Quotes about men

page 21

“… in practice the standard for what constitutes rape is set not at the level of women's experience of violation but just above the level of coercion acceptable to men.”

Judith Lewis Herman (1942) American psychiatrist

“Now I am just an elderly lady who is full of spleen,
who humps around greater Boston in a God-awful hat,
who never lived and yet outlived her time,
hating men and dogs and Democrats.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

“Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

“Italian men are like show poodles. Sometimes they look so good I want to applaud.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

“Men must be taught as if you taught them not,
And things unknown propos'd as things forgot.”

Alexander Pope An Essay on Criticism

“Though most expect young men to be fools, I've noticed that just a little bit of age can make a man far more foolish than he was as a child.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

“Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.”

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) Polish-British writer

“The most temptation I'd experienced had been with Tomas, the Senate's spy who had been feeding off me without permission, and Mircea, who was probably plotting some nefarious scheme. I have no taste in men.”

Karen Chance book Touch the Dark

“Roses! I swear you men have all your romance from the same worn book. Flowers are a good thing, a sweet thing to give a lady. But it is always roses, always red, and always perfect hothouse blooms when they can come by them.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

“There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feeling; none when they are under the influence of imagination.”

Edmund Burke book An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs

“… most men and women will yield to the strong currents sucking them into the seas of ruin. Only the strongest in mind and spirit will swim against that current.”

Ted Dekker (1962) American writer

“My God. Is there some unwritten law that you guys have to be giants? (Amanda)
What can I say? Artemis likes her Dark-Hunters tall. Short men need not apply. (Acheron)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon book Night Pleasures

“Only one man in a thousand is a leader of men -- the other 999 follow women.”

Groucho Marx (1890–1977) American comedian

“I shall tell you where we are. We're in the most extreme and utter region of the human mind. A dim, subconscious underworld. A radiant abyss where men meet themselves. Hell, Netley. We're in Hell.”

Alan Moore book From Hell

“You want to know what pain is? Try running out of Advil when you've got a Category Five period. I've had cramps that would make grown men beg for a bullet between the eyes."
- Jennifer, "Beauty Queens”

Libba Bray (1964) American teen writer

“The Last Supper is supposed to be thirteen men. Who is this woman?

"Everyone misses it, our preconceived notions of this scene are so powerful that our mind blocks out the incongruity and overrides our eyes.”

Dan Brown book The Da Vinci Code

“So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.”

Aldous Huxley book Ends and Means

“Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Wise Man's Fear

“War could bond men like a magnet, but like a magnet it could repel them, too. The things they saw, the things they did. Sometimes they just wanted to forget.”

Mitch Albom book The Five People You Meet in Heaven

“Love this job," Sanya murmured. "Just love it."
"I need to challenge more people to duels," Thomas said in agreement.
"Men are pigs," Murphy said.
"Amen," said Molly.
Lea gave me a prim look and said, "I've not sacrificed a holy virgin in ages.”

Jim Butcher book Changes

“You stand on dead men's legs. You've never had any of your own. You couldn't walk alone between two sunrises and hustle the meat for your belly”

Jack London book The Sea-Wolf

“Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

“This is the trouble with all happiness -all of it is built on top of something men want.”

Rick Riordan book The Sea of Monsters

“It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.”

Thomas Hardy book Far from the Madding Crowd

“What you tend to find in the personal lives of brilliant men is devastation akin to a nuclear bomb going off.”

Marisha Pessl (1977) American writer

“I don't think she realized how much she cared for him, or he for her, until the end. Hasn't someone said a woman may be known by the men who love her enough to die for her? (If they haven't, I claim the credit myself.)”

Elizabeth Peters The Ape Who Guards the Balance

“A deranged person is supposed to have the strength of ten men.
I have the strength of one small boy… with polio.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

“Any situation in which some men prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence;… to alienate humans from their own decision making is to change them into objects.”

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher

“I mean my characters are more like men than these real men are, see. They’re rough and rude, they got hands and they got bellies. They hate and they lust; break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

“In the faces of men and women I see God.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

“Perhaps, but you would not exist without a woman, would you? However little use you may find us, we are cleverer and more determined and more patient than men. Men may be stronger, but it is women who endure.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

“Your shallow men shall dream, dreams, your insightful men shall see visions.”

Nikki Sixx (1958) American musician

“Men judge generally more by the eye than by the hand, for everyone can see and few can feel. Every one sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are.”

Niccolo Machiavelli book The Prince

“One lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns…”

Mario Puzo (1920–1999) American Novelist

“(Men without ambition are boring)
And that attitude, mistress, is why the females of your kind continue to struggle for equality. And why they continue to fail.”

Richelle Mead (1976) American writer

“Men lie the most,

women tell the biggest lies.”

Chris Rock (1965) American comedian, actor, screenwriter, television producer, film producer, and director

“I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

“Woman is the unfathomable, incalculable mystery, the problem that we men can never hope to solve.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

“Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.”

Betty Friedan (1921–2006) American activist

“To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

“I don't go to mythical places with strange men.”

Douglas Adams The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.”

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist

“Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”

James Joyce Ulysses

“There are seasons in every country when noise and impudence pass current for worth; and in popular commotions especially, the clamors of interested and factious men are often mistaken for patriotism.”

Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804) Founding Father of the United States

“Men rarely see their own actions as unjustified.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

“When it comes to men, deal with them as they are, not how you’d like them to be.”

Greg Behrendt (1963) American comedian

“When I need to identify rebels, I look for men with principles”

Frank Herbert book God Emperor of Dune

“The world cries for men who are strong; strong in conviction, strong to lead, to stand, to suffer.”

Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) American missionary

“Men were always quick to believe in the madness of women.”

Alison Goodman (1966) Australian science-fiction writer

“But men are less used to the idea of being raped than women are, and it strikes them with a fresh horror. With women, that horror comes right along with the female genitals.”

Charlaine Harris book An Ice Cold Grave

“The most dangerous men on earth are those who are afraid they are wimps”

James Gilligan American psychiatrist and author

“Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women - black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

“Tis very strange Men should be so fond of being thought wickeder than they are.”

Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) English trader, writer and journalist

“? Is that boy crazy?"
"Most young men his age are somewhat crazy, I think," Sazed said with a smile. "However, this is hardly unexpected. Haven't you noticed how he stares at you when you enter a room?"
"I thought he was just creepy.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

“They lived freely among the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better, since they were women.”

D.H. Lawrence book Lady Chatterley's Lover

“Men become much more attractive when they start looking older. But it doesn't do much for women, though we do have an advantage: make-up.”

Bette Davis (1908–1989) film and television actress from the United States

“Men are sheep. Where one goes, the rest will soon follow.

-Lady Whistledown”

Julia Quinn (1970) American novelist

“In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

“Well, some men learn by listening, some read, some observe and analyze — and some of us just have to pee on the electric fence.”

Spider Robinson book Variable Star

“Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.”

James Thurber (1894–1961) American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright

“If men were equal in America, all these Poles and English and Czechs and blacks, then they were equal everywhere, and there was really no such thing as foreigner; there were only free men and slaves.”

Michael Shaara book The Killer Angels

“History is rarely made by reasonable men.”

Terry Goodkind (1948) American novelist

“Everything I do is going to contain the message that men who are going to be comfortable with powerful women are going to be more powerful men”

Joss Whedon (1964) American director, writer, and producer for television and film

“Some men fish all their lives without knowing it is not really the fish they are after.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

“No. It is said that the Nephilim are the children of men and angels. All that this angelic heritage has given to us is a longer distance to fall.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

“He had the unlucky capacity many men have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to take any serious part in it.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

“Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into
are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing
for long years.
And for this reason, some old things are lovely
warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

“The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

“When men can be made to hope, then they can be made to win.”

Bryce Courtenay The Power of One

“How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it”

Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) French writer and dramatist, father of the homonym writer and dramatist

“So who was she? (Vane)
Why do you assume it was a female? (Fang)
Didn’t know you were fond of men. I’ll file that under my special Fang folder. (Vane)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

“girls
please give your
bodies and your
lives
to
the young men
who
deserve them

besides
there is
no way
I would welcome
the
intolerable
dull
senseless hell
you would bring
me

and
I wish you
luck
in bed
and
out

but not
in
mine

thank
you.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

“At one point, she'd wanted to hurl the whole breakfast at the wall. And then she'd remember why it was that men had temper tantrums and women didn't: cleanup.”

Kristin Hannah (1960) American writer

“Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind,
because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

“Men forget everything; women remember everything. That's why men need instant replay in sports. They've already forgotten what's happened.”

Rita Rudner (1953) American comedian

“These men are worth your tears. You are not worth their merriment.”

Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) English poet and soldier (1893-1918)

“Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life's relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

“Gay men are guardians of the masculine impulse. To have anonymous sex in a dark alleyway is to pay homage to the dream of male freedom. The unknown stranger is a wandering pagan god. The altar, as in pre-history, is anywhere you kneel.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

“The reason men are so awful is because some woman has spoiled them.”

Larry McMurtry Lonesome Dove

“Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

“The best protection against rape, stalking, and domestic violence is to raise men who both understand that women are different, and would never dare take advantage of this difference.”

Wendy Shalit (1975) American writer

“Always remember the words of Descartes: The reading of all good books is like conversion with the finest men of the past centuries.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

“Some men are born sodomites, some achieve sodomy, and some have sodomy thrust upon them…”

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

“I am for those who believe in loose delights, I share the midnight orgies of young men, I dance with the dancers and drink with the drinkers.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

“All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

“They were more severely infected than the men, because while men were always getting furious, they calmed down in the end; women, who appeared to be silent, acquiescent, when they were angry flew into a rage that had no end.”

Elena Ferrante book My Brilliant Friend

“We're told that men are strong & brave, but I think women know how to endure, accept defeat & bear physical & mental agony much better than men.”

Lisa See book Shanghai Girls

“There are mysteries which men can only guess at, which age by age they may solve only in part.”

Bram Stoker (1847–1912) Irish novelist and short story writer, best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula

“I collected men with interesting names. I already knew a Socrates. He was tall and ugly and intellectual and the son of some big Greek movie producer in Hollywood, but also a Catholic, which ruined it for both of us.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

“Tis strange,-but true; for truth is always strange;
Stranger than fiction: if it could be told,
How much would novels gain by the exchange!
How differently the world would men behold!”

George Gordon Byron Don Juan

“Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it.”

Naomi Wolf book The Beauty Myth

“The men in my family are strong because the women in my family kill and eat the weak ones.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

“I've been fighting my entire adult life for men and women everywhere to be equal and to be different. But there is one right I would not grant anyone. And that is the right to be indifferent.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

“Men exist for the sake of one another. Teach them then or bear with them. (Long translation)”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

“The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
Gang aft agley.
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!”

Robert Burns (1759–1796) Scottish poet and lyricist

“Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

“The machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men.”

Jorge Luis Borges Dreamtigers

“The world hasn't changed that much; men still rule.”

Philippa Gregory book The Other Boleyn Girl

“Ask anything of men. Ask them to achieve wealth, fame, love, brutality, murder, self-sacrifice. But don’t ask them to achieve self-respect. They will hate your soul.”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead