Quotes by Kate Millett

About Kate Millett:

Katherine Murray is an American feminist writer, educator, artist, and activist. She attended Oxford University and was the first American woman to be awarded a postgraduate degree with first-class honors by St. Hilda's. She has been described as "a seminal influence on second-wave feminism", and is best known for her 1970 book Sexual Politics," which was her doctoral dissertation at Columbia University. Journalist Liza Featherstone attributes previously unimaginable "legal abortion, greater professional equality between the sexes and a sexual freedom" being made possible partially due to Millett's efforts.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Politics is repetition. It is not change. Change is something beyond what we call politics. Change is the essence politics is supposed to be the means to bring into being.

Kate Millett

This is how psychiatry has functioned-as a kind of property arm of the government, who can put you away if your husband doesn't like you.

Kate Millett

As women, we're probably more protective of children. Also, we've been minors all of our history.

Kate Millett

Psychiatry causes so much death.

Kate Millett

The great mass of women throughout history have been confined to the cultural level of animal life in providing the male with sexual outlet and exercising the animal functions of reproduction and care of the young.

Kate Millett

Everybody believes in psychiatry; it's supposed to be for our own good. Let psychiatry prove that anybody has an illness, and I'd concede, but there is no physical proof.

Kate Millett

What is the future of the woman's movement? How in the hell do I know? I don't run it.

Kate Millett

What is the natural reaction when told you have a hopeless mental illness? That diagnosis does you in; that, and the humiliation of being there. I mean, the indignity you're subjected to. My God.

Kate Millett

Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different.

Kate Millett

Mother had committed me for life. This is where I felt betrayed the most.

Kate Millett

The concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit, since love is the only circumstance in which the female is (ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity.

Kate Millett

It would appear that love is dead. Or very likely in a bad way.

Kate Millett

Men and women were declared equal one morning and everybody could divorce each other by postcard.

Kate Millett

We're more sexually repressed than men, having been given a much more strict puritanical code of behavior than men ever have.

Kate Millett

However muted its present appearance may be, sexual dominion obtains nevertheless as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of power.

Kate Millett

I was supposed to be women's lib, and now I'd exceeded it and gone over into international politics.

Kate Millett

We are naive and moralistic women. We are human beings who find politics a blight upon the human condition. And do not know how one copes with it except through politics.

Kate Millett

Aren't women prudes if they don't and prostitutes if they do?

Kate Millett

Many women do not recognize themselves as discriminated against; no better proof could be found of the totality of their conditioning.

Kate Millett

A sexual revolution begins with the emancipation of women, who are the chief victims of patriarchy, and also with the ending of homosexual oppression.

Kate Millett

We are women. We are a subject people who have inherited an alien culture.

Kate Millett

Author Bio

  • NameKate Millett
  • DescriptionWriter, activist
  • BornSeptember 14, 1934
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Film Director; Sculptor
  • AwardsCourage Award For The Arts; National Women's Hall Of Fame