19 Inspiring Quotes From Men Who Proudly Identify As Feminists

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1.

“You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation.”
—Brigham Young

2.

“He – and if there is a God, I am convinced he is a he, because no woman could or would ever fuck things up this badly.”
—George Carlin

3.

“Equality is not a concept. It’s not something we should be striving for. It’s a necessity. Equality is like gravity. We need it to stand on this earth as men and women, and the misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who’s confronted with it. We need equality. Kinda now.”
—Joss Whedon

4.

“I do call myself a feminist. Absolutely! It’s worth paying attention to the roles that are sort of dictated to us, and that we don’t have to fit into those roles. We can be anybody we want to be.”
—Joseph Gordon-Levitt

5.

“Who are your favorite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi as their ideal feminine model.”
—Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir

6.

“When women are empowered, they immeasurably improve the lives of everyone around them—their families, their communities, and their countries. This is not just about women; we men need to recognize the part we play too. Real men treat women with dignity and give them the respect they deserve.”
—Prince Harry

7.

“There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.”
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics

8.

“Young wives are the leading asset of corporate power. They want the suburbs, a house, a settled life, and respectability. They want society to see that they have exchanged themselves for something of value.”
—Ralph Nader

9.

“…[G]reat progress was evident in the last Congress of the American ‘Labour Union’ in that among other things, it treated working women with complete equality. While in this respect the English, and still more the gallant French, are burdened with a spirit of narrow-mindedness. Anybody who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex (the ugly ones included).”
―Karl Marx, Selected Letters: The Personal Correspondence 1844-1877

10.

“We let Willow cut her hair. When you have a little girl, it’s like, how can I teach her that she’s in control of her body? If I teach her that I’m in charge of whether or not she can touch her hair, she’s going to replace me with some other man when she goes out in the world. She can’t cut my hair, but that’s her hair. She has got to have command of her body. So when she goes out into the world, she’s going out with a command that is hers. She is used to making those decisions herself. We try to keep giving them those decisions until they can hold the full weight of their lives.”
—Will Smith

11.

“I am a sworn atheist and therefore from my point of view the Talmud or the Koran don’t constitute works of political philosophy but rather writings that stand in utter contradiction to concepts like logic, freedom, feminism, secularism, brotherhood – which are my ideals.”
—Michel Onfray

12.

“Maybe it will inspire women to pick up guitars and start bands. Because it’s the only future in rock’n’roll. I’ve had this negative attitude for years. Rock’n’roll has been exhausted. But that was always male rock’n’roll. There’s a lot of girl groups, just now, within the last few years. The Breeders and the Riot Grrrls all have a hand in it. People are finally accepting women in those kinds of roles.”
—Kurt Cobain

13.

“Feminism is an attack on social practices and habits of thought that keep women and men boxed into gender roles that are harmful.”
—Robert Webb

14.

“Many men will object to the very idea that male privilege exists, but their objection also insists on a kind of invisibility that patriarchy depends on. Few men realize how much their lives would change if women weren’t treated as subordinate. Instead, men take credit for their hard work and achievements without taking into account how much harder it would have been if they had to compete with women on a level playing field or do without the supportive (and unpaid) domestic labor that so many wives and mothers perform. Because patriarchy defines women as subordinate and “other,” men can take women’s exclusion from serious competition for granted. As a result, many men have been rudely awakened by women’s entry into hitherto male-only workplaces. When men complain about the advantage some women gain from affirmative action, they ignore centuries of pro-male affirmative action that, in spite of the women’s movement, continues as the largely unexceptional default condition under patriarchy.”
—Allan G. Johnson, The Gender Knot

15.

“Women are not the weak, frail little flowers that they are advertised. There has never been anything invented yet, including war, that a man would enter into, that a woman wouldn’t, too.”
—Will Rogers

16.

“My advice to the women’s clubs of America is to raise more hell and fewer dahlias.”
—James McNeill Whistler

17.

“I’m not ashamed to dress “like a woman” because I don’t think it’s shameful to be a woman.”
―Iggy Pop

18.

“All men should be feminists. If men care about women’s rights, the world will be a better place. We are better off when women are empowered, it leads to a better society.”
—John Legend

19.

“It’s crazy. Since there have been men and women, there have been funny women…f–king idiot-ass men keep saying that women aren’t funny. It makes me crazy. I find it disgusting and offensive every time.”
—Andy Samberg