quotations about men
I've never gone anywhere where the men have come up to my infantile expectations. I always have gone through life constantly being surprised by the extreme, marvelous qualities of a small minority of men. But I can't see the rest of them. They seem awful rubbish.
REBECCA WEST
The Paris Review, spring 1981
Men aren't allowed to have self-esteem, because we're already supposed to have all the power.... But most men earn less than they want, barely the minimum wage. They're drones. They do stuff they don't want to do to support their families, and they're not sure why they do it. They don't know what they're doing half the time, and any time we stick up for ourselves, we're pigs because we don't know how to articulate our frustrations and joys.
TIM ALLEN
Parade Magazine, October 27, 2002
[Man] attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Second Sex
I take it that "gentleman" is a term that only describes a person in his relation to others; but when we speak of him as "a man", we consider him not merely with regard to his fellow men, but in relation to himself, -- to life -- to time -- to eternity. A cast-away lonely as Robinson Crusoe -- a prisoner immured in a dungeon for life -- nay, even a saint in Patmos, has his endurance, his strength, his faith, best described by being spoken of as "a man". I am rather weary of this word "gentlemanly" which seems to me to be often inappropriately used, and often too with such exaggerated distortion of meaning, while the full simplicity of the noun "man", and the adjective "manly" are unacknowledged.
ELIZABETH GASKELL
North and South
When God made man she was practicing.
RITA MAE BROWN
Cat on the Scent
Men, like musical instruments, seem made to be played upon.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it. We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother. For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man's toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Lavinia
But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don't have them they hate you because you won't; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are discontented children, and can't be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman do what she may.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Men are like avocados. They're not ripe, they're not ripe, they're not ripe.... Then they're suddenly very ripe, and then they go bad.
RACHEL RACZKA
"Will people start becoming single again in their mid-30s? Don't count on it.", Washington Post, August 8, 2017
After thousands of centuries of vain efforts to come back to itself, Divinity, lost and scattered in the matter which it animates and sets in motion, finds a point of support, a sort of focus for self-concentration. This focus is man, his immortal soul singularly imprisoned in a mortal body. But each man considered individually is infinitely too limited, too small, to enclose the divine immensity; it can contain only a very small particle, immortal like the whole, but infinitely smaller than the whole. It follows that the divine being, the absolutely immaterial being, mind, is divisible like matter. Another mystery whose solution must be left to faith.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
If a girl as smart as yourself really wants to dig into the matter and truly get to know the nature of men and therefore boys, let me save you a lot of time and effort that you would otherwise spend trying to evaluate their intellectual motivations, their emotional states, and the reasons behind their inexplicable behavior. The thing to do is to take the anthropological view, try to concentrate on just how it is that they develop into the people they are: that is to say, thinly veiled sperm distributors. It will open up a wealth of answers. An ocean of understanding. And all you have to do is look down.
GWEN MACSAI
Lipshtick
All men seemed to be self-serving, selfish, insensitive pigs, just waiting for an opportunity to act like greater self-serving, selfish, insensitive pigs.
DAN SIMMONS
Ilium
If the world were a logical place, men would ride side saddle.
RITA MAE BROWN
Sudden Death
What woman would not gladly perform a painful pilgrimage, if so she could but find her Jove, and then fall down and worship him! Alas! the actual Jupiters are very scarce.
MARY CLEMMER AMES
Outlines of Men, Women, and Things
My! ain't men blinder'n moles?
AMY LOWELL
"Reaping", Men, Women and Ghosts
No matter what dimension you're in, there's a big-headed male trying to take over the world.
EOIN COLFER
The Lost Colony
Man is improvable.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
The longer I live, the more it grieves me to see man, who occupies his supreme place for the very purpose of imposing his will upon nature, and freeing himself and his from an outrageous necessity--to see him taken up with some false notion, and doing just the opposite of what he wants to do; and then, because the whole bent of his mind is spoilt, bungling miserably over everything.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
I sometimes think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated His ability.
OSCAR WILDE
The Wit of Oscar Wilde
Man himself is a great deep, whose very hairs Thou numberest, O Lord, and they fall not to the ground without Thee. And yet are the hairs of his head easier to be numbered than his feelings, and the beatings of his heart.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions