Kate Millett Quotes (41 Quotes)

Psychiatry causes so much death.

The involuntary character of psychiatric treatment is at odds with the spirit and ethics of medicine itself.

If only no one had told them I was mad. Then I wouldn't be.

The care of children. . . is infinitely better left to the best-trained practitioners of both sexes who have chosen it as a vocation, rather than to harried and all too frequently unhappy persons with little time or taste for the work of educating minds.

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

They weren't crazy. They were tired of being locked up. Even I could see that.

In those days, when you got boxed, that was it. A lot of old people were there because somebody wanted the farm. It was about property. People are treated like property.

The image of the woman as we know it is an image created by men and fashioned to suit their needs.

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

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.

You won't do any more housework? Then you go to the bin.

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.

We have to have an emancipation proclamation for children. What is at issue is children's rights not the right of sexual access to children.

Isn't privacy about keeping taboos in their place?

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

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

I saw hell. The hospital had divided and conquered pretty successfully.

Coitus can scarcely be said to take place in a vacuum although of itself it appears a biological and physical activity, it is set so deeply within the larger context of human affairs that it serves as a charged microcosm of the variety of attitudes and values to which culture subscribes. Among other things, it may serve as a model of sexual politics on an individual or personal plane.

What is our freedom fight about? Is it about the liberation of children or just having sex with them?

My sister said, You're making it hard for all us housewives in Nebraska.

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

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.

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

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.

I'm slammed with an identity that can no longer say a word; mute with responsibility.

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

It was horrifying. You wouldn't believe how people are treated there. You could see that these people had withdrawn so far that they just lived in their own minds. They did terrible things to themselves.

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

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.

Given the conditions under which you're a young person in this society, many things would be at least as important to you as your sexuality.

With the first act of cruelty committed in the name of revolution, with the first murder, with the first purge and execution, we have lost the revolution.

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

This country is becoming increasingly authoritarian. It's based on capital punishment.

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.

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

They are more beautiful than anything in the world, kinetic sculptures, perfect form in motion.

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.

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

This country is kind of run by capital punishment. If they can do kill you, what can they do short of that They can lock you up.

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.

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