Feminists From The United States

"Baby, Oh the secret's safe with me. There's nowhere else in the world that I could ever be. And baby don't it feel like I'm all alone? Who's gonna be there after the last angel has flown And I've lost my way back home? I think nobody knows, no. I said nobody knows. Nobody cares.It's win or lose, not how you play the game. And the road to darkness has a way Of always knowing my name. But I think nobody knows, No no. Nobody knows, no no no no."

"Dear Mr. President, Come take a walk with me. Let's pretend we're just two people And you're not better than me. I'd like to ask you some questions If we can speak honestly.What do you feel when you see All the homeless on the street? Who do you pray for at night Before you go to sleep? What do you feel When you look in the mirror? Are you proud?"

"Go away, Give me a chance to miss you. Say goodbye, It'll make me want to kiss you. I love you so Much more when you're not here, Watchin all the bad shows, Drinking all of my beer.I don't believe Adam and Eve Spent every goddamn day together. If you give me some room, there will be room enough for two."

"I'm not here for your entertainment. You don't really want to mess with me tonight. Just stop and take a second. I was fine before you walked into my life. 'Cause you know it's over Before it began. Keep your drink, just give me the money. It's just you and your hand tonight."

"So, so what? I'm still a rock star, I got my rock moves, And I don't need you. And guess what, I'm having more fun. And now that were done, I'm gonna show you tonight I'm alright, I'm just fine. And you're a tool. So, so what? I am a rock star, I got my rock moves. And I don't want you tonight."

"I'm safe, Up high. Nothing can touch me. But why do I feel this party's over? No pain, Inside. You're like protection. How do I feel this good sober?"

"I don't wanna be the girl who has to fill the silence; The quiet scares me 'cause it screams the truth."

"No I don't believe you When you say don't come around here no more. I want to remind you, You said we wouldn't be apart. No, I don't believe you When you say you don't need me anymore. So don't pretend To not love me at all."

"How did I become so obnoxious? What is it with you that makes me act like this? I've never been this nasty. Can't you tell that this is just a contest?,br>The one that wins will be the one that hits the hardest. But baby I don't mean it. I mean it, I promise."

"Alright sir, Sure I'll have another one, it's early. Three olives, shake it up, I like it dirty (dirty). Tequila for my friend it makes her flirty (flirty). Trust me. I'm the instigator of underwear, Showing up here and there uh oh (oh no). I'm always on a mission from the get go. So what if it's only 1 o'clock in the afternoon? It's never too soon to send out all the invitations to the last night (of your life)."

"This used to be a funhouse, But now it's full of evil clowns. It's time to start the countdown. I'm gonna burn it down down down; I'm gonna burn it down."

"Have you ever fed a lover With just your hands? Close your eyes and trust it, just trust it. Have you ever thrown A fist full of glitter in the air? Have you ever looked fear in the face, And said I just don't care?"

"So raise your glass if you are wrong in all the right ways, All my underdogs. We will never be, never be anything but loud And "Nitty-Gritty", Dirty little freaks. Won't you come and come and Raise your glass! Just come on and come on and Raise your glass."

"Pretty pretty please, Don't you ever ever feel Like you're less than Fuckin' perfect? Pretty pretty please, If you ever ever feel Like you're nothing, You're fuckin' perfect to me."

"I think I've finally had enough; I think I maybe think too much. I think this might be it for us (blow me one last kiss). You think I'm just too serious; I think you're full of shit. My head is spinning so (blow me one last kiss). Just when I think it can't get worse, I've had a shit day (no!) You've had a shit day (no!) We've had a shit day (no!). I think that life's too short for this; I'll pack my ignorance and bliss. I think I've had enough of this. Blow me (one last kiss)."

"Where there is desire, There is gonna be a flame. Where there is a flame, Someone’s bound to get burned. But just because it burns Doesn’t mean you’re gonna die. You’ve gotta get up and try, try, try."

"Just give me a reason, Just a little bit's enough. Just a second we're not broken just bent And we can learn to love again. It's in the stars; It's been written in the scars on our hearts. We're not broken just bent, And we can learn to love again."

"True love, true love. It must be true love. Nothing else can break my heart like True love, true love. It must be true love. No one else can break my heart like you."

"One step, two steps, counting tiles on the floor; Three steps, four steps, guess this means that I'm a whore. Uh-oh, hell no, how long till I reach the door? Fuck me, my feet are sore.I'm wearing last night's dress and I look like a hot ass mess. Although my hair looks good cause I haven't slept yet!"

"I want to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible."

"No no no no no! No! You're done!"

"You could kill me right now and I will be permanently dead, and I would willing do that if would end world hunger and poverty. That's a sacrifice! Saying I'm gonna let some people beat me and torture me and kill me, and a day and a half I'm gonna rise up and become what I was before, (...) That's not a sacrifice, that's a bad weekend!"

"Is there anything that one couldn't believe based on faith?"

"I don't think it's an accurate definition of morality."

"The police [enforcement institution] is a necessary organization and [in the cases where it is corrupt and/or abusive] it’s worth reforming. The Catholic Church is not a necessary organization. It is a nonsensical organization; a bunch of fat lazy do-nothings who have been living off the public dole for centuries. The fact that they can do good, is a testament to the fact that there are good people who will do good. But the organization is corrupt, it is poison to its core and it serves no essential good purpose – no true purpose. It’s lie after lie, promoting harm to real people and you can sit there and engage in histrionics and yelling at yourself [while] on-hold all you want, but the Catholic Church is not a force for good and fuck you for saying so."

"Existence is a temporal condition."

"So basically what you're saying is you believe this to be true despite the fact that you have no evidence to support that [statement]"

"Evidently god stupidly created a system where the devil wins by default. Okay, I'm gonna set up this game with you and I'm gonna give you all the chips and the chips have to voluntarily choose to come over to my side of the table. Who sets up a game like that?!"

"Your position is ... one where there is a god who has an important message for mankind, and somehow he only reveals it to certain individuals who then write this down and thousands of years after this initial revelation, we have to rely on copies of copies of translations of copies by anonymous authors with no originals, and the textual testimony to a miracle, for example the loaves and fishes; there’s no amount of reports - anecdotal testimonial reports - that could be sufficient to justify that this event actually happened as reported. No amount. And anything that would qualify as a god would clearly understand this, and if it wanted to convey this information to people in a way that was believable, would not be relying on text to do so, and this for me is the nail in the coffin for Christianity. The god that Christians believe in is amazingly stupid if it wants to actually achieve its goal of spreading this information to humanity by relying on text; by relying on languages that die out; by relying on anecdotal testimony. That's not a pathway to truth! And anything that would qualify for a god should know this, which means either that God doesn’t exist or it doesn't care enough about those people who understand the nature of evidence to actually present it. Now which of those possibilities do you think is accurate?" ... "Why would you believe anything on faith? Faith isn't a pathway to truth. Every religion has some sort of faith, people take things on, you know, - if faith is your pathway, you can't distinguish between Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, any of these others. How is it that you use reason as a path to truth in every endeavor of your life, and then when it comes to the ‘ultimate truth’ - the most important truth - you're saying that faith is required. And how does that reflect on a god (who supposedly exists and wants you to have this information); what kind of god requires faith instead of evidence? ... I have reasonable expectations based on evidence. I have trust that has been earned. I will grant trust tentatively. I don't have faith. Faith is the excuse people give for believing something when they don't have evidence."

"Despite people's claims to the contrary, I think that a proper application of skepticism when viewing religious claims does necessarily lead to atheism."

"A god that does not manifest in reality is indistinguishable from a god that does not exist."

"And yet people ask what's the harm of religion - and we cite all these different problems with religion: the global gag-rules and things like that , the oppression of different people - but there's a bigger harm with religion, and it's the reason why I'm outspoken about it, and that's because the average feel-good Johnny-in-the-pew person who is decent and kind and loving and good to their family and generally a good person to be around has polluted their mind to the point where they are unable to take credit for their accomplishments and responsibility for their actions. They are unable to interact on an interpersonal level with the people around them, to build a community in this cooperative society where that is absolutely essential. They have got this mentality that they are worthless without God."

"A god that rewards credulity, a god that sanctions slavery, is unworthy of any kind of reverence or respect or devotion."

"Your god isn't real. He's not moral. The Bible isn't moral. Islam isn't moral. None of these religious systems— anything that deteriorates the value of human beings, anything that hangs on to Bronze Age ideals about genocide and slavery and murder and deference to higher powers. None of those things are moral. We've graduated beyond that, and I'm sorry that we've had to drag religions kicking and screaming into the 21st century, but some of you gotta let this stuff go. You're not gonna get anywhere until you realize that it's OK not to be afraid. It's OK to say, "you know, I think slavery is wrong. I think slavery was probably always wrong. I think that you're a good person, and yeah it does sound like a crappy system.""

"I made a list of things that I might consider sin if the concept of sin were valid:Number 1: Credulity, gullibility. I'd say that's a sin.Voluntary willful ignorance. I'd say that's a sin.Letting fear prevent you from understanding reality. I'd call that a sin.Limiting the rights and freedoms of others in order to make them abide by your standards. That's a sin.Sacrificing the mental, emotional and physical well-being of a child in deference to your religion. That's a sin.Wasting the one and only life that you know you're going to have, worrying about and working for an afterlife that somebody told you might be there. That's a sin."

"You are better than your god. You are better than your religion. So am I, so is damn near everybody on the planet. I wish you people would wake up and see this. Stop apologizing for this! [holds up The Bible] It's not the Good Book, there's nothing good about it. All it does is poison minds. All it does is make you sacrifice your humanity— the only thing that you have that is of any value— in order to sit around in deference to your gods."

"While many Christians claim divine revelation — some even claiming that the truth has been revealed to them in such a way that there's no possibility that they could be wrong — there's hardly any points of doctrine upon which all these purported conduits of divine revelation agree. Which means that some if not all of them are wrong. And if you want to know what's wrong with Judaism, you ask a Christian. If you want to know what's wrong with Christianity, you ask a Muslim. If you want to know what's wrong with Catholicism, or Protestantism, or Calvinism, Hypercalvinism, Neocalvinism, Southern Baptists, the Church of Christ, or the First Baptist Church of Memphis, you can go to the Second Baptist Church of Memphis or any other denomination."

"It's a meaningless panacea when we invent a god that can do anything and be anything… It serves as an answer to every question and an explanation for nothing."

"Efficient exploitation requires that those exploited be relatively mobile, self-animating and self-maintaining—the more so as the work in question requires greater intelligence, attention or ingenuity. But it also requires that they not be free enough, strong enough or willful enough to resist, escape or significantly misfit the situation of exploitation."

"While what was said [in reference to the content Frye personally removed from her Wikipedia entry] could easily be extrapolated from my work, I have never written a word linking C. S. Lewis to male prostitution before. I am not Captain Obvious from Hotels.com!"

"If we have no intuition of ourselves as independent, unmediated beings in the world, then we cannot conceive ourselves surviving our liberation; for what our liberation will do is dissolve the structures and dismantle the mechanisms by which Woman is mediated by Man. If we cannot imagine ourselves surviving this, we certainly will not make it happen."

"The forces of men’s material and perceptual violence mold Woman to dependence upon Man, in every meaning of 'dependence': contingent upon; conditional upon; necessitated by; defined in terms of; incomplete or unreal without; requiring the support or assistance of; being a subordinate part of; being an appurtenance to."

"Western philosophy and science have for the most part been committed to the Simplicity Theory of Truth: the simplest theory that accounts for the data is the true theory. (Theories are simplest which postulate the fewest entities, require the fewest hypotheses, generate predictions by the fewest calculations, etc.) ...If someone believes that the world is made for him to have dominion over and he is made to exploit it, he must believe that he and the world are so made that he can, at least in principle, achieve and maintain dominion over everything. But you can’t put things to use if you don’t know how they work. So he must believe that he can, at least in principle, understand everything. If the world exists for man, it must be usably intelligible, which means it must be simple enough for him to understand. A usable universe is an intelligible universe is a simple universe. ...And so it goes with the philosophy and the science of The Arrogant Eye."

"Men see with arrogant eyes which organize everything seen with reference to themselves and their own interests."

"What the exploiter needs is that the will and intelligence of the victim be disengaged from the projects of resistance and escape but that they not be simply broken or destroyed. Ideally, the dis-integration and mis-integration of the victim should accomplish the detachment of the victim's will and intelligence from the victim’s own interests and their attachment to the interests of the exploiter. This will effect a displacement or dissolution of self-respect and will undermine the victim’s intolerance of coercion. With that, the situation transcends the initial paradigmatic form or structure of coercion; for if people don’t mind doing what you want them to do, then, in a sense, you can’t really be making them do it. In the limiting case, the victim’s will and intelligence are wholly transferred to a full engagement in the pursuit of the dominating person’s interests. The “problem” had been that there were two parties with divergent interests; this sort of solution (which is very elegant, as that word is used in logic) is to erase the conflict by reducing the number of interested parties to one. This radical solution can properly be called “enslavement.”"

"Efficient exploitation of “human resources” requires that the structures that refer the others’ actions to the exploiter’s ends must extend beneath the victim’s skin. The exploiter has to bring about the partial disintegration and re(mis)integration of the others’ matter, parts and properties so that as organized systems the exploited are oriented to some degree by habits, skills, schedules, values and tastes to the exploiter’s ends rather than, as they would otherwise be, to ends of their own. In particular, the manipulations which adapt the exploited to a niche in another’s economy must accomplish a great reduction of the victim’s intolerance of coercion."

"Cages. Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would have trouble going past the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon."

"People have always had these weird things about how you have to be really good looking to be a singer. I mean, it's not like Stevie Nicks or Linda Ronstadt were dogs. It's not like this is some new thing. But there was at one point a larger variety, but now the catchphrase is "the whole package," the "American Idol" reality that you're a model first and a singer second."

"Because we don't wanna assimilate to someone else's (boy) standards of what is or isn't."

"We wanted to start a magazine, and Allison Wolfe and Molly Neuman from the band Bratmobile had started a little fanzine called Riot Grrrl and we were writing little things for it. I'd always wanted to start a big magazine with really cool, smart writing in it, and I wanted to see if the other punk girls in D.C. that I was meeting were interested in that. So I called a meeting and found a space for it, and it just turned into this sort of consciousness-raising thing. I realized really quickly that a magazine wasn't the way to go. People wanted to be having shows, and teaching each other how to play music, and writing fanzines, so that started happening. It got some press attention, and girls in other places would be like "I wanna do that. I wanna start one of those.""