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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
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Optimism
Annihilated
Trying
Anti
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Defined
Establish
Believe
Easily
Superficial
Good
Americans
Precise
Already
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More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

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Ce n'est gue' re que dans les asiles que les coquettes gardent avec ente tement une foi entie' re en des regards absents normalement, elles re clament des te moins. Women fond of dress are hardly ever entirely satisfied not to be seen, except among the insane usually they want witnesses.
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A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Retirement revives the sorrow of parting, the feeling of abandonment, solitude and uselessness that is caused by the loss of some beloved person.
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That is what chills your spine when you read an account of a suicide: not the frail corpse hanging from the window bars but what happened inside that heart immediately before.
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If you are truly on the left, if you reject ideas of power and hierarchy, what you want is equality. Otherwise, it won't work at all.
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Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men.
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To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.
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You can't address yourself to women by speaking a language which no average woman will understand. In my opinion, it's wrong.
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Christian ideology has contributed no little to the oppression of woman.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity.
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It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.
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Because we are separated everything separates us, even our efforts to join each other.
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To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.
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I think that The Second Sex will seem an old, dated book, after a while. But nonetheless, a book which will have made its contribution. At least, I hope so.
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Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.
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Virginia Woolf thought a lot about her own sex when she wrote. In the best sense of the word, her writing is very feminine, and by that I mean that women are supposed to be very sensitive to all the sensations of nature, much more so than men, much more contemplative. It's this quality that marks her best works.
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I consider it almost antifeminist to say that there is a feminine nature which expresses itself differently, that a woman speaks her body more than a man, because after all, men also speak their bodies when they write. Everything is implicated in the work of a writer.
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There are so many problems. Women can go to work on these as well without giving up their feminism.
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Habit has a kind of poetry.
Simone de Beauvoir