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Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria.

Naomi Wolf

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Naomi Wolf
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: November 12
Activist
Author
Conspiracy Theorist
Feminist
Journalist
Non-Fiction Writer
Political Adviser
Political Writer
San Francisco County
California
Naomi R. Wolf
Naomi Rebekah Wolf
Hysteria
Encouragement
Believes
Madness
Pain
Real
Believe
People

More quotes by Naomi Wolf

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It is important to distinguish between the power of the internet to make the great change it can, and the limits and vulnerabilities of that change without real-time political mobilization deployed globally to protect those who venture out, especially in closed societies, into the heady new vistas it offers.
Naomi Wolf
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If people wake up, think critically, and get angry, we get connected to that courage that the founding generation meant us to have. History shows when millions just don't go along, resist at any level - and I'm talking about all the way up to bipartisan impeachment and arrest of the leaders of the coup - then it can't happen.
Naomi Wolf
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'The End of America' details the 10 steps that would-be dictators always take in seeking to close an open society it argued that the Bush administration had been advancing each one.
Naomi Wolf
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Most urgently, women's identity must be premised upon our 'beauty' so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of self-esteem exposed to the air.
Naomi Wolf
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Today a woman must ignore her reflection in the eyes of her lover, since he might admire her, and seek it in the gaze of the God of Beauty, in whose perception she is never complete.
Naomi Wolf
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Looking back on 200 years of feminist agitation in this country, we've got to get it that the moral high ground doesn't get us anything. Pleading with powerful men never gets us what we need. Talking doesn't do it. Being right doesn't do it. Hardball politics does it ... and a political strategy.
Naomi Wolf
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What, after all, is the narrative of the American Dream? It was a discourse formulated between the 1880s and the 1920s in the United States during the great waves of migration and expansion and reforms of the Progressive Era.
Naomi Wolf
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I'll go anywhere to talk about the Constitution. I believe in trans-partisan organizing around these issues.
Naomi Wolf
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Democracy is disruptive. Around the world, peaceful protesters are being demonised for this, but there is no right in a democratic civil society to be free of disruption. Protesters ideally should read Gandhi and King and dedicate themselves to disciplined, long-term, non-violent disruption of business as usual - especially disruption of traffic.
Naomi Wolf
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For I conclude that the enemy is not lipstick, but guilt itself that we deserve lipstick, if we want it, AND free speech we deserve to be sexual AND serious--or whatever we please we are entitled to wear cowboy boots to our own revolution.
Naomi Wolf
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I met Muslim immigrants in Brooklyn who were swept up in 9-11 raids, held in abusive conditions, beaten, denied rights. That's how things started in Germany. Guantanamo was modeled after what Stalin developed for the Gulag.
Naomi Wolf
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It is never smart, even in a strong democracy, to declare some debate off limits. In a weakening democracy it is catastrophic.
Naomi Wolf
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As women demanded access to power, the power structure used the beauty myth materially to undermine women's advancement.
Naomi Wolf
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a white person who claims to have no impediment of vision in this country is not, I think, telling the whole truth. And when it comes to race relations, not telling the whole truth about the fog one inhabits slows down the work of groping forward.
Naomi Wolf
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I've never understood this puritanical idea that feminism has to be a cult. You know, we all have to think alike or dress alike or have a similar ideology.
Naomi Wolf
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Cosmetic surgery processes the bodies of woman-made women, who make up the vast majority of its patient pool, into man-made women.
Naomi Wolf
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Documentary film without nuanced journalistic sourcing risks being sensational, tendentious or broad-brushed.
Naomi Wolf
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In 70s America, protest used to be very effective, but in subsequent decades municipalities have sneakily created a web of overpermiticisation - requirements that were designed to stifle freedom of assembly and the right to petition government for redress of grievances, both of which are part of our first amendment.
Naomi Wolf
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The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.
Naomi Wolf
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Sexiness is no longer defined just as whether we are desirable, but also what we desire. The more liberated women become - economically, politically, and personally - the more erotic we are. Freedom is a lot sexier than dependency.
Naomi Wolf