Quotes about men
page 59

Wallace Stevens photo
Thomas Carlyle photo
Woodrow Wilson photo

“Some men who are not real men love other things about themselves, but the real man believes that his honor is dearer than his life; and a nation is merely all of us put together, and the nation's honor is dearer than the nation's comfort and the nation's peace and the nation's life itself.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Speech in Cleveland http://books.google.com/books?id=o3j10P6YFZIC&pg=PA1090&dq=%22nation's+honor+is+dearer+than+the+nation's+comfort%22 (January 1916)
1910s

Ralph Waldo Emerson photo

“But genius looks forward: the eyes of men are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1830s, The American Scholar http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm (1837)

Jacob Bronowski photo

“There’s nothing wrong with most men’s egos that the kowtowing of a headwaiter can’t cure.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Women & men

Allen West (politician) photo

“If it's about the lives of my men and their safety, I'd go through hell with a gasoline can.”

Allen West (politician) (1961) American politician; retired United States Army officer

At his 2004 hearing, regarding his conduct of an interrogation. [Department of the Army, 43rd Military Police Detachment (CID)(FWD), 10th Military Police Battalion, United States Army Criminal Investigation Command, Memorandum, Subject: CID Report Of Investigation – Final – 0152-03-CID469-60212-5C1A/5C2/5T1, February 6, 2004, http://www.aclu.org/files/projects/foiasearch/pdf/DODDOACID000105.pdf, September 28, 2010]
2000s

Anthony Burgess photo
Frank Sinatra photo
Isabella Fyvie Mayo photo

“Let not thy peace depend on the tongues of men; for whether they judge well of thee or ill, thou art not on that account other than thyself. Where are true peace and true glory? Are they not in God?”

Isabella Fyvie Mayo (1843–1914) Scottish poet, novelist, reformer

Reported in Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895) by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 448.

Richard Bertrand Spencer photo
Warren Farrell photo
Camille Paglia photo

“All men — even, I have written, Jesus Christ — began as flecks of tissue inside a woman's womb. Every boy must stagger out of the shadow of a mother goddess, whom he never fully escapes.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 32

Roger Ebert photo

“As men are killed by fighting, the truth is lost in disputing.”

Henry Vaughan (1621–1695) Welsh author, physician and metaphysical poet

Preface to Hermetical Physick of Henry Nollus (1655).

R. H. Tawney photo
Anna Quindlen photo
Seneca the Younger photo

“Withdraw into yourself, as far as you can. Associate with those who will make a better man of you. Welcome those whom you yourself can improve. The process is mutual; for men learn while they teach.”
Recede in te ipse quantum potes; cum his versare qui te meliorem facturi sunt, illos admitte quos tu potes facere meliores. Mutuo ista fiunt, et homines dum docent discunt.

Seneca the Younger (-4–65 BC) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist

Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter VII: On crowds, Line 8.

Madonna photo
John F. Kennedy photo

“…there is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war and some men are wounded, and some men never leave the country, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It's very hard in the military or personal life to assure complete equality. Life is unfair.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

[http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/JFK-Quotations.aspx "President's News Conference (107)" (21 March 1962)
1962

Thomas Carlyle photo
Clifford D. Simak photo
Thomas Carlyle photo
Norman Tebbit photo

“Norman is one of the bravest men I have ever met. He will never deviate on a point of principle—and those principles are ones which even the least articulate Tory knows he shares.”

Norman Tebbit (1931) English politician

Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (HarperCollins, 1993), p. 421.
About

Theodor Mommsen photo
Toni Morrison photo
Warren Farrell photo
John Buchan photo
Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston photo

“When Bonaparte was to be dethroned, the Sovereigns of Europe called up their people to their aid; they invoked them in the sacred names of Freedom and National Independence; the cry went forth throughout Europe: and those, whom Subsidies had no power to buy, and Conscriptions no force to compel, roused by the magic sound of Constitutional Rights, started spontaneously into arms. The long-suffering Nations of Europe rose up as one man, and by an effort tremendous and wide spreading, like a great convulsion of nature, they hurled the conqueror from his throne. But promises made in days of distress, were forgotten in the hour of triumph…The rulers of mankind…had set free a gigantic spirit from its iron prison, but when that spirit had done their bidding, they shrunk back with alarm, from the vastness of that power, which they themselves had set into action, and modestly requested, it would go down again into its former dungeon. Hence, that gloomy discontent, that restless disquiet, that murmuring sullenness, which pervaded Europe after the overthrow of Bonaparte; and which were so unlike that joyful gladness, which might have been looked for, among men, who had just been released from the galling yoke of a foreign and a military tyrant. In 1820 the long brooding fire burst out into open flame; in Germany it was still kept down and smothered, but in Italy, in Spain, and in Portugal, it overpowered every resistance.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1830/mar/10/affairs-of-portugal in the House of Commons (10 March 1830).
1830s

George William Curtis photo

“For what do we now see in the country? We see a man who, as Senator of the United States, voted to tamper with the public mails for the benefit of slavery, sitting in the President's chair. Two days after he is seated we see a judge rising in the place of John Jay — who said, 'Slaves, though held by the laws of men, are free by the laws of God' — to declare that a seventh of the population not only have no original rights as men, but no legal rights as citizens. We see every great office of State held by ministers of slavery; our foreign ambassadors not the representatives of our distinctive principle, but the eager advocates of the bitter anomaly in our system, so that the world sneers as it listens and laughs at liberty. We see the majority of every important committee of each house of Congress carefully devoted to slavery. We see throughout the vast ramification of the Federal system every little postmaster in every little town professing loyalty to slavery or sadly holding his tongue as the price of his salary, which is taxed to propagate the faith. We see every small Custom-House officer expected to carry primary meetings in his pocket and to insult at Fourth-of-July dinners men who quote the Declaration of Independence. We see the slave-trade in fact, though not yet in law, reopened — the slave-law of Virginia contesting the freedom of the soil of New York We see slave-holders in South Carolina and Louisiana enacting laws to imprison and sell the free citizens of other States. Yes, and on the way to these results, at once symptoms and causes, we have seen the public mails robbed — the right of petition denied — the appeal to the public conscience made by the abolitionists in 1833 and onward derided and denounced, and their very name become a byword and a hissing. We have seen free speech in public and in private suppressed, and a Senator of the United States struck down in his place for defending liberty. We have heard Mr. Edward Everett, succeeding brave John Hancock and grand old Samuel Adams as governor of the freest State in history, say in his inaugural address in 1836 that all discussion of the subject which tends to excite insurrection among the slaves, as if all discussion of it would not be so construed, 'has been held by highly respectable legal authorities an offence against the peace of the commonwealth, which may be prosecuted as a misdemeanor at common law'. We have heard Daniel Webster, who had once declared that the future of the slave was 'a widespread prospect of suffering, anguish, and death', now declaring it to be 'an affair of high morals' to drive back into that doom any innocent victim appealing to God and man, and flying for life and liberty. We have heard clergymen in their pulpits preaching implicit obedience to the powers that be, whether they are of God or the Devil — insisting that God's tribute should be paid to Caesar, and, by sneering at the scruples of the private conscience, denouncing every mother of Judea who saved her child from the sword of Herod's soldiers.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Winston S. Churchill photo
Jerry Falwell photo

“Grown men should not be having sex with prostitutes unless they are married to them.”

Jerry Falwell (1933–2007) American evangelical pastor, televangelist, and conservative political commentator

Crossfire (17 May 1997)

Tommy Douglas photo
P.G. Wodehouse photo
Pappus of Alexandria photo
Thomas Hobbes photo
David Hume photo
Donald J. Trump photo
William Langland photo
Koxinga photo

“On land you saw how the pride of Captain Pedel was so much humbled that he with his men, who are as foolish as himself, could not even bear the look of my men; and how, on the mere sight of my warriors, they threw down their arms and willingly awaited their well-deserved punishment with outstretched necks. Are these not sufficient proofs of your incompetency and inability to resist my forces?”

Koxinga (1624–1662) Chinese military leader

Formosa under the Dutch: described from contemporary records, with explanatory notes and a bibliography of the island, 1903, William Campbell, Kegan Paul, 424, Dec. 20 2011 http://books.google.com/books?id=OpdMq-YJoeoC&pg=PA423&dq=koxinga+formosa+always+belonged+to+china&hl=en&ei=vsjiTergDM3TgAekqbzKBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEQQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=same%20doom%20had%20they%20not%20taken%20to%20flight%20and%20gone%20out%20to%20sea.&f=false, Original from the University of Michigan(LONDON : KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO. LTD DRYDEN HOUSE, 43 GERRARD STREET, SOHO MDCCCCIII Edinburgh : T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty)

Bem Cavalgar photo

“Engineers and certified pilots may be expensive but talented young men with a teenager's grasp of risk are surprisingly affordable.”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

[lsllrn$2m3$1@reader1.panix.com, 2014-08-15]
Reviewing Robert Heinlein's Rocket Ship Galileo
2010s

William Ellery Channing photo
Adlai Stevenson photo

“Every age needs men who will redeem the time by living with a vision of the things that are to be.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

What I Think (1956), p. 142

Anacharsis photo

“The forum [is] an established place for men to cheat one another, and behave covetously.”

Anacharsis Scythian philosopher

As quoted in The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius, as translated by C. D. Yonge) (1853), "Anacharsis" sect. 5, p. 48

William Wordsworth photo

“Men who can hear the Decalogue, and feel
To self-reproach.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

The Old Cumberland Beggar.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Masculine process has at its foundation externalization. The young boy is focused away from his inner and personal self and into achievement, performance, competition, success, emotional control (being "cool"), autonomy (not being dependent or needy), fearlessness, action, and an ethic that only values time spent in doing. Anything else is suspect and viewed as lazy, worthless, time-wasting, or meaningless.Externalization, or the process of being pushed outside of oneself, amplifies and eventually becomes disconnection. Personal relationships are then objectified and founded on the role another can play in his life. Relationships are based on doing and are therefore fairly readily interchangeable with anyone else who can do.Disconnection leads men to the experience of being loners, where it's "lonely at the top," and freedom, space, and "doing one's thing," are the rationalized values. Disconnection transforms a man into someone who has everything he wanted externally, but has nothing that is bonded or connected on a personal level. He is "out of touch," so he doesn't know why he's unhappy, and may conclude that the cause of his malaise is that he needs "more." He sets out to get it, but when he gets it he feels deader and more isolated than ever.The end stage of this journey of masculine process is personal oblivion, which can occur early in his life or may not appear full blown until he's an older man, depending on how extreme his externalized process is. At this point, personal connection becomes impossible. He doesn't know he rationalizes his personal emptiness with cynical philosophies and escapes painful awareness through non-relationships he can control by buying. In the end state of oblivion, he is beyond personal reach and can only relate in abstract, depersonalized, intellectualized ways. The only way he is "loved" is in return for providing or taking care of others.”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

The Personal Journey of Masculinity: From Externalization to Disconnection to Oblivion, pp. 10–11
What Men Still Don't Know About Women, Relationships, and Love (2007)

George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax photo

“Men are not hang'd for stealing Horses, but that Horses may not be stolen.”

George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax (1633–1695) English politician

Of Punishment.
Political, Moral, and Miscellaneous Reflections (1750), Political Thoughts and Reflections

Koichi Tohei photo
Denis Diderot photo

“The pit of a theatre is the one place where the tears of virtuous and wicked men alike are mingled.”

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist

On Dramatic Poetry (1758)

Lyndall Urwick photo
Jani Allan photo

“I disapproved of the number of men she had traipsing into her bedroom and suggested she should have a turnstile on her bedroom door.”

Jani Allan (1952) South African columnist and broadcaster

Describing Linda Shaw, her former flatmate and defence witness in 1992 in the London High Court to George Carman, defence lawyer representing Channel 4 during the libel case she filed against the broadcaster. http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/courtroom-14-the-owl-has-landed-1535309.html
Other

Nathan Bedford Forrest photo

“Every moment lost is worth the life of a thousand men.”

Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821–1877) Confederate Army general

Said to Braxton Bragg at Chickamauga, September 18-20, 1863. As quoted in May I Quote You, General Forrest? by Randall Bedwell.
1860s

François de La Rochefoucauld photo

“Old men delight in giving good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer provide bad examples.”

Les vieillards aiment à donner de bons préceptes, pour se consoler de n'être plus en état de donner de mauvais exemples.
Maxim 93.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

Thomas Szasz photo
Samuel Bowles photo
Farah Pahlavi photo
William Ellery Channing photo
Immanuel Kant photo
Barry Diller photo
Abraham Joshua Heschel photo
John Bunyan photo
John Muir photo

“The United States government has always been proud of the welcome it has extended to good men of every nation, seeking freedom and homes and bread.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Source: 1900s, Our National Parks (1901), chapter 10: The American Forests

Tom Watson photo

“A man is known by the company he keeps. A company is known by the men it keeps.”

Tom Watson (1874–1956) American businessman

Source: Garg, Anu, A Word A Day, Wordsmith, 2016.02.17

Indro Montanelli photo
Jean de La Bruyère photo
Frederick Douglass photo
Thomas Carlyle photo
Norman Mailer photo

“The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

On Joe DiMaggio's marriage to Marilyn Monroe, in Marilyn (1973)

Nicole Kidman photo
Edward Jenks photo
Robert LeFevre photo

“Formal government can be defined as: a group of men who sell retribution to the inhabitants of a limited geographic area at monopolistic prices.”

Robert LeFevre (1911–1986) American libertarian businessman

Rampart Institute, p. 409.
The Fundamental of Liberty (1988)

Michelle Obama photo

“Barack is one of the smartest men we will see in our lifetime.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

Campaign rally, Las Vegas, Nevada http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/014/601mzofy.asp (17 January 2008)
2000s

James Macpherson photo
Anthony Burgess photo
Naomi Wolf photo
Hesiod photo

“For in misery men grow old quickly.”

Source: Works and Days (c. 700 BC), line 93.

Washington Irving photo
Báb photo
John Maynard Keynes photo
Thomas Jefferson photo
Jimmy Carter photo

“It would be a fruitless search to look through the Scriptures and find one single instance where Jesus did not treat women either equal or superior to men.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

As quoted in "Jimmy Carter 3.0: Building a post-presidential legacy" by Adelle M. Banks, in Religion News Service (28 May 2014) http://www.religionnews.com/2014/05/28/jimmy-carter-3-0-building-post-presidential-legacy/
Post-Presidency

Emil M. Cioran photo
Walter Rauschenbusch photo
Clementine Ford (writer) photo

“You can be told 20 days in (a) row that you should be raped and sodomised and beaten and strung up and thrown out and taught a lesson, but if on the 21st day you turn around and make a joke about firing men into the sun using a cannon, you are a scold who hates men and is teaching her son that he's a rapist.”

Clementine Ford (writer) (1981) Australian feminist writer, broadcaster and public speaker

Clementine Ford: This is the personal price I pay for speaking out online http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/news-and-views/opinion/clementine-ford-this-is-the-personal-price-i-pay-for-speaking-out-online-20170713-gxaa6z.html, July 13 2017, in the Sydney Morning Herald
2017

Philip Sidney photo

“With a tale forsooth he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner.”

Philip Sidney (1554–1586) English diplomat

Page 95.
An Apology of Poetry, or The Defence of Poesy (1595)

Franklin Pierce photo

“Do we not all know that the cause of our casualties is the vicious intermeddling of too many of the citizens of the Northern States with the constitutional rights of the Southern States, cooperating with the discontents of the people of those states? Do we not know that the disregard of the Constitution, and of the security that it affords to the rights of States and of individuals, has been the cause of the calamity which our country is called to undergo? And now, war! war, in its direst shape — war, such as it makes the blood run cold to read of in the history of other nations and of other times — war, on a scale of a million of men in arms — war, horrid as that of barbaric ages, rages in several of the States of the Union, as its more immediate field, and casts the lurid shadow of its death and lamentation athwart the whole expanse, and into every nook and corner of our vast domain.

Nor is that all; for in those of the States which are exempt from the actual ravages of war, in which the roar of the cannon, and the rattle of the musketry, and the groans of the dying, are heard but as a faint echo of terror from other lands, even here in the loyal States, the mailed hand of military usurpation strikes down the liberties of the people, and its foot tramples on a desecrated Constitution.”

Franklin Pierce (1804–1869) American politician, 14th President of the United States (in office from 1853 to 1857)

Address to the Citizens of Concord, New Hampshire (4 July 1863).

John Milton photo

“No man who knows aught, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were born free.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649)

Luís de Camões photo

“Ever in this world saw I
Good men suffer grave torments,
But even more—
Enough to terrify—
Men who live out evil lives
Reveling in pleasure and in content.”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

Os bons vi sempre passar
No mundo graves tormentos;
E para mais me espantar,
Os maus vi sempre nadar
Em mar de contentamentos.
"Esparsa ao Desconcerto do Mundo", translation from Luís de Camões and the Epic of the Lusiads (1962) by Henry Hersch Hart, p. 111
Lyric poetry, Songs (redondilhas)

John Dryden photo
André Maurois photo