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Naomi Wolf

22 quotes

“The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behavior and not appearance.”
Naomi Wolf (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it.”
Naomi Wolf (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. So even if we agree that sexual imagery is in fact a language, it is clearly one that is already heavily edited to protect men’s sexual—and hence social—confidence while undermining that of women.”
Naomi Wolf (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What becomes of a man who acquires a beautiful woman, with her 'beauty' his sole target? He sabotages himself. He has gained no friend, no ally, no mutual trust: She knows quite well why she has been chosen. He has succeeded in buying a mutually suspicious set of insecurities. He does gain something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive.”
Naomi Wolf (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Women's dieting has become what Yale psychologist Judith Rodin calls a 'normative obsession,' a never-ending passion play given international coverage out of all proportion to the health risks associated with obesity, and using emotive language that does not figure even in discussions of alcohol or tobacco abuse. […] Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”
Naomi Wolf (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today's woman has become her 'beauty.' Her reproductive value, as the 'aesthetic' value of her face and body today, 'came to be seen as a sacred trust, one that she must constantly guard in the interest of her race.'”
Naomi Wolf (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Health makes good propaganda. “'Proof' that women's activities outside the home are detrimental to the health and welfare of themselves, their families and the country as a whole” lent impetus, writes Ann Oakley, to the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity. The ovaries were seen as collective property rather than the woman's own business, as the face and body outline are seen today. Who can argue with health?”
Naomi Wolf (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You do not win by struggling to the top of a caste system, you win by refusing to be trapped within one at all.”
Naomi Wolf (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was completely dumbfounded but I actually had this vision of . . . of Jesus, and I'm sure it was Jesus. [...] But it wasn't this crazy theological thing; it was just this figure who was the most perfected human being - full of light and full of love. And completely accessible. Any of us could be like that. There was light coming out of him holographically, simply because he was unclouded. But any of us could become that as human beings.”
Naomi Wolf (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On a mystical level, it was complete joy and happiness and there were tears running down my face. On a conscious level, when I came out of it I was absolutely horrified because I'm Jewish. This was not the thing I'm supposed to have confront me.”
Naomi Wolf (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Experiencing writers' block, Wolf sought specialist assistance. Being induced in "a light meditative state" (Wolf), she was required to descent downstairs in a relaxation technique.] I opened the door and there he was [...] I wasn't myself in this visual experience [...] I was a 13-year-old boy sitting next to him [Jesus] and feeling feelings I'd never felt in my lifetime, of a 13-year-old boy being with an older male who he really loves and admires and loves to be in the presence of. It was probably the most profound experience of my life. I haven't talked about it publicly [before].”
Naomi Wolf (born 1962) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Revered as a feminist icon, then slated for being an intellectual lightweight, Naomi Wolf has experienced highs as well as lows . . . and then she met Jesus", The Herald (Scotland, January 22, 2006)
“The First Amendment was designed to allow for disruption of business as usual. It is not a quiet and subdued amendment or right.”
Naomi Wolf (born 1962) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The First Amendment and the Obligation to Peacefully Disrupt in a Free Society (October 22, 2011), Blog Post at huffingtonpost.com
“It was amazing to go to Belfast, which does not yet have 5G, and feel the earth, sky, air, human experience, feel the way it did in the 1970s. Calm, still peaceful, natural, restful.”
Naomi Wolf (born 1962) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Deleted tweet (July 5, 2019), as cited in "Naomi Klein — my life being mistaken for a notorious conspiracy theorist", The Sunday Times (September 3, 2023)
“It was the doctors in pre-Nazi Germany in the early thirties who were co-opted by the National Socialists and sent to do exactly what we're seeing kind of replaying now. It was the medical organisations in the early thirties who were emboldened to be the arbiters of, you know, "life worthy of life, life unworthy of life"’, um, and to, kind of, medicalise and pathologise dissent or difference. So we're seeing wholesale purchasing of the medical establishment in the United States, in Britain and in countries around the world to do things much more serious.”
Naomi Wolf (born 1962) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: GB News broke broadcasting rules over 'Nazi Germany' vaccine claims", The Jewish Chronicle (May 9, 2023)
“The books and films they see survey from the young boy's point of view his first touch of a girl's thighs, his first glimpse of her breasts. The girls sit listening, absorbing, their familiar breasts estranged as if they were not part of their bodies, their thighs crossed self-consciously, learning how to leave their bodies and watch them from the outside. Since their bodies are seen from the point of view of strangeness and desire, it is no wonder that what should be familiar, felt to be whole, becomes estranged and divided into parts. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys; that takes up the space that should be devoted to finding out about what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking it and getting it.”
Naomi Wolf (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For the first time in history, children are growing up whose earliest sexual imprinting derives not from a living human being, or fantasies of their own; since the 1960s pornographic upsurge, the sexuality of children has begun to be shaped in response to cues that are no longer human. […] Today's children and young men and women have sexual identities that spiral around paper and celluloid phantoms: from Playboy to music videos to the blank female torsos in women’s magazines, features obscured and eyes extinguished, they are being imprinted with a sexuality that is mass-produced, deliberately dehumanizing and inhuman.”
Naomi Wolf (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Just as 'beauty' is not related to sex, neither is it related to love. Even having it does not bestow love on a woman, though the beauty myth claims that it must. It is because 'beauty' is so hostile to love that many beautiful women are so cynical about men. […] The beautiful woman is excluded forever from the rewards and responsibilities of particular human love, for she cannot trust that any man will love her 'for herself alone.' A hellish doubt inheres in the myth that makes impersonal 'beauty' a prerequisite for love: Where does love go when beauty vanishes? And, if a woman cannot be loved 'for herself alone,' for whom is she being loved?”
Naomi Wolf (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1962) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, Chapter One, 'The Founders and the Fragility of Democracy,' (Chelsea Green Publishing (2007), p. 27
“[[w:Alex Cohen|[Alex] Cohen]]: There's never a line in this book that says George W. Bush is just like Hitler or Mussolini or Stalin, but there's enough that after a while there definitely seems to be the air of some comparisons happening. Isn't that a bit extreme to compare our president to these historical figures? Ms Wolf: Well, again, I stick very rigorously to the evidence. You had the Nazis unloaded coffins at night; we saw coffins being unloaded at night. They talked about enhanced interrogation, meaning torture; Karl Rove talked about enhanced interrogation, meaning torture. They said, you know, we've got to invade Czechoslovakia because it's a station ground for terrorists. And we said we've got to invade Iraq, a country we're not at war with, because they are torturing their ethnic minorities, it's a station ground for terrorists and they hate our freedoms. I don't need to draw an analogy. The analogies are there.”
Naomi Wolf (born 1962) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Naomi Wolf Likens Bush to Hitler" NPR (November 19, 2007)
“JS [Justine Sharrock]: How is your comparison of Obama to Hitler any different from someone at a Tea Party holding up a placard of Obama with a Hitler mustache? NW: Those signs are offensive. If only the Holocaust was just about imposing health care on my people. Obama has done things like Hitler did. Let me be very careful here. The National Socialists rounded people up and held them without trial, signed legislation that gave torture impunity, and spied on their citizens, just as Obama has. It isn't a question of what has been done that Hitler did. It's what does every dictator do, on the left or the right, that is being done here and now. The real fight isn't left or right but between forces of democracy across the spectrum and the forces of tyranny.”
Naomi Wolf (born 1962) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From an interview (March 30, 2010)] on AlterNet, as cited in "Crying Wolf", The New Republic (March 31, 2010)
“So what can be done? Well, first of all, I can't believe that I'm saying this - a lifelong former Democrat and the child of hippies - but thank God for the Second Amendment. Because one reason the United States is not, you know, entirely enslaved like Australia or Shanghai or Canada, in many ways – we're relatively freer compared to those countries – is that we have, you know, millions of owners of guns. And I'm a peaceful person, this should not be taken out of context, but it is harder to subjugate an armed population. And this is why our Founders gave us the Second Amendment, for exactly times like these. They knew that it was harder to subjugate an armed population. But, you know, may that be the worst case scenario. I really hope that it doesn't devolve into civil war, which is really what the next thing is in history when you have an occupying force, which is what the WHO will be, you know, by next week.”
Naomi Wolf (born 1962) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In conversation with Charlie Kirk "On YouTube, Naomi Wolf says that the WHO will occupy the U.S. next week, and that could trigger a civil war" transcript from Media Matters for America (May 23, 2022)