She plucked from my lapel the invisible strand of lint (the universal act of woman to proclaim ownership).
—O. Henry (William Sydney Porter) (1862–1910) American Writer of Short Stories
The cocks may crow, but it’s the hen that lays the egg.
—Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British Head of State
Please know I am quite aware of the hazards. I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.
—Amelia Earhart (1897–1937) American Aviator
The man, at the head of the house, can mar the pleasure of the household, but he cannot make it.—That must rest with the woman, and it is her greatest privilege.
—Arthur Helps (1813–75) English Dramatist, Essayist
Sometimes I think that the biggest difference between men and women is that more men need to seek out some terrible lurking thing in existence and hurl themselves upon it. Women know where it lives but they can let it alone.
—Russell Hoban (1925–2011) American Novelist, Children’s Writer
The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one’s clean linen in public.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
A woman should say: “Have I made him happy? Is he satisfied? Does he love me more than he loved me before? Is he likely to go to bed with another woman?” If he does, then it’s the wife’s fault because she is not trying to make him happy.
—Barbara Cartland (1901–2000) English Popular Romantic Novelist
Perhaps nothing is so depressing an index of the inhumanity of the male-supremacist mentality as the fact that the more genial human traits are assigned to the underclass: affection, response to sympathy, kindness, cheerfulness.
—Kate Millet (1934–2017) American Feminist, Writer, Sculptor
As vivacity is the gift of women, gravity is that of men.
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719) English Essayist, Poet, Playwright, Politician
A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
Every woman is like a time-zone. She is a nocturnal fragment of your journey. She brings you unflaggingly closer to the next night.
—Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French Sociologist, Philosopher
The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctances, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will come together as human beings.
—Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian Poet
I tell you there isn’t a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it’s bearing children, and they do that in a poor make-shift way; it had better ha been left to the men.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) (1819–80) English Novelist
While farmers generally allow one rooster for ten hens, ten men are scarcely sufficient to service one woman.
—Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) Italian Writer, Poet
The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.
—Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American Poet
I love the idea of there being two sexes, don’t you?
—James Thurber
When men and woman die, as poets sung, his heart’s the last part moves, her last, the tongue.
—Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) American Political Leader, Inventor, Diplomat
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 (1880–1956) American Journalist, Literary Critic
A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humors and flatters them, as he does with a sprightly and forward child; but he neither consults them about, nor trusts them with, serious matters.
—Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) English Statesman, Man of Letters
All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more. But I am of the House of Eorl and not a serving-woman. I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death.
—J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) British Scholar, Author
The many faces of intimacy: the Victorians could experience it through correspondence, but not through cohabitation; contemporary men and women can experience it through fornication, but not through friendship.
—Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian-American Psychiatrist, Psychoanalyst
After centuries of conditioning of the female into the condition of perpetual girlishness called femininity, we cannot remember what femaleness is. Though feminists have been arguing for years that there is a self-defining female energy, and a female libido that is not expressed merely in response to demands by the male, and a female way of being and of experiencing the world, we are still not close to understanding what it might be. Yet every mother who has held a girl child in her arms has known that she was different from a boy child and that she would approach the reality around her in a different way. She is a female and she will die female, and though many centuries should pass, archaeologists would identify her skeleton as the remains of a female creature.
—Germaine Greer (b.1939) Australia Academic, Journalist, Scholar, Writer
The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
—Henry Adams (1838–1918) American Historian, Man of Letters
If the wife sins, the husband is not innocent.
—Italian Proverb
On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself—on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger. In the meantime, love represents in its most touching form the curse that lies heavily upon woman confined in the feminine universe, woman mutilated, insufficient unto herself.
—Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86) French Philosopher, Writer, Feminist
A woman who gives any advantage to a man may expect a lover—but will sooner or later find a tyrant.
—Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) (1788–1824) English Romantic Poet
A true gentleman is at a disadvantage in dealing with women. Women are realist, and their tactics are realistic, so no man should be a gentleman where women are concerned unless the women are very, very young. Women admire gentlemen, and sleep with cads.
—Louis L’Amour (1908–88) American Novelist, Short-story Writer
All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are sides and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster a highly ornamental pot. As people mature, they cease to believe in sides or in Headmasters or in highly ornamental pots.
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English Novelist
There are few things that we so unwillingly give up, even in advanced age, as the supposition that we still have the power of ingratiating ourselves with the fair sex.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.
—Robert Frost (1874–1963) American Poet
Coming to terms with the rhythms of women’s lives means coming to terms with life itself, accepting the imperatives of the body rather than the imperatives of an artificial, man-made, perhaps transcendentally beautiful civilization. Emphasis on the male work-rhythm is an emphasis on infinite possibilities; emphasis on the female rhythms is an emphasis on a defined pattern, on limitation.
—Margaret Mead (1901–78) American Anthropologist, Social Psychologist
Were there no women, men might live like gods.
—Thomas Dekker
There are three possible parts to a date, of which at least two must be offered: entertainment, food, and affection. It is customary to begin a series of dates with a great deal of entertainment, a moderate amount of food, and the merest suggestion of affection. As the amount of affection increases, the entertainment can be reduced proportionately. When the affection IS the entertainment, we no longer call it dating. Under no circumstances can the food be omitted.
—Unknown
The fact is, you have fallen lately, Cecily, into a bad habit of thinking for yourself. You should give it up. It is not quite womanly… men don’t like it.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
It is not her body that he wants but it is only through her body that he can take possession of another human being, so he must labor upon her body, he must enter her body, to make his claim.
—Joyce Carol Oates (b.1938) American Novelist, Short Story Writer, Playwright, Poet, Literary Critic
A good cigar is as great a comfort to a man as a good cry is to a woman.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton (1803–73) British Novelist, Poet, Politician
But as to women, who can penetrate the real sufferings of their she condition? Man’s very sympathy with their estate has much of selfishness and more suspicion. Their love, their virtue, beauty, education, but form good housekeepers, to breed a nation.
—Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) (1788–1824) English Romantic Poet
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 (b.1939) Australia Academic, Journalist, Scholar, Writer
The loss of sex polarity is part and parcel of the larger disintegration, the reflex of the soul’s death, and coincident with the disappearance of great men, great deeds, great causes, great wars, etc.
—Henry Miller (1891–1980) American Novelist
The multitude will hardly believe the excessive force of education, and in the difference of modesty between men and women, ascribe that to nature, which is altogether owing to early instruction: Miss is scarce three years old, but she’s spoke to every day to hide her leg, and rebuked in good earnest if she shows it; whilst little Master at the same age is bid to take up his coats, and piss like a man.
—Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733) Anglo-Dutch Philosopher, Satirist
I must have women—there is nothing unbends the mind like them.
—John Gay (1685–1732) English Poet, Dramatist
Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English Novelist
All women are flirts, but some are restrained by shyness, and others by sense.
—Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613–80) French Writer
Men and women, women and men; it will never work.
—Erica Jong (b.1942) American Novelist, Feminist
Nature makes woman to be won and men to win.
—George William Curtis (1824–92) American Essayist, Public Speaker, Editor, Author
I really think that American gentlemen are the best after all, because kissing your hand may make you feel very good but a diamond and a sapphire bracelet lasts forever.
—Anita Loos (1888–1981) American Actor, Novelist, Screenwriter
Given the cultural barriers to intersex conversation, the amazing thing is that we would even expect women and men to have anything to say to each other for more than ten minutes at a stretch. The barriers are ancient—perhaps rooted, as some paleontologist may soon discover, in the contrast between the occasional guttural utterances exchanged in male hunting bands and the extended discussions characteristic of female food-gathering groups.
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b.1941) American Social Critic, Essayist
Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.
—Robert A. Heinlein (1907–88) American Science Fiction Writer
There is no kind of harassment that a man may not inflict on a woman with impunity in civilized societies.
—Denis Diderot (1713–84) French Philosopher, Writer
Men never remember, but women never forget.
—Unknown