I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could… that your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend.

You will then. Listen here...I've always got this to look forward to: I'll settle down by that man's side. I'll be as virtuous as any woman. I've made up my mind to it and I'll be it. And I'll be bored stiff for the rest of my life. Except for one thing. I can torment that man. And I'll do it. Do you understand how I'll do it? There are many ways. But if the worst comes to the worst I can always drive him silly...by corrupting the child!' She was panting a little, and round her brown eyes the whites showed. 'I'll get even with him. I can. I know how, you see. And with you, through him, for tormenting me. I've come all the way from Brittany without stopping. I haven't slept...But I can...

If she be a woman, and love me, I shall surely catch her once tripping: for love was ever a traitor to its harbourer: and Love within, and I without, she will be more than a woman, as the poet says, or I less than man, if I succeed not.

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.

When a man, however passively, becomes an obstacle to the fulfillment of a woman's desires, he becomes an odious thing in her eyes, - or will, given time enough.

Nature wishes that woman should attract man, yet she often cunningly moulds into her face a little sarcasm, which seems to say, 'Yes, I am willing to attract, but to attract a little better kind of a man than any I yet behold

...the greatest tyrants over women are women.

He would have been far more attractive to her if she could have trusted him. You could not love a man who was always playing hide-and-seek with you; that was the lesson she had learned.

Every woman feels that the greater her power over a man, the more impossible it is to leave him except by sudden flight: a fugitive precisely because a queen.

Sometimes a woman needs a man for company, no matter how useless he is.

Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior.

Rather than seek to be squired and dated by their rivals why should it not be possible for women to find relaxation and pleasure in the company of their 'inferiors'? They would need to shed their desperate need to admire a man, and accept the gentler role of loving him. A learned woman cannot castrate a truck-driver like she can her intellectual rival, because he has no exaggerated respect for her bookish capacities. The alternative to conventional education is not stupidity, and many a clever girl needs the corrective of a humbler soul's genuine wisdom.

I suppose that we women are such cowards that we think a man will save us from fears, and we marry him.

I always run into strong women who are looking for weak men to dominate them.