Work almost always has a double aspect: it is a bondage, a wearisome d — Simone de Beauvoir

"What is an adult? A child puffed with age."

"The Communists, following Hegel, speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion."

"His personal prestige, his qualities, his competence assure him a preponderant role however; since 1927 he has been above all the unchallenged specialist on peasant question. But the power he exercises is no more dictatorial than, for example, Roosevelts was. New Chinas Constitution renders impossible the concentration of authority in one mans hands; the country is governed by a team whose members have been united through a long common struggle and by a close friendship."

"I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom."

"I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth — and truth rewarded me."

"Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it. Psychiatrists have told me that they give The Second Sex to their women patients to read, and not merely to intellectual women but to lower-middle-class women, to office workers and women working in factories. Your book was a great help to me. Your book saved me, are the words I have read in letters from women of all ages and all walks of life. If my book has helped women, it is because it expressed them, and they in their turn gave it its truth. Thanks to them, it is no longer a matter for scandal and concern. During these last ten years the myths that men created have crumbled, and many women writers have gone beyond me and have been far more daring than I. Too many of them for my taste take sexuality as their only theme; but at least when they write about it they now present themselves as the eye-that-looks, as subject, consciousness, freedom."