#hypocrisy

Do you really believe ... that everything historians tell us about men – or about women – is actually true? You ought to consider the fact that these histories have been written by men, who never tell the truth except by accident. ↗

— Moderata Fonte

#double-standards #feminism #gender #history #hypocrisy

If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women: they do not read them in a true light: they misapprehend them, both for good and evil: their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#double-standards #empowerment #expectations #false-belief #feminism

...sentences of the court on moral issues are always passed in absentia. ↗

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

#judgment #morality #men

As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#dignity #double-standards #empowerment #feminism #gender

When you turn your back on hypocrisy and do nothing you don’t change the hearts of others you change yours. ↗

— Shannon L. Alder

#change

We have also set up for them an edifying project for a continuous mitigation of their own tyranny, ascribing to them an unshakeable faith in the triumph of virtue, as well as in the moral justification of their crimes. These are the theories of well-meaning children who see everything in black or white, dream of nothing but angels or demons, and have no idea of the incredible number of hypocritical masks of every color and shape and size which men use to conceal their features when they have passed the age of devotion to ideals and have abandoned themselves unrestrainedly to their egotistic desires ↗

— Alfred de Vigny

#hypocrisy #mankind #power #age

As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy. ↗

— Abraham Lincoln

#bigotry #despotism #equality #hypocrisy #know-nothings

If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance (...); as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out [in his History of England], she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#clichés #dignity #equality #fiction #gender

Experience teaches is such a lovely saying. However, when people try not to make the mistakes of what history and experience has taught, they are criticized for it. They are told that because they have not experienced it, they cannot appreciate it, and thus never know it. However, at the same time, people want you to learn from past mistakes and past experiences, in order to make a better choice for yourself. So let me ask you, which is the hypocrite? Is it history or is it today? ↗

— Lionel Suggs

#history #hypocrisy #experience

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#life