#standard

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

The rule seemed to be that a great woman must either die unwed ... or find a still greater man to marry her. ... The great man, on the other hand, could marry where he liked, not being restricted to great women; indeed, it was often found sweet and commendable in him to choose a woman of no sort of greatness at all. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#choice #clichés #double-standards #empowerment #feminism

Causing any damage or harm to one party in order to help another party is not justice, and likewise, attacking all feminine conduct [in order to warn men away from individual women who are deceitful] is contrary to the truth, just as I will show you with a hypothetical case. Let us suppose they did this intending to draw fools away from foolishness. It would be as if I attacked fire -- a very good and necessary element nevertheless -- because some people burnt themselves, or water because someone drowned. The same can be said of all good things which can be used well or used badly. But one must not attack them if fools abuse them. ↗

— Christine de Pizan

#argument #clichés #conduct #damage #danger

We must seek to persuade member states and institutions that better regulation in Europe does not mean cutting health and safety in the workplace, nor does it mean dismantling social standards. ↗

— John Hutton

#cutting #dismantling #does #europe #health

For the standard of Christian life was to be strained to a higher pitch; more fasting was required, and more careful separation from the manners and enjoyments of the world; celibacy and martyrdom had great value set upon them, and second marriages were prohibited. ↗

— Robert Rainy

#celibacy #christian #christian life #enjoyments #fasting

If you take 2001: A Space Odyssey as an example of somebody who creates a new language in film by what he was able to accomplish with art direction, photography, lighting, etc., it is still a gold standard for science fiction. ↗

— Matthew Modine

#accomplish #art #creates #direction #etc

Where the private sector, or anyone else, has skills, knowledge and resources that can help to deliver a high quality of education and to raise standards, we should use them. ↗

— Estelle Morris

#deliver #education #else #help #high

Time after time we're told corporations should have freedom from pesky job safety regulations, environmental protections and labor standards - giving working people the freedom to be crushed in collapsing mines, choke on filthy air and get paid too little to live on. ↗

— Richard Trumka

#air #choke #collapsing #corporations #crushed

It is extraordinarily entertaining to watch the historians of the past ... entangling themselves in what they were pleased to call the "problem" of Queen Elizabeth. They invented the most complicated and astonishing reasons both for her success as a sovereign and for her tortuous matrimonial policy. She was the tool of Burleigh, she was the tool of Leicester, she was the fool of Essex; she was diseased, she was deformed, she was a man in disguise. She was a mystery, and must have some extraordinary solution. Only recently has it occrurred to a few enlightened people that the solution might be quite simple after all. She might be one of the rare people were born into the right job and put that job first. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#achievements #career #clichés #double-standards #feminism

The moral world has no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name. ↗

— William Makepeace Thackeray

#dishonesty #double-standards #morality #vice #vanity