When an individual or a group of individuals is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he or they are inferior.
Two separate beings, placed in different situations, confronting each other in their freedom, and seeking the justification of existence through each other, will always live an adventure full of risks and promises.
To make oneself object, to make oneself passive, is very different from being a passive object.
There is no other justification for present existence than its expansion toward an indefinitely open future.
The representation of the world as the world itself is the work of men; they describe it from a point of view that is their own and that they confound with the absolute truth.
The curse weighing on marriage is that individuals too often join together in their weakness and not in their strength, that each one asks of the other rather than finding pleasure in giving.
The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and the outline for our projects.
Society codified by men decrees that woman is inferior: she can only abolish this inferiority by destroying male superiority.
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
One is not born, but becomes, a genius.
No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or more disdainful, than a man anxious about his own virility.
Man today represents the positive and the neuter—that is, the male and the human being—while woman represents the negative, the female. Every time she behaves like a human being, she is declared to be identifying with the male.
