Saturday Quotathon: Women?

Since last week, I didn't have many quotes except by women, I thought I'd go looking for quotes about women. Let me make a suggestion: Don't go looking at Wikiquote unless you're misogynistic. The collection they have is stomach-turning.

The way women are viewed and have been viewed [by men] through the ages is more than a little sickening, at least for me. I knew there was better stuff out there, so I kept searching. Truth is, it wasn't that easy to find. I found tons and tons of quotes by women about women, but I wanted to find some things that men had to say that weren't focused on our appearances or presuming we were deceitful, or just toys for men.

I would rather trust a woman's instinct than a man's reason.
-Stanley Baldwin

Despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, I have not been able to answer... the great question that has never been answered: what does a woman want?
-Sigmund Freud

Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.
-Robert Heinlein

There is no occasion for women to consider themselves subordinate or inferior to men.
-Mohandas K. Gandhi

Here's all you have to know about men and women: women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid.
-George Carlin

The best judge of whether or not a country is going to develop is how it treats its women. If it's educating its girls, if women have equal rights, that country is going to move forward. But if women are oppressed and abused and illiterate, then they're going to fall behind.
-Barack Obama

A woman who makes you feel good about yourself is never homely. After a while, you realize she always was beautiful. You just didn't notice it at first.
-Robert Heinlein

I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

There is in every true woman's heart, a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity, but which kindles up and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.
-Washington Irving

For I cannot think that GOD Almighty ever made them [women] so delicate, so glorious creatures; and furnished them with such charms, so agreeable and so delightful to mankind; with souls capable of the same accomplishments with men: and all, to be only Stewards of our Houses, Cooks, and Slaves.
-Daniel Defoe

This view that women are somehow inferior to men is not restricted to one religion or belief. Women are prevented from playing a full and equal role in many faiths. Nor, tragically, does its influence stop at the walls of the church, mosque, synagogue or temple. This discrimination, unjustifiably attributed to a Higher Authority, has provided a reason or excuse for the deprivation of women's equal rights across the world for centuries. At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.... The truth is that male religious leaders have had -- and still have -- an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter.
-Jimmy Carter

There are two kinds of spiritual law, two kinds of conscience, one in man and another, altogether different, in woman. They do not understand each other; but in practical life the woman is judged by man's law, as though she were not a woman but a man.
-Henrik Ibsen

What is better than wisdom? Woman. And what is better than a good woman? Nothing.
-Geoffrey Chaucer

I am not accustomed to the language of eulogy. I have never studied the art of paying compliments to women. But I must say, that if all that has been said by orators and poets since the creation of the world in praise of women were applied to the women of America, it would not do them justice.
-Abraham Lincoln

So, it isn't all bad.