"The opposite attracts you on the one hand and on the other hand makes you feel dependent. And nobody wants to feel dependent. Hence, there is a constant struggle between lovers: they are trying to dominate each other. The name is love, but the game is politics.

"The very effort of man is to dominate the woman, to reduce her to an inferior status, to disallow her to grow, so that she always remains retarded. For thousands of years, what man has done to women is simply monstrous: no education – she cannot read the holy scriptures. She cannot think of herself as equal to man and she has been conditioned so deeply that even if you say she is equal, she is not going to believe it. It has become almost her mind – the conditioning has become her mind, that she is less in everything: physical strength, intellectual qualities…. And man has made a society in which he has become the protector and the woman is the protected.

"The Hindu scriptures say that in childhood the father should protect the girl; in youth the husband should protect the woman; in old age the son should protect the mother – but she is always to be protected, and man is to protect her. He has made her weak, uneducated, uncultured; he has stopped her movement in the society. And the greatest thing he has done is he has taken her liberty of financial freedom, which cuts her very roots to be free. She has to be dependent; she is not capable of earning herself.

"And for centuries there was a certain logic in it because she had to become the mother. And out of ten children, nine children were dying, so a woman was pregnant for almost the whole period of her life until menopause. How can she work? How can she earn? She is carrying a child, and she is caring for other small children, looking after them, looking after the house. In short, man made woman a slave – and very cheaply, without purchasing her. You should see the irony….

"In India, and I think in other countries also, in different ways, the same thing happens."