Castration Quotes:

Monastic incarceration is castration.

- Victor Hugo

topic: Castration, Incarceration

Believe what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.

- Michel Foucault

topic: Believe, Castration, Sedentary

You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

source: Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2016). “Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile”, p.1755, Random House

topic: Being Yourself, Jobs, School, Castration

The castration of women has been carried out in terms of a masculine-feminine polarity, in which men have commandeered all the energy and streamlined it into an aggressive conquistadorial power, reducing all heterosexual contact to a sadomasochistic pattern.

- Germaine Greer

topic: Sex, Men, Energy, Polarity, Castration

The elimination of the will altogether and the switching off of the emotions all and sundry, is tantamount to the elimination of reason: intellectual castration.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

topic: Intellectual, Emotion, Reason, Switching, Switching Off

The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.

- Theodor Adorno

source: Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.352, Univ of California Press

topic: Giving Up, Symbolism, Sound, Jazz Band, Castration

But never fear, gentlemen; castration was really not the point of feminism, and we women are too busy eviscerating one another to take you on.

- Anna Quindlen

topic: Gentleman, Feminism, Busy, Castration

I would say that the off-frame effect in photography results from a singular and definitive cutting-off which figures castration and is figured by the click of the shutter.

- Christian Metz

topic: Photography, Cutting, Figures, Castration

Lust and self-mutilation are closely related impulses. There are also self-mutilators among knowers: they do not want to be creators under any circumstances.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

topic: Self, Lust, Want, Mutilation, Castration

The worst thing that can happen to an artist is to be subsidized by the state. It leads to an intellectual and artistic castration.

- Mario Vargas Llosa

topic: Artist, Intellectual, States, Castration

Without poetry, religion becomes obscure, false, and malignant; without philosophy, licentious in all wantonness, and lascivious to the point of self-castration.

- Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

topic: Philosophy, Philosophical, Self, Castration

Anyway, to cut off one's biological dreams seems to me the most fundamental form of psychic castration that you could imagine.

- Quentin S. Crisp

topic: Dream, Cutting, Psychics, Castration

For the lost are lost by nature, all your ideas of moral regeneration will make no difference, there is AN INNATE DETERMINISM, there is an undeniable incurability in suicide, crime, idiocy, madness, there is an invincible cuckoldry in man, there is a congenital weakness of the character, a castration of the mind.

- Antonin Artaud

topic: Suicide, Character, Men, Determinism, Castration

Most observers of the French Revolution, especially the clever and noble ones, have explained it as a life-threatening and contagious illness. They have remained standing with the symptoms and have interpreted these in manifold and contrary ways. Some have regarded it as a merely local ill. The most ingenious opponents have pressed for castration. They well noticed that this alleged illness is nothing other than the crisis of beginning puberty.

- Novalis

source: "Pollen and Fragments". Book by Novalis. Fragment No. 105, 1798.

topic: Clever, Opponents, Way, Manifold, Castration

When Vishous pushed open the door to the exam room, he got a gander at the kind of seating arrangement that made him think fondly of castration.

- J.R. Ward

topic: Thinking, Doors, Rooms, Gander, Castration

Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which the Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.

- Michel Foucault

topic: Believe, Reality, Law, Nomadic, Castration

I wonder why men get serious at all. They have this delicate, long thing hanging outside their bodies which goes up and down by its own will. If I were a man I would always be laughing at myself.

- Yoko Ono

topic: Men, Laughing, Long, Castration

I wonder why men can get serious at all. They have this delicate long thing hanging outside their bodies, which goes up and down by its own will. First of all, having it outside your body is terribly dangerous. If I were a man I would have a fantastic castration complex to the point that I wouldn't be able to do a thing. Second, the inconsistency of it, like carrying a chance time alarm or something. If I were a man I would always be laughing at myself.

- Yoko Ono

source: Yoko Ono (1970). “Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings by Yoko Ono”, p.280, Simon and Schuster

topic: Men, Long, Laughing, Castration