Midge Decter Quotes

A collection of quotes by Midge Decter.

Midge Decter (1927-2020) was an American writer, editor, and social critic. Known for her conservative views, she worked as the executive editor of Commentary magazine and contributed to several conservative publications. Decter was a passionate advocate for traditional family values and criticized feminism and liberal social policies. She authored several books, including "The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women's Liberation" and "Liberal Parents, Radical Children." Decter played a prominent role in shaping the conservative movement in the United States and was regarded as a significant voice in conservative intellectual circles.

Women's Liberation calls it enslavement but the real truth a

Women's Liberation calls it enslavement but the real truth about the sexual revolution is that it has made of sex an almost chaotically limitless and therefore unmanageable realm in the life of women.

It might sound a paradoxical thing to say --for surely never

It might sound a paradoxical thing to say --for surely never has a generation of children occupied more sheer hours of parental time --but the truth is that we neglected you. We allowed you a charade of trivial freedoms in order to avoid making those impositions on you that are in the end both the training ground and proving ground for true independence. We pronounced you strong when you were still weak in order to avoid the struggles with you that would have fed your true strength. We proclaimed you sound when you were foolish in order to avoid taking part in the long, slow, slogging effort that is the only route to genuine maturity of mind and feeling. Thus, it was no small anomaly of your growing up that while you were the most indulged generation, you were also in many ways the most abandoned to your own meager devices by those into whose safe-keeping you had been given.

Ideas are powerful things, requiring not a studious contempl

Ideas are powerful things, requiring not a studious contemplation but an action, even if it is only an inner action. Their acquisition obligates each man in some way to change his life, even if it is only his inner life. They demand to be stood for. They dictate where a man must concentrate his vision. They determine his moral and intellectual priorities. They provide him with allies and make him enemies. In short, ideas impose an interest in their ultimate fate which goes far beyond the realm of the merely reasonable.

The hatred of the youth culture for adult society is not a d

The hatred of the youth culture for adult society is not a disinterested judgment but a terror-ridden refusal to be hooked into the, if you will, ecological chain of breathing, growing, and dying. It is the demand, in other words, to remain children.

The fundamental impulse of the movement is neither masturbat

The fundamental impulse of the movement is neither masturbatory nor concretely lesbian -- although it of course offers warm house to both these possibilities; it is an impulse to maidenhood -- to that condition in which a woman might pretend to a false fear or loathing of the penis in order to escape from any responsibility for the pleasure and well-being of the man who possesses it.