Simone de Beauvoir — "To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to…"
To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future.
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More from Simone de Beauvoir
"The greatest danger for the future is indifference."
"The greatest crime is to be bored."
"I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth was undoubtedly at the bottom of my search for an autonomous existence."
"If I had to choose, I would rather have a God who is incomprehensible than a God who is comprehensible but also incomprehensible."
"The mind is everything. What you think you become."
About Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)
French existentialist philosopher whose The Second Sex (1949) is the foundational text of modern feminist theory. Closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre (lifetime partner and existentialist co-founder) and Albert Camus (existentialist contemporary in Paris). For an intellectual contrast, see Camille Paglia, American cultural critic and Sexual Personae author — Paglia argues for biological-essentialist roots of gender that Beauvoir's social-construction view — 'one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman' — explicitly rejects. The two are the cleanest constructed-vs-essentialist poles in feminist theory.
The standard scholarly entry points to Simone de Beauvoir's work: Toril Moi (Duke, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor) — Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (1994); Margaret A. Simons (Southern Illinois University, Emerita) — Beauvoir and The Second Sex (1999); Kate Kirkpatrick (Oxford, Regent's Park College) — Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (2019). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Simone de Beauvoir.
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