Wit & Attitude Quote by Kate Millett

The line lands like a jail door slamming: not on the people inside, but on the reader’s assumptions. Millett doesn’t romanticize “madness” or offer a feel-good redemption arc. She does something sharper: she reassigns the pathology. “They weren’t crazy” is a refusal of the easy diagnosis society reaches for when it wants to stop listening. The pivot - “They were tired of being locked up” - turns supposed illness into a legible reaction to confinement. Fatigue becomes evidence, not of defect, but of endurance under coercion.

The most damning phrase is the quietest: “Even I could see that.” It’s a self-indictment disguised as modesty. Millett implicates herself - an educated observer, a public intellectual, someone who should have known - in the culture that treats institutionalization as care. The admission suggests how thoroughly the system trains people to doubt the obvious, to interpret resistance as symptom. If it takes effort to “see” that captivity produces rage, despair, and rebellion, the moral failure isn’t individual; it’s infrastructural.

Context matters: Millett wrote and spoke amid feminist critiques of psychiatry and the carceral logic embedded in “treatment,” particularly for women who didn’t behave correctly. The sentence compresses that critique into an everyday observation. No theory required, just the plain recognition that being locked up makes people want out - and that calling them “crazy” is often the story power tells to keep the locks justified.