Democracy is disruptive... there is no right in a democratic civil society to be free of disruption. - Naomi Wolf
Dissident Natan Sharansky writes that there are two kinds of states -- fear societies and free societies, 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. - Naomi Wolf
Excellence, to me, is the state of grace that can descend only when one tunes out all the world's clamour, listens to an inward voice one recognizes as wiser than one's own, and transcribes without fear. - Naomi Wolf
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. - Naomi Wolf
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. - Naomi Wolf
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.' - Naomi Wolf
In 70s America, protest used to be very effective, but in subsequent decades municipalities have sneakily created a web of 'overpermiticisation' - requirements that were designed to stifle freedom of assembly and the right to petition government for redress of grievances, both of which are part of our first amendment. - Naomi Wolf
In a fascist shift, reporters start to face more and more harassment, and they have to be more and more courageous simply in order to do their jobs. - Naomi Wolf
It is important to distinguish between the power of the Internet to make the great change it can, and the limits and vulnerabilities of that change without real-time political mobilization deployed globally to protect those who venture out, especially in closed societies, into the heady new vistas it offers. - Naomi Wolf
It is never smart, even in a strong democracy, to declare some debate off limits. In a weakening democracy it is catastrophic. - Naomi Wolf
Obstacles, of course, are developmentally necessary: they teach kids strategy, patience, critical thinking, resilience and resourcefulness. - Naomi Wolf
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 or your own unfeminine inadequacy. Women have learned to submit to pain by hearing authority figures - doctors, priests, psychiatrists - tell us that what we feel is not pain. - Naomi Wolf
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
Poststructuralism. . . . is a form of literary criticism that uses elaborate wordplay to prove its central premise, that all language is internally contradictory and has no fixed meaning. - Naomi Wolf
She wins who calls herself beautiful and challenges the world to change to truly see her. - Naomi Wolf
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
The idea that women are innately gentle is a fantasy, and a historically recent one. Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, is depicted as wreathed in male human skulls; the cruel entertainments of the Romans drew audiences as female as they were male; Boudicca led her British troops bloodily into battle. - Naomi Wolf
The last thing the consumer index wants men and women to do is to figure out how to love one another: The $1.5 trillion retail-sales industry depends on sexual estrangement between men and women, and is fuelled by sexual dissatisfaction. Ads do not sell sex--that would be counterproductive, if it meant that heterosexual women and men turned to one another and were gratified. What they sell is sexual discontent. - Naomi Wolf
The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold. Or, if your ad revenue or your seven-figure salary or your privileged sexual status depend on it, it is an operable condition. - Naomi Wolf
The symbolic value of having an African-American president has certainly eased some racial tensions in America, but they're not gone. - Naomi Wolf
We should be telling girls what they already know but rarely see affirmed: that the lives they lead inside their own self-contained bodies; the skills they attain through their own concentration and rigor, and the unique phase in their lives during which they may explore boys and eroticism at their own pace - these are magical. And they constitute the entrance point to a life cycle of a sexuality that should be held sacred. - Naomi Wolf
What editors are obliged to appear to say that men want from women is actually what their advertisers want from women. - Naomi Wolf
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