Quotations about men and their place in the world. What men and women think about men: sometimes humorous, sometimes insightful, sometimes outrageous. (And no, I don’t agree with all of these!)

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Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

— Albert Camus

[M]en are too emotional to vote. Their conduct at baseball games and political conventions shows this, while their innate tendency to appeal to force renders them unfit for government.

— Alice Duer Miller

To understand how a society functions, you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.

— Angela Davis

A lot of guys think the larger a woman’s breasts are, the less intelligent she is. I don’t think it works like that. I think it’s the opposite. I think the larger a woman’s breasts are, the less intelligent the men become.

— Anita Wise

It is men who face the biggest problems in the future, adjusting to their new and complicated role.

— Anna Ford, 1995

The friendship between a man and a woman which does not lead to marriage or desire for marriage may be a life long experience of the greatest value to themselves and to all their circle of acquaintance and of activity; but for this type of friendship both a rare man and a rare woman are needed. Perhaps it should be added that either the man or the woman thus deeply bound in lifelong friendship who seeks marriage must find a still rarer man or woman to wed, to make such a three cornered comradeship a permanent success.

— Anna Garlin Spencer

A woman can say more in a sigh than a man can say in a sermon.

— Arnold Haultain

Yes, I am crying although I am a man. But has not a man eyes! Has not a man hands, limbs, senses, thoughts, passions? Is he not fed with the wine food, hurt by the same weapons, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter as a woman? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? And if you poison us, do we not die? Why shouldn’t a man complain, a soldier weep? Because it is unmanly? Why is it unmanly?

— August Strindberg

The power of patriarchy has been to make maleness feared and to make men feel that it is better to be feared that to be loved. Whether they can confess this or not, men know that just is not true.

— bell hooks

Men weren’t really the enemy — they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.

— Betty Friedan

I would like it if men had to partake in the same hormonal cycles to which we’re subjected monthly. Maybe that’s why men declare war — because they have a need to bleed on a regular basis.

— Brett Butler

You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation.

— Brigham Young

The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs.

— Charles de Gaulle

I am neither a man nor a woman but an author.

— Charlotte Brönte

In every man’s heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.

— Christopher Morley

Behind every good man, there’s a good woman reminding you I knew you when you didn’t have nothing.

— Coretta Scott King

Man is willing to accept woman as an equal, as a man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a baby-face, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a servant, an encyclopedia, an ideal or an obscenity; the one thing he won’t accept her as is a human being, a real human being of the feminine sex.

— D.H. Lawrence

Men need rule books. Women want men to intuit what they want. And only about 2% of men can do that, and most of them are not heterosexual.

— Dennis Prager

Too often the great decisions are originated and given form in bodies made up wholly of men, or so completely dominated by them that whatever of special value women have to offer is shunted aside without expression.

— Eleanor Roosevelt

What’s wrong with you men? Would hair stop growing on your chest if you asked directions somewhere?

— Erma Bombeck

God made man stronger but not necessarily more intelligent. He gave women intuition and femininity. And, used properly, that combination easily jumbles the brain of any man I’ve ever met.

— Farrah Fawcett

It’s easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.

— Frederick Douglass

In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Years ago, manhood was an opportunity for achievement, and now it is a problem to be overcome.

— Garrison Keillor

Scientific theories never dictate human values, but they can often cast new light on ethical issues. From a sexual selection viewpoint, moral philosophy and political theory have mostly been attempts to shift male human sexual competitiveness from physical violence to the peaceful accumulation of wealth and status. The rights to life, liberty, and property are cultural inventions that function, in part, to keep males from killing and stealing from one another while they compete to attract sexual partners.

— Geoffrey Miller

All young women begin by believing they can change and reform the men they marry. They can’t.

— George Bernard Shaw

Men are from Earth, women are from Earth. Deal with it.

— George Carlin

What passes for woman’s intuition is often nothing more than man’s transparency.

— George Jean Nathan

Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.

— George Santayana

I think that testosterone is a rare poison.

— Germaine Greer

Perhaps women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism.

— Germaine Greer

The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy; nowadays it means rank subversion.

— Germaine Greer

Women fail to understand how much men hate them.

— Germaine Greer

Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity.

— Germaine Greer

I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.

— Gloria Steinem

The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.

— Gloria Steinem

Women have convinced ourselves that we can do what men can do. But we haven’t convinced ourselves and therefore haven’t convinced our country, that men can do what women can do.

— Gloria Steinem

If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn’t it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?

— Gloria Steinem

I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.

— Gloria Steinem

Man does not control his own fate. The women in his life do that for him.

— Groucho Marx

Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later. For another thing, they die earlier.

— H. L. Mencken

Never trust a husband too far, nor a bachelor too near.

— Helen Rowland

The struggle of the male to learn to listen to and respect his own intuitive, inner prompting is the greatest challenge of all. His conditioning has been so powerful that it has all but destroyed his ability to be self-aware.

— Herb Goldberg

Men build bridges and throw railroads across deserts, and yet they contend successfully that the job of sewing on a button is beyond them. Accordingly, they don’t have to sew buttons.

— Heywood Broun

Can you become a man without becoming your father?

— Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men

If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.

— James Baldwin

Every man who is high up loves to think that he has done it all himself; and the wife smiles, and lets it go at that.

— James M. Barrie

I do not believe that women are better than men. We have not wrecked railroads, nor corrupted legislature, nor done many unholy things that men have done; but then we must remember that we have not had the chance.

— Jane Addams

Being a woman is a terribly difficult task since it consists principally in dealing with men.

— Joseph Conrad
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