Quotes about men
page 3

W.E.B. Du Bois photo

“I believe that all men, black, brown, and white, are brothers.”

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) American sociologist, historian, activist and writer
Andrea Dworkin photo

“A commitment to sexual equality with men is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.”

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

"I Want a Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape" http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/WarZoneChaptIIIE.html (1983).
Context: I want to see this men's movement make a commitment to ending rape because that is the only meaningful commitment to equality. It is astonishing that in all our worlds of feminism and antisexism we never talk seriously about ending rape. Ending it. Stopping it. No more. No more rape. In the back of our minds, are we holding on to its inevitability as the last preserve of the biological? Do we think that it is always going to exist no matter what we do? All of our political actions are lies if we don't make a commitment to ending the practice of rape. This commitment has to be political. It has to be serious. It has to be systematic. It has to be public. It can't be self-indulgent.

D.H. Lawrence photo

“Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.”

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

Poem, "Liberty's old story" in Pansies (Third typing, ribbon copy - 231 poems, c. 11-28 February 1929)

Oscar Wilde photo
Geoffrey Chaucer photo

“Men may the wise atrenne, and naught atrede.”

Source: Troilus and Criseyde

H.P. Lovecraft photo
Louis-ferdinand Céline photo
Jean Jacques Rousseau photo
René Descartes photo
Alice Sebold photo
John Stuart Mill photo
Aristotle photo

“All men by nature desire knowledge.”

Aristotle (-384–-321 BC) Classical Greek philosopher, student of Plato and founder of Western philosophy

Source: On Man in the Universe

Albert Camus photo
Billy Connolly photo
Martin Luther photo
Ludwig von Mises photo
Karel Čapek photo
Baron d'Holbach photo

“When we examine the opinions of men, we find that nothing is more uncommon, than common sense; or, in other words, they lack judgment to discover plain truths, or to reject absurdities, and palpable contradictions.”

Baron d'Holbach (1723–1789) French-German author, philosopher, encyclopedist

Good Sense without God, or, Freethoughts Opposed to Supernatural Ideas (London: W. Stewart & Co., ca. 1900) ( Project Gutenberg e-text http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/gsens10.txt), preface
Translator unknown. Original publication in French at Amsterdam, 1772, as Le bon sens ("Common Sense"), and often attributed to John Meslier.

Irenaeus photo
Benjamin Disraeli photo

“Moderation has been called a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to console undistinguished people for their want of fortune and their lack of merit.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Not Disraeli but La Rochefoucauld; it is Maxim 308 in his Reflections.
Misattributed

Cardinal Richelieu photo

“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.”

Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642) French clergyman, noble and statesman

Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
As quoted in The Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations (1896) by Jehiel K̀eeler Hoyt, p. 763
Édouard Fournier, in L'Espirit dans l'Historie (1867), 3rd edition, Ch. 51, p. 260, disputes the traditional attribution, and suggests various agents of Richelieu might have been the actual author.
David Hackett Fischer, in Champlain's Dream (2009), Simon & Schuster, p. 704, n. 14, says it's a paraphrase of Quintilian and there is no source closer to Richelieu than Francoise Bertaut's Memoires pour servir à l'histoire d'Anne d'Autriche.
Disputed

Thomas Paine photo

“It is by distortedly exalting some men, that others are distortedly debased, till the whole is out of nature.”

Part 1.3 Rights of Man
1790s, Rights of Man, Part I (1791)

Patrice Lumumba photo

“Without dignity there is no liberty, without justice there is no dignity, and without independence there are no free men.”

Patrice Lumumba (1925–1961) Congolese Prime Minister, cold war leader, executed

Letter to his wife (Congo, My Country)

Cesare Lombroso photo

“Unfortunately, goodness and honor are rather the exception than the rule among exceptional men, not to speak of geniuses.”

Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) Italian criminologist

Die Welt (1909); also in A Treasury of Jewish Quotations (1985) by Joseph L. Baron.

Ptolemy photo
Ludwig von Mises photo
Marcus Garvey photo

“We were the first Fascists, when we had 100,000 disciplined men, and were training children, Mussolini was still an unknown. Mussolini copied our Fascism.”

Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) Jamaica-born British political activist, Pan-Africanist, orator, and entrepreneur

1937 interview reported by Joel A. Rogers, "Marcus Garvey," in Negroes of New York series, New York Writers Program, 1939, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York.

Adam Weishaupt photo
Erik H. Erikson photo

“When established identities become outworn or unfinished ones threaten to remain incomplete, special crises compel men to wage holy wars, by the cruelest means, against those who seem to question or threaten their unsafe ideological bases.”

Erik H. Erikson (1902–1994) American German-born psychoanalyst & essayist

"The Problem of Ego Identity" (1956), published in Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 4:56-121

Blaise Pascal photo

“They [men] have corrupted this [God's supernatural] order by making profane things what they should make of holy things, because in fact, we believe scarcely any thing except which pleases us.”

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher

The Art of Persuasion

Socrates photo
George Orwell photo
Edgar Guest photo
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn photo
Jean Rostand photo

“Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god.”

Jean Rostand (1894–1977) French writer

See also "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic." (misattributed to Joseph Stalin)

Omar Bradley photo

“What women want is what men want. They want respect.”

Marilyn vos Savant (1946) US American magazine columnist, author and lecturer

As quoted in Evergreen : A Guide to Writing with Readings (2003), by Susan Fawcett

Juan Donoso Cortés photo

“There is no man, let him be aware of it or not, who is not a combatant in this hot contest; no one who does not take an active part in the responsibility of the defeat or victory. The prisoner in his chains and the king on his throne, the poor and the rich, the healthy and the infirm, the wise and the ignorant, the captive and the free, the old man and the child, the civilized and the savage, share equally in the combat. Every word that is pronounced, is either inspired by God or by the world, and necessarily proclaims, implicitly or explicitly, but always clearly, the glory of the one or the triumph of the other. In this singular warfare we all fight through forced enlistment; here the system of substitutes or volunteers finds no place. In it is unknown the exception of sex or age; here no attention is paid to him who says, I am the son of a poor widow; nor to the mother of the paralytic, nor to the wife of the cripple. In this warfare all men born of woman are soldiers.
And don’t tell me you don’t wish to fight; for the moment you tell me that, you are already fighting; nor that you don’t know which side to join, for while you are saying that, you have already joined a side; nor that you wish to remain neutral; for while you are thinking to be so, you are so no longer; nor that you want to be indifferent; for I will laugh at you, because on pronouncing that word you have chosen your party. Don’t tire yourself in seeking a place of security against the chances of war, for you tire yourself in vain; that war is extended as far as space, and prolonged through all time. In eternity alone, the country of the just, can you find rest, because there alone there is no combat. But do not imagine, however, that the gates of eternity shall be opened for you, unless you first show the wounds you bear; those gates are only opened for those who gloriously fought here the battles of the Lord, and were, like the Lord, crucified.”

Juan Donoso Cortés (1809–1853) Spanish author, political theorist and diplomat

Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism (1879)

Socrates photo
Gilbert Parker photo
Democritus photo

“The brave man is not only he who overcomes the enemy, but he who is stronger than pleasures. Some men are masters of cities, but are enslaved to women.”

Democritus Ancient Greek philosopher, pupil of Leucippus, founder of the atomic theory

Freeman (1948), p. 163
Variant: The brave man is he who overcomes not only his enemies but his pleasures. There are some men who are masters of cities but slaves to women.

Charles Spurgeon photo
Martin Luther photo
Norman Cousins photo

“Most men think they are immortal--until they get a cold, when they think they are going to die within the hour.”

Norman Cousins (1915–1990) American journalist

http://books.google.com/books?id=feWS3EhzaRwC&q=%22Most+men+think+they+are+immortal+until+they+get+a+cold+when+they+think+they+are+going+to+die+within+the+hour%22&pg=PA216#v=onepage
Human Options (1981)

George Orwell photo

“One is almost driven to the cynical conclusion that men are only decent when they are powerless.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Review of The Freedom of the Streets by Jack Common, June 1938, pp. 335-6

B.F. Skinner photo

“Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.”

B.F. Skinner (1904–1990) American behaviorist

Freedom and the control of men (1955/1956) American Scholar, 25 (1), 47-65.

Aleksandr Pushkin photo

“God save us from seeing a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless. Those who plot impossible upheavals among us, are either young and do not know our people, or are hard-hearted men who do not care a straw either about their own lives or those of others.”

Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837) Russian poet

Found in Pushkin's. The Captain's Daughter and Other Stories. English edition by Random House LLC. 2013. p. 139
As quoted by Joseph Frank in Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (2009). Princeton University Press, p. 203.

“On that day all the gods looked down from heaven upon the ship and the might of the heroes, half-divine, the bravest of men then sailing the sea.”

Source: Argonautica (3rd century BC), Book I. Preparation and Departure, Lines 547–549 (tr. R. C. Seaton)

George Orwell photo

“Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.”

"Charles Dickens" (1939), Inside the Whale and Other Essays (1940) http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/dickens/english/e_chd
Charles Dickens (1939)

Stefan Zweig photo
Martin Luther photo
Martin Luther photo
José Martí photo

“Mankind is composed of two sorts of men — those who love and create, and those who hate and destroy.”

José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader

"Letter to a Cuban Farmer" (1893)

Martin Luther photo
Colin Wilson photo
Abraham Lincoln photo

“Understanding the spirit of our institutions to aim at the elevation of men, I am opposed to whatever tends to degrade them.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Letter to Dr. Theodore Canisius (17 May 1859)
1850s

Andrea Dworkin photo

“Q: People think you are very hostile to men.
A: I am.
Q: Doesn't that worry you?
A: From what you said, it worries them.”

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

Nervous Interview http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/WarZoneChaptIIA.html (1979). Dworkin wrote both the questions and the answers

Jean Paul Sartre photo
Dante Alighieri photo

“The use of men is like a leaf
On bough, which goeth and another cometh.”

Canto XXVI, lines 137–138 (tr. Longfellow).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Paradiso

Emperor Gaozu of Han photo

“A great wind came forth, the clouds rose on high.
Now that my might rules all within the seas, I have returned to my old village.
Where will I find brave men to guard the four corners of my land?”

Emperor Gaozu of Han (-256–-195 BC) founding emperor of the Han Dynasty (256 BC - 195 BC)

Translated by Burton Watson
大風歌 Song of the Great Wind

Socrates photo
Cyndi Lauper photo
Mikhail Bakunin photo
Martin Luther photo

“Concerning the female sorcerer. Roman law also prescribes this. Why does the law name women more than men here, even though men are also guilty of this? Because women are more susceptible to those superstitions of Satan; take Eve, for example. They are commonly called “wise women.””

Martin Luther (1483–1546) seminal figure in Protestant Reformation

Let them be killed.
Sermon on Exodus, 1526, WA XVI, p. 551 as quoted in Luther on Women: A Sourcebook, edited by Susan C. Karant-Nunn, Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, (2003), p. 231

Ho Chi Minh photo
Socrates photo
Martin Luther photo
Socrates photo

“It would be better for me… that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Gorgias, 482c
Plato, Gorgias

Piet Mondrian photo
Martin Luther photo
John Fante photo
Isocrates photo
Hermann Göring photo

“The Russians are primitive folk. Besides, Bolshevism is something that stifles individualism and which is against my inner nature. Bolshevism is worse than National Socialism — in fact, it can't be compared to it. Bolshevism is against private property, and I am all in favor of private property. Bolshevism is barbaric and crude, and I am fully convinced that that atrocities committed by the Nazis, which incidentally I knew nothing about, were not nearly as great or as cruel as those committed by the Communists. I hate the Communists bitterly because I hate the system. The delusion that all men are equal is ridiculous. I feel that I am superior to most Russians, not only because I am a German but because my cultural and family background are superior. How ironic it is that crude Russian peasants who wear the uniforms of generals now sit in judgment on me. No matter how educated a Russian might be, he is still a barbaric Asiatic. Secondly, the Russian generals and the Russian government planned a war against Germany because we represented a threat to them ideologically. In the German state, I was the chief opponent of Communism. I admit freely and proudly that it was I who created the first concentration camps in order to put Communists in them. Did I ever tell you that funny story about how I sent to Spain a ship containing mainly bricks and stones, under which I put a single layer of ammunition which had been ordered by the Red government in Spain? The purpose of that ship was to supply the waning Red government with munitions. That was a good practical joke and I am proud of it because I wanted with all my heart to see Russian Communism in Spain defeated finally.”

Hermann Göring (1893–1946) German politician and military leader

To Leon Goldensohn (28 May 1946)
The Nuremberg Interviews (2004)

Ivan Pavlov photo
Harold II of England photo

“Seven feet of English ground, or as much more as he may be taller than other men.”

Harold II of England (1022–1066) Anglo-Saxon King of England

Variant translation: He will give him seven feet of English ground, or as much more as he may be taller than other men.
Attributed by the Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson (1178-1241) in his Saga of Harald Hardrade.
1066, when asked by his traitorous brother, Tostig, how much of England he was prepared to give up to the invading King Harald Hardrada of Norway
Attributed

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues photo
George Orwell photo

“Both men were the spiritual children of Voltaire, both had an ironical, sceptical view of life, and a native pessimism overlaid by gaiety; both knew that the existing social order is a swindle and its cherished beliefs mostly delusions.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

On Mark Twain and Anatole France, in "Mark Twain - The Licensed Jester" in Tribune (26 November 1943); reprinted in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (1968)

Karl Popper photo
Martin Luther photo
Ludwig von Mises photo
Andrea Dworkin photo
Socrates photo

“We shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good, for one of two things: either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and a migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the site of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king, will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now, if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O friends and judges, can be greater than this? …Above all, I shall be able to continue my search into true and false knowledge; as in this world, so also in that; I shall find out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise, and is not. …What infinite delight would there be in conversing with them and asking them questions! For in that world they would not put a man to death for this; certainly not. For besides being happier in that world than in this, they will be immortal, if what is said is true.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

40c–41c
Plato, Apology

Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Ferdowsi photo
Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues photo

“The moderation of great men only sets a limit to their vices. The moderation of weak men is mediocrity.”

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) French writer, a moralist

La modération des grands hommes ne borne que leurs vices. La modération des faibles est médiocrité.
Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 168.

Ambrose Bierce photo

“An army's bravest men are its cowards. The death which they would not meet at the hands of the enemy they will meet at the hands of their officers, with never a flinching.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

Source: What I Saw At Shiloh (1881), V

Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Socrates photo
Jean Rostand photo

“Science had better not free the minds of men too much, before it has tamed their instincts.”

Jean Rostand (1894–1977) French writer

[Jean Rostand, The substance of men, Doubleday, 1962, 19]

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs photo
Émile Durkheim photo
Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues photo
Abraham Lincoln photo

“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Sometimes attributed to Lincoln since a 1950 speech of Douglas MacArthur citing him as its author, this is actually from a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
Misattributed

Huldrych Zwingli photo

“Balthasar of Waldshit has fallen into prison here - a man not merely irreverent and unlearned, but even empty. Learn the sum of the matter. When he came to Zurich our Council fearing lest he should cause a commotion ordered him to be taken into custody. Since, however, he had once in freakishness of disposition and fatuity, lurked out in Waldshut against our Council, of which place he, by the gods, was a guardian [i. e., he has pastor there], until the stupid fellow disunited and destroyed everything, it was determined that I should discuss with him in a friendly manner the baptising of infants and Catabaptists, as he earnestly begged first from prison and afterwards from custody. I met the fellow and rendered him mute as a fish. The next day he recited a recantation in the presence of certain Councillors appointed for the purpose [which recantation when repeated to the Two Hundred it was ordered should be publicly made Therefore having started to write it in the city, he gave it to the Council with his own hand, with all its silliness, as he promised. At length he denied that he had changed his opinion, although he had done so before a Swiss tribunal, which with us is a capital offence, affirming that his signature had been extorted from him by terror, which was most untrue].
The council was so unwilling that force should be used on him that when the Emperor or Ferdinand twice asked that the fellow be given to him it refused the request. Indeed he was not taken prisoner that he might suffer the penalty of his boldness in the baptismal matter, but to prevent his causing in secret some confusion, a thing he delighted to do. Then he angered the Council; for there were present most upright Councillors who had witnessed his most explicit and unconstrained withdrawal, and had refused to hand to him over to the cruelty of the Emperor, helping themselves with my aid. The next day he was thrust back into prison and tortured. It is clear that the man had become a sport for demons, so he recanted not frankly as he had promised, nay he said that he entertained no other opinions than those taught by me, execrated the error and obstinacy of the Catabaptists, repeated this three times when stretched on the racks, and bewailed his misery and the wrath of God which in this affair was so unkind. Behold what wantonness! Than these men there is nothing more foolhardy, deceptive infamous - for I cannot tell you what they devise in Abtzell - and shameless. Tomorrow or next day the case will come up.”

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) leader of the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland, and founder of the Swiss Reformed Churches

Letter to Capito, January 1, 1526 (Staehelin, Briefe ausder Reformationseit, p. 20), ibid, p. 249-250

Yukteswar Giri photo
Cassiodorus photo
Duns Scotus photo

“If all men by nature desire to know, then they desire most of all the greatest knowledge of science. So the Philosopher argues in chap. 2 of his first book of the work [Metaphisics]. And he immediately indicates what the greatest science is, namely the science which is about those things that are most knowable. But there are two senses in which things are said to be maximally knowable: either [1] because they are the first of all things known and without them nothing else can be known; or [2] because they are what are known most certainly. In either way, however, this science is about the most knowable. Therefore, this most of all is a science and, consequently, most desirable…”
sic: si omnes homines natura scire desiderant, ergo maxime scientiam maxime desiderabunt. Ita arguit Philosophus I huius cap. 2. Et ibidem subdit: "quae sit maxime scientia, illa scilicet quae est circa maxime scibilia". Maxime autem dicuntur scibilia dupliciter: uel quia primo omnium sciuntur sine quibus non possunt alia sciri; uel quia sunt certissima cognoscibilia. Utroque autem modo considerat ista scientia maxime scibilia. Haec igitur est maxime scientia, et per consequens maxime desiderabilis.

Duns Scotus (1265–1308) Scottish Franciscan friar, philosopher and Catholic blessed

sic: si omnes homines natura scire desiderant, ergo maxime scientiam maxime desiderabunt. Ita arguit Philosophus I huius cap. 2. Et ibidem subdit: "quae sit maxime scientia, illa scilicet quae est circa maxime scibilia".
Maxime autem dicuntur scibilia dupliciter: uel quia primo omnium sciuntur sine quibus non possunt alia sciri; uel quia sunt certissima cognoscibilia. Utroque autem modo considerat ista scientia maxime scibilia. Haec igitur est maxime scientia, et per consequens maxime desiderabilis.
Quaestiones subtilissimae de metaphysicam Aristotelis, as translated in: William A. Frank, Allan Bernard Wolter (1995) Duns Scotus, metaphysician. p. 18-19