People, Process

  11 Copy quote

• In a better world, science teachers would teach creationism along with evolution as an exercise in critical thinking.

  Katha Pollitt

  Teacher, Exercise, Thinking

  16 Copy quote

• We tend to tell strangers what we think will make us sound good. I myself, to my utter amazement, informed a telephone pollster that I exercised regularly, a bare-faced lie.

  Katha Pollitt

  Lying, Thinking, Deception

  Katha Pollitt (1995). “Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism”, Vintage

  14 Copy quote

• Every inch of progress is won in struggle.

  Katha Pollitt

  Struggle, Progress, Inches

  10 Copy quote

• One of the very important ideas of feminism for me has always been women helping and supporting each other.

  Katha Pollitt

  Ideas, Feminism, Important

  14 Copy quote

• Every gain women have made in the past two hundred years has been in the face of experts insisting they couldn't do it and didn't really want to.

  Katha Pollitt

  Past, Years, Two

  Katha Pollitt (2006). “Virginity Or Death!: And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time”, Random House Incorporated

  8 Copy quote

• As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in Time, in no other Western country is the teaching of Evolution regarded as controversial. Throughout the world, one way or another, most Christian denominations have managed to reconcile belief in God with belief in the mechanisms of natural selection. A French or German or Scandinavian politician who called for students to entertain as a reasonable deduction from existing evidence the proposition that Earth is at most 10,000 years old would be bundled off to a mental hospital.

  Katha Pollitt

  Christian, Country, Teaching

  6 Copy quote

• We live, I am trying to say, in an epidemic of male violence against women.

  Katha Pollitt

  Epidemics, Feminist, Trying

  Katha Pollitt (1995). “Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism”, Vintage

  13 Copy quote

• Old, in America, is not a good thing to be.

  Katha Pollitt

  America, Good Things

  "Breaking feminism's waves" by Katha Pollitt, www.theguardian.com. June 3, 2009.

  8 Copy quote

• If a woman says, I am getting these breast implants to gain self confidence, then I have to ask, What kind of a society do we live in where a woman's self-confidence depends on having a dangerous, expensive and painful operation on a perfectly healthy body?

  Katha Pollitt

  Self Confidence, Healthy, Body

  7 Copy quote

• Right now religion has the romantic aura of the forbidden - Christ is cool. We need to bring it into the schools, which kids already hate, and associate it firmly with boredom, regulation, condescension, makework and de facto segregation ... Prayer in the schools will rid us of the bland no-offense ecumenism that is so infuriating to us anticlericals: Oh, so now you say Jews didn't kill Christ - a little on the late side, isn't it?

  Katha Pollitt

  Prayer, Hate, School

  Katha Pollitt (2007). “Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture”, p.30, Modern Library

  4 Copy quote

• While woman sheds the Blood of Life each moon at menstruation, man can only shed the blood of death through warfare and killing.

  Katha Pollitt

  Moon, Men, Blood

  50 Copy quote

• funny how ready people are to believe that counseling, which even when voluntary takes years to modify garden-variety neuroses, can work wonders in months with resistant patients who hate each other.

  Katha Pollitt

  Hate, Believe, Garden

  Katha Pollitt (1995). “Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism”, Vintage

  5 Copy quote

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