Quotes about men
page 77

Kofi Annan photo
Dorothy Day photo
Edmund Burke photo
Pierre Corneille photo

“As great as kings may be, they are what we are: they can err like other men.”

Pour grands que soient les rois, ils sont ce que nous sommes:
Ils peuvent se tromper comme les autres hommes.
Don Gomès, act I, scene iii.
Le Cid (1636)

Ernest King photo

“There is work in plenty for all hands- officers and men.”

Ernest King (1878–1956) United States Navy admiral, Chief of Naval Operations

Excerpt from Atlantic Fleet Confidential Memorandum 2CM-41, sent on 24 March 1941. As quoted in History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Volume One: The Battle of the Atlantic, September 1939-May 1943 (1948) by Samuel Eliot Morison, p. 52

“Language, intelligence, and humor, along with art, generosity, and musical ability, are often described as human equivalents of the peacock’s tail. However, peacocks afford a poor analogy for the role of courtship displays in humans. Other animal models offer a better fit. In a number of nonhuman species — species as diverse as sea dragons and grebes — males and females engage in a mutual courtship “dance,” in which the two partners mirror one another’s movements. In Clark’s grebes and Western grebes, for instance, the pair bond ritual culminates in the famous courtship rush: The male and female swim side by side along the top of the water, with their wings back and their heads and necks in a stereotyped posture. If we want a nonhuman analogue for the role of creative intelligence or humor in human courtship, we should think not of ornamented peacocks displaying while drab females evaluate them. We should think instead of grebes engaged in their mating rush or sea dragons engaged in their synchronized mirror dance. Once we have one of these alternative images fixed in our minds, we can then add the proviso that there is a slight skew such that, in the early stages of courtship, men tend to display more vigorously and women tend to be choosier. However, this should be seen as a qualification to the primary message that intelligence, humor, and other forms of sexual display are part of the mutual courtship process in our species.”

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 160

Benjamin R. Barber photo
K. R. Narayanan photo

“The applications of science are inevitable and unquotable for all countries and people today. But something more than its application is necessary. It is the scientific approach, the adventurous, and critical temper of science, the search for truth and new knowledge, the refusal to accept anything without testing and trial, the capacity to change previous conclusions in the face of new evidence, the reliance on observed fact and not on pre-conceived theory, the hard discipline of the mind – all this is necessary, not merely for the too many scientists today, who swear by science, forget all about it outside their particular sphere. The scientific approach and temper or should be a way of life, a process of thinking, a method of acting, associating, with our fellow men. That is a large order and undoubtedly very few if any at all can function in this way with even partial success. But his [Nehru] criticism applies in equal or even greater measure to all the injunctions which philosophy and religion have laid upon us. The scientific temper points out the way along which man should travel. It is the temper of a free man. We live in a scientific age, so we are told but there is little evidence of this temper in the people anywhere or even in their leaders.”

K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India

Quoted from his book “In Nehru and His Vision 1999" in: K.K. Sinha, Social And Cultural Ethos Of India http://books.google.co.in/books?id=Jb-fO2R1CQUC&pg=PA183, Atlantic Publishers & Dist, 1 January 2008, p. 183

Franklin D. Roosevelt photo
Max Stirner photo
Michael Moorcock photo
Vilfredo Pareto photo
John Milton photo
Lyndon B. Johnson photo

“For it is not enough just to give men rights. They must be able to use those rights in their personal pursuit of happiness.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Voting Rights Act signing speech (1965)

Germaine Greer photo
Warren Farrell photo
Alcaeus of Mytilene photo
Baruch Spinoza photo
André Maurois photo
Rachel Riley photo
Philo photo
Aristide Maillol photo
Louis Bromfield photo
Bernard Cornwell photo
Vilfredo Pareto photo
Mark Hopkins (educator) photo
Wilfred Thesiger photo
Shankar Dayal Sharma photo
Paul Hamilton Hayne photo
Paul Cézanne photo
William Westmoreland photo
Warren Farrell photo

“Men are not only women's unpaid bodyguards, they actually pay to be a woman's bodyguard.”

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 230.

David Strauss photo
Howell Cobb photo
Phillips Brooks photo

“The absence of sentimentalism in Christ's relations with men is what makes His tenderness so exquisitely touching.”

Phillips Brooks (1835–1893) American clergyman and author

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 59.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury photo
Maria Mitchell photo
Clifford D. Simak photo
Frederick Douglass photo
Camille Paglia photo

“Men, gay or straight, can get beauty and lewdness into one image. Women are forever softening, censoring, politicizing.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 65

Jonathan Swift photo

“For, in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery: but in fact, eleven men well armed will certainly subdue one single man in his shirt.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

The Drapier's Letters, letter iv (13 October, 1724)

Lois McMaster Bujold photo
Donald J. Trump photo
André Maurois photo
Colin Wilson photo
Ann Coulter photo
Allen West (politician) photo

“The chroniclers of the early Turkish rulers of India take pride in affirming that Qutbuddin Aibak was a killer of lakhs of infidels. Leave aside enthusiastic killers like Alauddin Khalji and Muhammad bin Tughlaq, even the "kind-hearted" Firoz Tughlaq killed more than a lakh Bengalis when he invaded their country. Timur Lang or Tamerlane says he killed a hundred thousand infidel prisoners of war in Delhi. He built victory pillars from severed heads at many places. These were acts of sultans. The nobles were not lagging behind. One Shaikh Daud Kambu is said to have killed 20,000 with his dagger. The Bahmani sultans of Gulbarga and Bidar considered it meritorious to kill a hundred thousand Hindu men, women and children every year….. The rite of Jauhar killed the women, the tradition of not deserting the field of battle made Rajputs and others die fighting in large numbers. When Malwa was attacked (1305), its Raja is said to have possessed 40,000 horse and 100,000 foot.43 After the battle, "so far as human eye could see, the ground was muddy with blood"…. Under Muhammad Tughlaq, wars and rebellions knew no end. His expeditions to Bengal, Sindh and the Deccan, as well as ruthless suppression of twenty-two rebellions, meant only depopulation in the thirteenth and first half of the fourteenth century. For one thing, in spite of constant efforts no addition of territory could be made by Turkish rulers from 1210 to 1296; for another the Turkish rulers were more ruthless in war and less merciful in peace. Hence the extirpating massacres of Balban, and the repeated attacks by others on regions already devastated but not completely subdued….. Mulla Daud of Bidar vividly describes the war between Muhammad Shah Bahmani and the Vijayanagar King in 1366 in which "Farishtah computes the victims on the Hindu side alone as numbering no less than half a million." Muhammad also devastated the Karnatak region with vengeance….. Under Akbar and Jahangir "five or six hundred thousand human beings were killed," says emperor Jahangir. The figures given by these killers and their chroniclers may be a few thousand less or a few thousand more, but what bred this ambition of cutting down human beings without compunction was the Muslim theory, practice and spirit of Jihad, as spelled out in Muslim scriptures and rules of administration.”

Ch 3
Theory and Practice of Muslim State in India (1999)

Paul Blobel photo

“Our men taking part in the executions suffered more from nervous exhaustion than those who were to be shot.”

Paul Blobel (1894–1951) German SS officer and Holocaust perpetrator

Quoted in "Minister of death: the Adolf Eichmann story" - Page 131 - by Quentin James Reynolds, Zwy Aldouby - 1960.

Confucius photo
Mary McCarthy photo
Ray Comfort photo

“So, a talking parrot, three hundred people flying through the sky in a big tin can called a 747, a human being growing inside another person, and men walking on the moon don't contradict logic?”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think (2009)

Dylan Moran photo
Smita Nair Jain photo

“Being one of the few women in the leadership team, I am often surrounded by men, but I have never found that to be uncomfortable.”

Smita Nair Jain (1969) Indian Author, screenwriter and playback singer

Source: Women corporate leaders enlighten IIM-Raipur, Sify, 2018-07-23 http://www.sify.com/finance/women-corporate-leaders-enlighten-iim-raipur-news-default-oi2ikzdhagaaf.html,

John Heywood photo

“Who waite for dead men shall goe long barefoote.”

John Heywood (1497–1580) English writer known for plays, poems and a collection of proverbs

Part I, ch 9.
Proverbs (1546)

Graham Greene photo
Michael Badnarik photo
Josh Billings photo

“Men are often praized for their sagassity, but all the fore sight in the world kant tell a dubble yelked egg untill it iz broken.”

Josh Billings (1818–1885) American humorist

Josh Billings: His Works, Complete (1873)

Steven Pressfield photo
Salam Fayyad photo

“It's the responsibility of men of religion to … present religion as a way of tolerance, not as a cover for bloodshed.”

Salam Fayyad (1952) Palestinian politician

Fayyad Warns Islamic Preachers http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/06/29/ap3870235.html

Pat Conroy photo
Alfred North Whitehead photo

“The worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

Source: 1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925), Ch. 1: "The Origins of Modern Science"

Hester Chapone photo
Alan Rusbridger photo
C. Wright Mills photo
Leo Tolstoy photo
Charles A. Beard photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Oliver Wendell Holmes photo
Herbert Marcuse photo
Joseph Hayne Rainey photo
Frederic Joliot-Curie photo
Henry Ford photo

“Money doesn't change men. It merely unmasks them. If a man is naturally selfish, or arrogant, or greedy, the money brings it out; that's all.”

Henry Ford (1863–1947) American industrialist

Interview with Bruce Barton, "It Would Be Fun To Start Over Again," The American Magazine, April 1921

Will Cuppy photo
Montesquieu photo

“The laws of Rome had wisely divided public power among a large number of magistracies, which supported, checked and tempered each other. Since they all had only limited power, every citizen was qualified for them, and the people — seeing many persons pass before them one after the other — did not grow accustomed to any in particular. But in these times the system of the republic changed. Through the people the most powerful men gave themselves extraordinary commissions — which destroyed the authority of the people and magistrates, and placed all great matters in the hands of one man, or a few.”

Source: Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence/11 - Wikisource, fr.wikisource.org, fr, 2018-07-07 https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Consid%C3%A9rations_sur_les_causes_de_la_grandeur_des_Romains_et_de_leur_d%C3%A9cadence/11,
Source: Montesquieu, Causes of the Greatness of the Romans, 2017-11-09, 2018-07-07 https://web.archive.org/web/20171109014358/http://www.constitution.org/cm/ccgrd_l.htm,
Source: Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (1876), Chapter XI.

Charles P. Mattocks photo

“When the two Regts. were panic-stricken they [his command] stood by me like heroes … Would I abandon men who showed themselves willing to give their own lives to save mine?”

Charles P. Mattocks (1840–1910) American soldier, lawyer and politician

Speaking of the 17th Main Volunteer Infantry Regiment in a letter to his mother, in [Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai, Northern Character: College-Educated New Englanders, Honor, Nationalism, and Leadership in the Civil War Era, https://books.google.com/books?id=cFMnDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA160, 2016, Oxford University Press, 978-0-8232-7181-8, 160–]

François de La Rochefoucauld photo

“What we term virtues are often but a mass of various actions and diverse interests, which fortune or our own industry manage to arrange; and it is not always from valour or from chastity that men are brave, and women chaste.”

Ce que nous prenons pour des vertus n'est souvent qu'un assemblage de diverses actions et de divers intérêts, que la fortune ou notre industrie savent arranger; et ce n'est pas toujours par valeur et par chasteté que les hommes sont vaillants, et que les femmes sont chastes.
Maxim 1.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

Thomas Merton photo
Leo Tolstoy photo
William Hazlitt photo

“Jesus Christ is personally unknown to the vast masses of men on all continents. His influence is limited by the failure and indifference of his professed followers.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Source: Something More, A Consideration of the Vast, Undeveloped Resources of Life (1920), p. 58

David Morrison photo
Antonio Cocchi photo
Abraham Cahan photo
John Muir photo

“Happy will be the men who, having the power and the love and the benevolent forecast to [create a park], will do it. They will not be forgotten. The trees and their lovers will sing their praises, and generations yet unborn will rise up and call them blessed.”

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

"The Basin of the Columbia River" in Picturesque California (1888-1890); reprinted in Steep Trails (1918), chapter 22
1880s

Pope Pius II photo
Sima Qian photo

“I myself have travelled west as far as K'ung-t'ung, north past Cho-lu, east to the sea, and in the south I have sailed the Yellow and Huai Rivers. The elders and old men of these various lands frequently pointed out to me the places where the Yellow Emperor, Yao, and Shun had lived, and in these places the manners and customs seemed quite different. In general those of their accounts which do not differ from the ancient texts seem to be near to the truth.”

translation by Burton Watson
I once traveled west to Mount K’ung-t'ung and passed Cho-lu [Mountain] in the north; to the east I drifted along the coast, and to the south I floated over the Huai River and the Chiang. Wherever I went, all of the village elders would point out for me sites of The Huang-ti, Yao and Shun. The traditions were certainly very different from each other. In sum, [those accounts of the elders] which were not far from the ancient-text versions [of the classics], tend to be plausible.
translated by Tsai-fa Cheng, Zongli Lu, William H. Nienhauser, Jr., and Robert Reynolds, in The Grand Scribe’s Records, edited by William H. Nienhauser, Jr.
五帝本紀 https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E5%8F%B2%E8%A8%98/%E5%8D%B7001
Records of the Grand Historian

Edward Carpenter photo
Seneca the Younger photo

“If any one is angry with you, meet his anger by returning benefits for it: a quarrel which is only taken up on one side falls to the ground: it takes two men to fight.”
Irascetur aliquis: tu contra beneficiis prouoca; cadit statim simultas ab altera parte deserta; nisi paria non pugnant.

De Ira (On Anger): Book 2, cap. 34, line 5.
Moral Essays

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn photo
John Lancaster Spalding photo
Renée Vivien photo

“Men smell of leather. … The leather of huntsmen, furniture movers, porters.”

Renée Vivien (1877–1909) British poet who wrote in the French language

Quoted in Mercure de France, I-XII (1953), trans. Jeannette H. Foster (1977)

Sri Aurobindo photo
Dayanand Saraswati photo