30+ Katha Pollitt Quotes (Eloquent, Insightful And Honest)

Katha Pollitt is an American poet, essayist, and critic. She is best known for her work as an essayist for The Nation magazine, where she has been a columnist since 1994. Pollitt is also the author of several books of poetry, including The Mind-Body Problem, The Prodigal, and The Cutting Room.

Top 10 Katha Pollitt Quotes

1. While woman sheds the Blood of Life each moon at menstruation, man can only shed the blood of death through warfare and killing.
2. Can currently existing religion be disentangled from the misogyny of its texts, its traditions, and its practices? ... a resounding NO: misogyny not only pervades the major faiths, it's baked in.
3. Misogyny runs deeper than religion.
4. When your claim to be victims of secularism rests on Wal-Mart greeters wishing shoppers Happy Holidays, you are clearly a bunch of great big babies.
5. One of the very important ideas of feminism for me has always been women helping and supporting each other.
6. In a better world, science teachers would teach creationism along with evolution as an exercise in critical thinking.
7. We live, I am trying to say, in an epidemic of male violence against women.
8. ... on the whole 'blasphemy' has been a force for good in human history. It is part of the process by which millions of people have come to reject theocracy and think for themselves.
9. funny how ready people are to believe that counseling, which even when voluntary takes years to modify garden-variety neuroses, can work wonders in months with resistant patients who hate each other.
10. For me, religion is serious business - a farrago of authoritarian nonsense, misogyny and humble pie, the eternal enemy of human happiness and freedom.

Katha Pollitt Short Quotes

• For me, to be a feminist is to answer the question 'Are women human?' with a yes.
• Like Broadway, the novel, and G-d, feminism has been declared dead many times
• Every inch of progress is won in struggle.
• Old, in America, is not a good thing to be.

Katha Pollitt Famous Quotes And Sayings

Young women need to know that abortion rights and abortion access are not presents bestowed or retracted by powerful men (or women) - Presidents, Supreme Court justices, legislators, lobbyists - but freedoms won, as freedom always is, by people struggling on their own behalf. — Katha Pollitt

A feminist is a person who answers 'yes' to the question 'Are women human?' Feminism is not about whether women are better than, worse than or identical with men...It's about justice, fairness, and access to the broad range of human experience. — Katha Pollitt

Whether you look at Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism, wherever a distinction of sex is made, it is to the advantage of men. If you think of religions as if they were novels, the authors are men, and so are the major characters. — Katha Pollitt

I'm anticlerical, not antireligion. If somebody believes there is God, I'm not interested in trying to persuade that person there is no intelligent design to the universe. Where I become interested and wake up is about the temporal power of religion, things like prayer in schools, or Catholic-secular hospital mergers. — Katha Pollitt

Why must the woman apologize for not having a baby just because she happened to get pregnant? It's as if we think motherhood is the default setting for a woman's life from first period to menopause, and she needs a note from God not to say yes to every zygote that knocks on her door. — Katha Pollitt

If a woman says, I am getting these breast implants to gain self confidence, then I have to ask, What kind of a society do we live in where a woman's self-confidence depends on having a dangerous, expensive and painful operation on a perfectly healthy body? — Katha Pollitt

Thanks to feminism, women can now acquire status in two ways: through marriage or their own achievements. Cure cancer or marry the man who does, either way society will applaud. Unless he marries into the British royal family, it doesn't work that way for men. Wives shed no glory on their husbands. Having tea with Nancy Reagan is an honor; having tea with Denis Thatcher is a joke. — Katha Pollitt

My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war. — Katha Pollitt

When you consider that God could have commanded anything he wanted--anything!--the Ten [Commandments] have got to rank as one of the great missed moral opportunities of all time. How different history would have been had he clearly and unmistakably forbidden war, tyranny, taking over other people's countries, slavery, exploitation of workers, cruelty to children, wife-beating, stoning, treating women--or anyone--as chattel or inferior beings. — Katha Pollitt

We need to say that women have sex, have abortions, are at peace with the decision and move on with their lives. We need to say that is their right, and, moreover, it’s good for everyone that they have this right: The whole society benefits when motherhood is voluntary. When we gloss over these truths we unintentionally promote the very stigma we’re trying to combat. — Katha Pollitt

We tend to tell strangers what we think will make us sound good. I myself, to my utter amazement, informed a telephone pollster that I exercised regularly, a bare-faced lie. — Katha Pollitt

For many people, feminism is one of those words of which, as St. Augustine said about time, they know the meaning as long as no one is asking. — Katha Pollitt

Right now religion has the romantic aura of the forbidden - Christ is cool. We need to bring it into the schools, which kids already hate, and associate it firmly with boredom, regulation, condescension, makework and de facto segregation ... Prayer in the schools will rid us of the bland no-offense ecumenism that is so infuriating to us anticlericals: Oh, so now you say Jews didn't kill Christ - a little on the late side, isn't it? — Katha Pollitt

If you run into trouble doing what's expected, people sympathize with you, while if you try something else and flop everyone says, You see? — Katha Pollitt

When it comes to ideas - and religions are, among other things, ideas - there is no right not to be offended. ... In fact, if you need laws ... to protect your faith, maybe your faith is weak. — Katha Pollitt

Every gain women have made in the past two hundred years has been in the face of experts insisting they couldn't do it and didn't really want to. — Katha Pollitt

Life Lessons by Katha Pollitt

1. Katha Pollitt's work emphasizes the importance of speaking out against injustice and standing up for what is right.
2. Her poetry is a reminder that our individual voices can be powerful when used to advocate for positive change.
3. Through her work, we learn that even small acts of courage can have a lasting impact on society.