"We have already posited that when two human categories find themselves face-to-face, each one wants to impose its sovereignty on the other; if both hold to this claim equally, a reciprocal relationship is created, either hostile or friendly, but always tense. if one of the two has an advantage over the other, that one prevails and works to maintain the relationship by oppression." (71)
"it was man who controlled the balance between reproduction and production... There are female animals that derive total autonomy from motherhood; so why has woman not been able to make a pedestal for herself from it?... The reason for this is that humanity is not a simple natural species: it does not seek to survive as a species; its project is not stagnation: it seek to surpass itself." (72-73)
"to give birth and to breast-feed are not activities but natural functions; they do not involve a project, which is why the woman finds no motive there to claim a higher meaning for her existence; she passively submits to her biological destiny... Man's case is radically different. He does not provide for the group in the way worker bees do, by a simple vital process, but rather by acts that transcend his animal condition." (73)
"to appropriate the world's treasurers, he annexes the world itself. Through such actions he tests his own power; he posits ends and projects paths to them: he realizes himself as existent. To maintain himself, he creates; he spills over the present and opens up the future... This pride is still apparent today when he builds a dam, a skyscraper, or an atomic reactor. he has not only worked to preserve the given world: he has burst through its borders; he has laid the ground for a new future." (73)
"This is how he brilliantly proves that life is not the supreme value for man but that it must serve ends far greater than itself. The worst curse on woman is her exclusion from warrior expeditions; it is not in giving life but in risking his life that man raises himself above the animal; this is why throughout humanity, superiority has been granted not to the sex that gives birth but to the one that kills." (74)
"By transcending Life through Existence, man guarantees the repetition of Life: by this surpassing, he creates values that deny any value to pure repetition... in serving the species, the human male shapes the face of the earth, creates new instruments, invents and forges the future." (74)
"Certain passages where Hegel's dialectic describes the relationship of master to slave would apply far better to the relationship of man to woman." (74)
"Hegel's definition applies singularly to her. 'The other [consciousness] is the dependent consciousness for which essential reality is animal life, that is, life given by another entity.'" (74)
"The female, more than the male, is prey to the species; humanity has always tried to escape from its species' destiny; with the invention of the tool, maintenance of life became activity and project for man, while motherhood left woman riveted to her body like the animal. it is because humanity puts itself into question in its being - that is, values reasons for living over life - that man has set himself as master over woman; man's project is not to repeat himself in time: it is to reign over the instant and to forge the future." (75)
"in the alienation process mentioned before, the clan grasps itself in this territory in the guise of an objective and concrete figure; through the permanence of the land, the clan thus realizes itself as a unity whose identity persists throughout the passage of time." (77)
"The community conceives of its unity and wills its existence beyond the present: it sees itself in its children, it recognizes them as its own, and it accomplishes and surpasses itself through them." (77)
"It is in women that the whole of foreign Nature is concentrated... When the woman's role grows, she comes to occupy nearly the whole region of the Other." (79)
"But in reality this golden age of Woman is only a myth. To say that woman was the Other is to say that a relationship of reciprocity between the sexes did not exist... she was never a peer for man; her power asserted itself beyond human rule: she was thus outside of this rule." (80)
"Insofar as woman is considered the absolute Other, that is - whatever magic powers she has - as the inessential, it is precisely impossible to regard her as another subject. Women have thus never constituted a separate group that posited itself for-itself before a male group; they have never had a direct or autonomous relationship with men." (80)
"But as powerful as she may appear, she is defined through notions created by the male consciousness. All of the idols invented by man, however terrifying he may have made them, are in fact dependent upon him, and this is why he is able to destroy them." (82)
"And in fact, even when man grasps himself as given, passive, and subject to the vagaries of rain and sun, he still realizes himself as transcendence, as project; already, spirit and will assert themselves within him against life's confusion and contingencies." (82)
"man wishes to possess what he is not; he unites himself to what appears to him to be Other than himself." (83)
"he relegates them to their Olympian heaven and keeps the terrestrial domain for himself; the great Pan begins to fade at the first sound of his hammer, and man's reign begins... cause and effect" (84)
"alterity is the same as negation, thus Evil." (88)
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