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They [Americans] want to believe that Good and Evil can be defined in precise categories, that Good is already, or will be easily achieved. ... if this optimism appears too superficial, they will try to create a kind of anti-God: the U.S.S.R. That is Evil, and it only needs to be annihilated to re-establish the reign of Good.

Simone de Beauvoir

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Simone de Beauvoir
Age: 78 †
Born: 1908
Born: January 9
Died: 1986
Died: April 14
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Philosopher
Political Activist
Political Philosopher
Paris
France
Simone-Lucie-Ernestine-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
Castor
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
Create
Achieved
Evil
Appears
Needs
Optimism
Annihilated
Trying
Anti
Reign
Kind
Defined
Establish
Believe
Easily
Superficial
Good
Americans
Precise
Already
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More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

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I think that Freud understood absolutely nothing about women - as he himself said.
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My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.
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It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body.
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Each person has his or her own very particular history and after all, the unconscious is the most secret part of ourselves.
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I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.
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The individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and to other individuals he exists only by transcending himself, and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others. He justifies his existence by a movement which, like freedom, springs from his heart but which leads outside of himself.
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Let women be provided with living strength of their own.
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All oppression creates a state of war.
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Literature is always what the dominant ideology recognizes as literature.
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I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me.
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Woman is determined not by her hormones or by mysterious instincts, but by the manner in which her body and her relation to the world are modified through the action of others than herself.
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Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift.
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Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly.
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To create a language all of a piece which would be a women's language, that I find quite insane. There does not exist a mathematics which is only a women's mathematics, or a feminine science.
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Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.
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To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future.
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It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.
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The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return.
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…but all day long I would be training myself to think, to understand, to criticize, to know myself I was seeking for the absolute truth: this preoccupation did not exactly encourage polite conversation.
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From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.
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