Mary Daly Quotes

Women have had the power of naming stolen from us.

The liberation of language is rooted in the liberation of ourselves.

I saw women that were repressed. When they’re in classes with young men, they shut up all the time. They’re laughed at if they have unusual ideas. They have to be sexy; then, they can’t really think.

one hundred percent of the bishops who oppose the repeal of anti-abortion laws are men and one hundred percent of the people who have abortions are women.

I was honestly a Catholic.

You become courageous by doing courageous acts…Courage is a habit.

Courage to be is the key to revelatory power of the feminist revolution.

Goddess is the deep Source of creating integrity and the Self-affirming be-ing of women.

Radical feminism is still threatening.

Male religion entombs women in sepulchres of silence in order to chant its own eternal and dreary dirge to a past that never was.

If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males.

Every woman who has come to consciousness can recall an almost endless series of oppressive, violating, insulting, assaulting acts against her Self. Every woman is battered by such assaults – is on a psychic level, a battered woman.

Work is a substitute religious experience for many workaholics.

God’s plan’ is often a front for men’s plans and a cover for inadequacy, ignorance, and evil.

I’m a complete deviant. All creative work breaks new ground.

The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es-,’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a [person] trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin’.

I urge you to sin. But not against these itty-bitty religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism-or their secular derivatives, Marxism, Maoism, Freudianism and Jungianism-whic h are all derivatives of the big religion of patriarchy. Sin against the infrastructure itself!

We will look upon the earth and her sister planets as being with us, not for us.

It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging.

Women have had the power of naming stolen from us. We have not been free to use our own power to name ourselves, the world, or God.

‘God’s plan’ is often a front for men’s plans and a cover for inadequacy, ignorance, and evil.

I don’t want to be a fulfilled woman.

There are and will be those who think I have gone overboard. Let them rest assured that this assessment is correct, probably beyond their wildest imagination, and that I will continue to do so.

Patriarchy appears to be everywhere. Even outer space and the future have been colonized. As a rule, even the more imaginative science-fiction writers (allegedly the most foretelling futurists) cannot/will not create a space and time in which women get far beyond the role of space stewardess.

Patriarchy has stolen our cosmos and returned it in the form of ‘Cosmopolitan’ magazine and cosmetics.

Almost everything has been stolen from us by the patriarchy. Our creativity has been stolen, our creative energies, our religion. I want it back.

Why indeed must ‘God’ be a noun? Why not a verb – the most active and dynamic of all.

I didn’t study theology out of piety. I studied it because I wanted to know.

I’m trying to get to a deep future, but in order to get to a deep future, I had to think about the deep past.

I have a theory of living on the boundary: on the boundary of patriarchy and the boundary of different dimensions.

I hate the Bible. I always did.

It is the creative potential itself in human beings that is the image of God.

Think of Virginia Woolf, ‘A Room of One’s Own’ – that’s what women have always needed under patriarchy and can’t be creative without. They took away my classroom and my status to teach, and now they have taken away my office, and all of it is giving the message that Virginia Woolf and I are losing what I call ‘womenspace.’