Best 196 quotes of Naomi Wolf on MyQuotes

A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.

A culture fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.

After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it.

Aging in women is 'unbeautiful' since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be broken.

Al Gore was a good guy and he wanted to give flextime to American women who are trying to balance work and family, but he couldn't because the business interests are organized, and they don't want it to happen.

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

As soon as a woman's primary social value could no longer be defined as the attainment of virtuous domesticity, the beauty myth redefined it as the attainment of virtuous beauty. It did so to substitute both a new consumer imperative and a new justification for economic unfairness in the workplace where the old ones had lost their hold over newly liberated women.

As women demanded access to power, the power structure used the beauty myth materially to undermine women's advancement.

At least a third of a woman's life is marked with aging; about a third of her body is made of fat. Both symbols are being transformed into operable condition

A utopian future for the Internet could be secured if the heavy-duty influencers - and the grassroots influencers tweeting along - can create a new global organization peopled with defenders of Internet freedom.

a white person who claims to have no impediment of vision in this country is not, I think, telling the whole truth. And when it comes to race relations, not telling the whole truth about the fog one inhabits slows down the work of groping forward.

Beauty discrimination has become necessary, not from the perception that women will not be good enough, but that they will be, as they have been, twice as good.

'Beauty' is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West is is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact.

Beauty' is a currency system like the gold standard.

Become goddesses of disobedience.

Citizens who live or work near protest sites or marches have every right to be free of violence from protesters, and they should never be subjected to destruction of property.

Cosmetic surgery and the ideology of self-improvement may have made women's hope for legal recourse to justice obsolete.

Cosmetic surgery is not "cosmetic," and human flesh is not "plastic." Even the names trivialize what it is. It's not like ironing wrinkles in fabric, or tuning up a car, or altering outmoded clothes, the current metaphors. Trivialization and infantilization pervade the surgeons' language when they speak to women: "a nip," a "tummy tuck."...Surgery changes one forever, the mind as well as the body. If we don't start to speak of it as serious, the millennium of the man-made woman will be upon us, and we will have had no choice.

Cosmetic surgery processes the bodies of woman-made women, who make up the vast majority of its patient pool, into man-made women.

Culture stereotypes women to fit the myth by flattening the feminine into beauty-without-intelligence or intelligence-without-beauty; women are allowed a mind or a body but not both.

Democracy is disruptive. Around the world, peaceful protesters are being demonised for this, but there is no right in a democratic civil society to be free of disruption. Protesters ideally should read Gandhi and King and dedicate themselves to disciplined, long-term, non-violent disruption of business as usual - especially disruption of traffic.

Democracy is disruptive... there is no right in a democratic civil society to be free of disruption.

Demographically, I'm a hippie from San Francisco and I'm not culturally inclined to be sympathetic to states' rights. My cultural heritage is FDR and Medicare and federal government solutions. But if you think through the analysis, strengthening state rights is a good corrective of the aggregation of an over-reaching federal power.

Dissident Natan Sharansky writes that there are two kinds of states - “fear societies” and “free societies.”… The two societies make up 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.

Documentary film without nuanced journalistic sourcing risks being sensational, tendentious or broad-brushed.

Don't sit around waiting for the two corrupted established parties to restore the Constitution or the Republic. The founding generation was birthed by the rabble of all walks of life that got fed up and did risky things because they were captivated by the breath of liberty. There is a looming oligarchy and it is up to the people to organize a grassroots movement and push back.

Even though I'm appalled when racism surfaces, and I personally don't agree with certain policy solutions and a lot of what they believe in, as someone who is very concerned about reinvigorating democracy the Tea Parties are an answer to what I asked for.

Evolutionary biology is crazy because sometimes it seems anybody can draw any conclusion they want.

Excellence, to me, is the state of grace that can descend only when one tunes out all the world's clamor, listens to an inward voice one recognizes as wiser than one's own, and transcribes without fear.

For all the power of video and film, I am not giving up my pen... together they are more than the sum of their parts.

For I conclude that the enemy is not lipstick, but guilt itself; that we deserve lipstick, if we want it, AND free speech; we deserve to be sexual AND serious--or whatever we please; we are entitled to wear cowboy boots to our own revolution.

Frankly, liberals are out of the habit of communicating with anyone outside their own in cohort. We have a cultural problem with self-righteousness and elitism.

From 1970 onwards, our culture told both sexes that individual expression was paramount. And for women, that was defined as the right to choose an interesting a career, a high-status mate, the desirable handbag or vacation, the perfect family size, and a definitionally fruitless quest for 'perfection.'

From a constitutional point of view George W. Bush passing through the Patriot Act is no worse than Obama renewing it.

George W. Bush legalized torture, but Obama is legalizing impunity. He promised to roll stuff back, but he is institutionalizing these things forever. It is terrifying and the left doesn't seem to recognize it.

Germany was a parliamentary democracy with many, many humane and decent people who kept writing in their journals - I've read these journals, these memoirs - "Surely our leaders will stop this nonsense. Surely someone will take on these thugs. Surely the pendulum will swing back." Everyone was sitting at home going, "Well, they haven't come for me. This is crazy, but surely someone's going to take care of it." We all have to take care of it.

“Healthy" and “diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society makes for its own purposes. Women have long been defined as sick as a means of subjecting them to social control.

Historically, when a leader has deployed his own military against civilians, it's never been good. There's never been a time where it's ended well.

How is it even sustainable in 21st-century America, that women earn, on average, 77 cents for every dollar earned by men?

I am delighted to be joining 'Guardian U.S.''s team as a weekly columnist, and to have the chance to address American and global current events on its distinguished platform. 'Guardian U.S.' brings the 'Guardian''s hard-hitting investigative brand to a new focus on American news and opinion.

I am worried that Americans I have met on my journey across the country, seem very hopeless and are feeling powerless to make change and are feeling passive. I'm not blaming them. But one thing we need at a time like this is for people to feel empowered and angry.

I argue that we deserve the choice to do whatever we want with our faces and bodies without being punished by an ideology that is using attitudes, economic pressure, and even legal judgments regarding women's appearance to undermine us psychologically and politically.

I did not imagine that pregnant women were 'naturally' any more sensitive or exalted than people in any other condition; only it seemed as if - perhaps because we are in such a twilight state, a melting down and reconstituting of the self - there was more opportunity to hear strains from what must be the other side, the moral music of the sphere.

I don't think we've got the concept in the West that male desire degrades men. Or that if men become sexually active, they become debased in some way, or slutty. Or lose status.

I don't want people to be suicidal. I want them to be energized and angry.

I don't want to overstate tantra because I'm sure there are scumbags everywhere, but it seems like it's an ideology that actually respects female desire.

If people are taking my book seriously and organizing, getting into office, caring about the constitution, and not waiting for someone else to lead them, I think, God bless them. All of us should be doing that. The left should be doing that.

If people wake up, think critically, and get angry, we get connected to that courage that the founding generation meant us to have. History shows when millions just don't go along, resist at any level - and I'm talking about all the way up to bipartisan impeachment and arrest of the leaders of the coup - then it can't happen.

If the whole world is a battlefield, then the United States is also a battlefield.

I'll go anywhere to talk about the Constitution. I believe in trans-partisan organizing around these issues.