Quotes about men
page 82

C. Wright Mills photo
Willa Cather photo
Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon photo

“Those regulations that are adapted to the common race of men are the best.”

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon (1732–1802) British Baron

King v. The College of Physicians (1797), 7 T. R. 288.

Peter T. King photo
Norman Thomas photo
Robert E. Howard photo
Warren Farrell photo

“The rules of sexism do not free men from the terror of violence; they only keep men from complaining about it.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Are the Way They Are (1988), p. 232.

Tristan Tzara photo
Halldór Laxness photo
Robert Sheckley photo
Thomas Szasz photo
William Harvey photo
Niccolo Machiavelli photo

“Upon this, one has to remark that men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.”

Source: The Prince (1513), Ch. 3; Variant translation: Never do any enemy a small injury for they are like a snake which is half beaten and it will strike back the first chance it gets.

Warren Farrell photo

“Men’s life expectancy was one year less than women’s in 1920; today, it is seven years less, yet the federal government has only an Office of Research on Women’s Health.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000)

Henry Adams photo

“Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Cristoforo Colombo photo
Daniel Defoe photo
Torquato Tasso photo

“Too dark the place and too inscrutable
where mortal men their deepest thoughts control.”

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet

Chè 'n parte troppo cupa, e troppo interna
Il pensier de' mortali occulto giace.
Canto V, stanza 41 (tr. Wickert)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)

Joseph Conrad photo

“This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak.”

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) Polish-British writer

Youth, A Narrative http://www.gutenberg.org/files/525/525.txt (1902)

John Dos Passos photo
Jane Yolen photo

“Wars may make heroes of men, but not all the time.”

Source: Briar Rose (1992), Chapter 25 (p. 146)

Germaine Greer photo
Otto Pfleiderer photo
Warren Farrell photo
Gene Wolfe photo
Warren Farrell photo
Warren Farrell photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
George William Russell photo
Louis Brandeis photo
Robert Musil photo
Muhammad photo
Nick Drake photo
Michael Moorcock photo
William Cobbett photo
Camille Paglia photo
Robert Patrick (playwright) photo

“God, think of the great men that have nibbled on me, and now I'm nothing but a snack for a virus - something that can't even decide if it's a plant or an animal.”

Robert Patrick (playwright) (1937) Playwright, poet, lyricist, short story writer, novelist

"Pouf Positive"
Untold Decades: Seven Comedies of Gay Romance (1988)

J. R. D. Tata photo

“To lead men, you have to lead them with affection.”

J. R. D. Tata (1904–1993) Indian businessman

His Biographers remark quoted in “Believing in Perfection” in New India Digest

Haile Selassie photo
Frances Kellor photo
David Brin photo
Robert A. Heinlein photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo

“The men who declare that woman is the intellectual inferior of man, do not, and cannot, by offering themselves in evidence, substantiate their declaration.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Preface to Helen Hamilton Gardner, Men, Women and Gods (1885)

Frederick Douglass photo
Otto Pfleiderer photo
Anthony Trollope photo
Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey photo
Alexandre Dumas, fils photo

“Men and women go to the theatre only to hear of love, and to take part in the pains or in the joys that it has caused. All the other interests of humanity remain at the door.”

Alexandre Dumas, fils (1824–1895) French writer and dramatist, son of the homonym writer and dramatist

Les hommes et les femmes ne se réunissent au théâtre que pour entendre parler de l'amour, et pour prendre part aux douleurs et aux joies qu'il cause. Tous les autres intérêts de l'humanité restent à la porte.
Preface to La Femme de Claude (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1873) p. xxxiii; translation from Henri Pène du Bois (trans. and ed.) French Maxims of the Stage (New York: Brentano's, 1894) p. 49.

George Bernard Shaw photo
Marco Girolamo Vida photo

“But ne'er the subject of your work proclaim
In its own colors and its genuine name;
Let it by distant tokens be conveyed,
And wrapped in other words, and covered in their shade.
At last the subject from the friendly shroud
Bursts out, and shines the brighter from the cloud;
Then the dissolving darkness breaks away,
And every object glares in open day.
Thus great Ulysses' toils were I to choose
For the main theme that should employ my Muse,
By his long labors of immortal fame
Should shine my hero, but conceal his name;
As one who, lost at sea, had nations seen,
And marked their towns, their manners, and their men,
Since Troy was leveled to the dust by Greece—
Till a few lines epitomized the piece.”

Jam vero cum rem propones, nomine nunquam Prodere conveniet manifesto: semper opertis Indiciis, longe et verborum ambage petita Significant, umbraque obducunt: inde tamen, ceu Sublustri e nebula, rerum tralucet imago Clarius, et certis datur omnia cernere signis. Hinc si dura mihi passus dicendus Ulysses, Non ilium vero memorabo nomine, sed qui Et mores hominum multorum vidit et urbes Naufragus, eversae post saeva incendia Trojae, Addam alia, angustis complectens omnia dictis.

Marco Girolamo Vida (1485–1566) Italian bishop

Book II, line 40
De Arte Poetica (1527)

Osama bin Laden photo

“What I know is that those who risked their lives to earn the pleasure of God are real men. They managed to rid the Islamic nation of disgrace. We hold them in the highest esteem.”

Osama bin Laden (1957–2011) founder of al-Qaeda

In response to the interviewer stating: 'Do you know the men who have been arrested for these attacks?'
1990s, Time magazine interview (1998)

T. H. White photo
Halldór Laxness photo
Robert Solow photo
Henri Fayol photo
Margaret Cho photo

“Why is this all so hard? Why do these old men need it so hard?”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, WAR

James Russell Lowell photo
T. E. Lawrence photo
Octave Mirbeau photo

“Dead trees enclosed the bodies of men and women, violently distorted and subjected to hideous and shameful tortures.”

Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) French journalist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright

Garden of Tortures

“Some persons in Europe carry their notions about cruelty to animals so far as not to allow themselves to eat animal food. Many very intelligent men have, at different times of their lives, abstained wholly from flesh; and this too with very considerable advantage to their health. … The most attentive research which I have been able to make into the health of all these persons induces me to believe that vegetable food is the natural diet of man; I tried it once with very considerable advantage: my strength became greater, my intellect clearer, my power of continued exertion protracted, and my spirits much higher than they were when I lived on a mixed diet. I am inclined to think that the inconvenience which some persons experience from vegetable food is only temporary; a few repeated trials would soon render it not only safe but agreeable, and a disgust to the taste of flesh, under any disguise, would be the result of the experiment. The Carmelites and other religious orders, who subsist only on the productions of the vegetable world, live to a greater age than those who feed on meat, and in general herbivorous persons are milder in their dispositions than other people. The same quantity of ground has been proved to be capable of sustaining a larger and stronger population on a vegetable than on a meat diet; and experience has shewn that the juices of the body are more pure and the viscera much more free from disease in those who live in this simple way. All these facts, taken collectively, point to a period, in the progress of civilization, when men will cease to slay their fellow mortals in the animal world for food, and will tend thereby to realize the fictions of antiquity and the Sybilline oracles respecting the millennium or golden age.”

Thomas Ignatius Maria Forster (1789–1860) British astronomer

Philozoia; or Moral Reflections on the Actual Condition of the Animal Kingdom, and on the Means of Improving the same, Brussels: Deltombe and W. Todd, 1839, pp. 42 https://books.google.it/books?id=hdVq93Ypgu0C&pg=PA42-43.

Warren Farrell photo
Thomas Carlyle photo

“No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Divinity

Manuel Zelaya photo
Homér photo
Michael Moorcock photo
Bell Hooks photo

“To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body. As black Americans living in a small Kentucky town, the railroad tracks were a daily reminder of our marginality. Across those tracks were paved streets, stores we could not enter, restaurants we could not eat in, and people we could not look directly in the face. Across those tracks was a world we could work in as maids, as janitors, as prostitutes, as long as it was in a service capacity. We could enter that world but we could not live there. We had always to return to the margin, to cross the tracks, to shacks and abandoned houses on the edge of town. There were laws to ensure our return. To not return was to risk being punished. Living as we did-on the edge-we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as on the margin. We understood both. This mode of seeing reminded us of the existence of a whole universe, a main body made up of both margin and center. Our survival depended on an ongoing public awareness of the separation between margin and center and an ongoing private acknowledgment that we were a necessary, vital part of that whole. This sense of wholeness, impressed upon our consciousness by the structure of our daily lives, provided us an oppositional world view-a mode of seeing unknown to most of our oppressors, that sustained us, aided us in our struggle to transcend poverty and despair, strengthened our sense of self and our solidarity. … Much feminist theory emerges from privileged women who live at the center, whose perspectives on reality rarely include knowledge and awareness of the lives of women and men who live in the margin. As a consequence, feminist theory lacks wholeness, lacks the broad analysis that could encompass a variety of human experiences. Although feminist theorists are aware of the need to develop ideas and analysis that encompass a larger number of experiences, that serve to unify rather than to polarize, such theory is complex and slow in formation. At its most visionary, it will emerge from individuals who have knowledge of both margin and center.”

p. xvii https://books.google.com/books?id=ClWvBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT8.
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Preface

Warren Farrell photo

“The people considered the most in need of protection were women and children. The sex considered most disposable was men – or males….”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000)

Francis Bacon photo
Haile Selassie photo
Omar Bradley photo
Gottfried Leibniz photo

“I am convinced that the unwritten knowledge scattered among men of different callings surpasses in quantity and in importance anything we find in books, and that the greater part of our wealth has yet to be recorded.”

Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) German mathematician and philosopher

Pour ce qui est des connaissances non-écrites qui se trouvent dispersées parmi les hommes de différents professions, je suis persuadé qu’ils passent de beaucoup tant à l'égard de la multitude que de l'importance, tout ce qui se trouve marqué dans les livres, et que la meilleure partie de notre trésor n'est pas encore enregistrée.
Discours touchant la méthode de la certitude et de l'art d'inventer pour finir les disputes et pour faire en peu de temps de grands progrès (1688–1690)

Martial photo

“Believe me, wise men don't say ‘I shall live to do that’, tomorrow's life is too late; live today.”
Non est, crede mihi, sapientis dicere ‘Vivam’: Sera nimis vita est crastina: vive hodie.

I, 15.
Variant translations:
'I'll live to-morrow', 'tis not wise to say:
'Twill be too late to-morrow—live to-day.
Tomorrow will I live, the fool does say;
Today itself's too late; the wise lived yesterday.
Epigrams (c. 80 – 104 AD)

Michael Crichton photo
John Maynard Keynes photo
Sarah Chang photo
Warren Farrell photo
Marcus Tullius Cicero photo

“For to those who have not the means within themselves of a virtuous and happy life every age is burdensome; and, on the other hand, to those who seek all good from themselves nothing can seem evil that the laws of nature inevitably impose. To this class old age especially belongs, which all men wish to attain and yet reproach when attained; such is the inconsistency and perversity of Folly! They say that it stole upon them faster than they had expected. In the first place, who has forced them to form a mistaken judgement? For how much more rapidly does old age steal upon youth than youth upon childhood? And again, how much less burdensome would old age be to them if they were in their eight hundredth rather than in their eightieth year? In fact, no lapse of time, however long, once it had slipped away, could solace or soothe a foolish old age.”
Quibus enim nihil est in ipsis opis ad bene beateque vivendum, eis omnis aetas gravis est; qui autem omnia bona a se ipsi petunt, eis nihil potest malum videri quod naturae necessitas afferat. quo in genere est in primis senectus, quam ut adipiscantur omnes optant, eandem accusant adeptam; tanta est stultitiae inconstantia atque perversitas. obrepere aiunt eam citius quam putassent. primum quis coegit eos falsum putare? qui enim citius adulescentiae senectus quam pueritiae adulescentia obrepit? deinde qui minus gravis esset eis senectus, si octingentesimum annum agerent, quam si octogesimum? praeterita enim aetas quamvis longa, cum effluxisset, nulla consolatione permulcere posset stultam senectutem.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

section 4 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2007.01.0039%3Asection%3D4
Cato Maior de Senectute – On Old Age (44 BC)

Frances Kellor photo
Winston S. Churchill photo
John C. Wright photo

“We are indeed human beings. We are merely not Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens is a species, something into which one is born. Humanity one chooses. Men who choose inhumanity are merely upright beasts.”

John C. Wright (1961) American novelist and technical writer

Source: Titans of Chaos (2007), Chapter 6, “Six Score Leagues Northwest of Paradise” Section 4 (p. 75)

Harry V. Jaffa photo

“For a competent audience, uncommon men must have other uncommon men.”

Henry S. Haskins (1875–1957)

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 146

Marcus Tullius Cicero photo

“O immortal gods! Men do not realize how great a revenue parsimony can be!”
O di immortales! non intellegunt homines, quam magnum vectigal sit parsimonia.

Paradoxa Stoicorum; Paradox VI, 49

Thomas Carlyle photo
Charles Lamb photo
Robert Sheckley photo
Jefferson Davis photo

“We recognize the fact of the inferiority stamped upon that race of men by the Creator, and from the cradle to the grave, our Government, as a civil institution, marks that inferiority.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

Reply in the Senate to William H. Seward (29 February 1860), Senate Chamber, U.S. Capitol. As quoted in The Papers of Jefferson Davis, Volume 6, pp. 277–84. Transcribed from the Congressional Globe, 36th Congress, 1st Session, pp. 916–18.
1860s

Edward Bellamy photo
Halldór Laxness photo

“I don't know how to lie. But I don't know what truth is, either. I always try to speak the way I think will cause least trouble to God and men.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Ólafur talking to Vegmey
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

Nile Kinnick photo
Frederick Soddy photo
Thomas Fuller (writer) photo

“539. All Men think their Enemies ill Men.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Leo Tolstoy photo
Gottfried Leibniz photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Warren Farrell photo
Francis Bacon photo
Jefferson Davis photo

“I think Stone Mountain is amusing, but then again I find most representations of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson outside of Virginia, and, in Jackson's case, West Virginia, to be amusing. Aside from a short period in 1861-62, when Lee was placed in charge of the coastal defense of South Carolina and Georgia, neither general stepped foot in Georgia during the war. Lee cut off furloughs to Georgia's soldiers later in the war because he was convinced that once home they’d never come back. He resisted the dispatch of James Longstreet's two divisions westward to defend northern Georgia, and he had no answer when Sherman operated in the state. It would be better to see Joseph E. Johnston and John Bell Hood on the mountain, although it probably would have been difficult to get those two men to ride together. Maybe Braxton Bragg would have been a better pick, but no one calls him the hero of Chickamauga. Yet Bragg, Johnston, and Hood all attempted to defend Georgia, and they are ignored on Stone Mountain. So is Joe Wheeler, whose cavalry feasted off Georgians in 1864. So is John B. Gordon, wartime hero and postwar Klansman. Given Stone Mountain's history, Klansman Gordon would have been a good choice. It's also amusing to see Jefferson Davis represented. Yes, Davis came to Georgia, once to try to settle disputes within the high command of the Army of Tennessee, not a rousing success, and once to rally white Georgians to the cause once more after the fall of Atlanta. But any serious student of the war knows that Davis spent much of his presidency arguing with Georgia governor Joseph Brown about Georgia's contribution to the Confederate war effort, and that the vice president of the Confederacy, Georgia's own Alexander Hamilton Stephens, was not a big supporter of his superior. Yet we don't see Brown or Stephens on Stone Mountain, either.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

Brooks D. Simpson, "The Future of Stone Mountain" https://cwcrossroads.wordpress.com/2015/07/22/the-future-of-stone-mountain/ (22 July 2015), Crossroads, WordPress