Limit cycle oscillations of a two-dimensional airfoil with quadratic and cubic pitching nonlinearities are investigated. The equivalent stiffness of the pitching stiffness is obtained by combining the linearization and harmonic balance method. With the equivalent stiffness, the equivalent linearization method for nonlinear flutter analysis is generalized to address aeroelastic system with quadratic nonlinearity. Numerical example shows that good approximation of the limit cycle can be obtained by the generalized method. Furthermore, the proposed method is capable of revealing the unsymmetry of the limit cycle; however the ordinary equivalent linearization method fails to do so.