The great living experience for every man is his adventure into the woman. The man embraces in the woman all that is not himself, and from that one resultant, from that embrace, comes every new action.
—D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English Novelist, Playwright, Poet, Essayist, Literary Critic
Whether women are better than men I cannot say – but I can say they are certainly no worse.
—Golda Meir (1898–1978) Israeli Head of State
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
When a flirt fishes for a man, she fishes merely for the sport.
—Unknown
The nearer society approaches to divine order, the less separation will there be in the characters, duties, and pursuits of men and women. Women will not become less gentle and graceful, but men will become more so. Women will not neglect the care and education of their children, but men will find themselves ennobled and refined by sharing those duties with them; and will receive, in return, co-operation and sympathy in the discharge of various other duties, now deemed inappropriate to women. The more women become rational companions, partners in business and in thought, as well as in affection and amusement, the more highly will men appreciate home.
—Lydia Maria Child (1802–80) American Abolitionist, Writer
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 great majority of men, especially in France, both desire and possess a fashionable woman, much in the way one might own a fine horse—as a luxury befitting a young man.
—Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) (1783–1842) French Writer
For a man to strike any women is most brutal, and I, as well as everyone else, think this far worse than any attempt to shoot, which, wicked as it is, is at least more comprehensible and more courageous.
—Queen Victoria (1819–1901) British Royal
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
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
To be completely woman you need a master, and in him a compass for your life. You need a man you can look up to and respect. If you dethrone him it’s no wonder that you are discontented, and discontented women are not loved for long.
—Marlene Dietrich (1901–92) German-born American Actor, Singer
Men are the managers of the affairs of women for that God has preferred in bounty one of them over another, and for that they have expended of their property. Righteous women are therefore obedient, guarding the secret for God’s guarding. And those you fear may be rebellious admonish; banish them to their couches, and beat them.
—The Holy Quran Sacred Scripture of Islam
Courtship—A man pursuing a woman until she catches him.
—Unknown
Women have got to make the world safe for men since men have made it so darned unsafe for women.
—Nancy Astor, Viscountess Astor (1879–1964) American-born British Politician
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
—Gloria Steinem (b.1934) American Feminist, Journalist, Social Activist, Political Activist
If ever a man and his wife, or a man and his mistress, who pass nights as well as days together, absolutely lay aside all good breeding, their intimacy will soon degenerate into a coarse familiarity, infallibly productive of contempt or disgust.
—Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) English Statesman, Man of Letters
Upscale young men seem to go for the kind of woman who plays with a full deck of credit cards, who won’t cry when she’s knocked to the ground while trying to board the six o clock Eastern shuttle, and whose schedule doesn’t allow for a sexual encounter lasting more than twelve minutes.
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b.1941) American Social Critic, 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
I have always been principally interested in men for sex. I’ve always thought any sane woman would be a lover of women because loving men is such a mess. I have always wished I’d fall in love with a woman. Damn.
—Germaine Greer (b.1939) Australia Academic, Journalist, Scholar, Writer
A man’s brain has a more difficult time shifting from thinking to feeling than a women’s brain does.
—Barbara De Angelis (b.1951) American Lecturer, Author, TV Personality, Motivational Speaker
Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.
—Katharine Hepburn (1907–2003) American Actor, TV Personality
Men naturally resent it when women take greater liberties in dress than men are allowed.
—Michael Korda (b.1933) English-born Writer, Novelist
If women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race.
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish Playwright
The cocks may crow, but it’s the hen that lays the egg.
—Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British Head of State
I do not know who first invented the myth of sexual equality. But it is a myth willfully fostered and nourished by certain semi-scientists and other fiction writers. And it has done more, I suspect, to unsettle marital happiness than any other false doctrine of this myth-ridden age.
—Phyllis McGinley (1905–78) American Children’s Books Writer, Poet, Writer of Children’s Books
In the sex-war thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.
—Cyril Connolly (1903–74) British Literary Critic, Writer
Men greet each other with a sock on the arm, women with a hug, and the hug wears better in the long run.
—Edward Hoagland (b.1932) American Essayist, Novelist
The female of the genus homo is economically dependent on the male. He is her food supply.
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) American Feminist, Writer
When a woman is very, very bad, she is awful, but when a man is correspondingly good, he is weird.
—Minna Antrim (1861–1950) American Writer, Epigrammist
Let women be provided with living strength of their own. Let them have the means to attack the world and wrest from it their own subsistence, and their dependence will be abolished—that of man also.
—Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86) French Philosopher, Writer, Feminist
The superiority of one man’s opinion over another’s is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
—Henry James (1843–1916) American-born British Novelist, Writer
No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
—H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) American Journalist, Literary Critic
Men are just as sensitive, and in some ways more sensitive, than women are.
—Barbara De Angelis (b.1951) American Lecturer, Author, TV Personality, Motivational Speaker
Were there no women, men might live like gods.
—Thomas Dekker
Men and women belong to different species, and communication between them is a science still in its infancy.
—Bill Cosby (b.1937) American Actor, Comedian, Activist, Producer, Author
I think the worst woman that ever existed would have made a man of very passable reputation—they are all better than us and their faults such as they are must originate with ourselves.
—Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) (1788–1824) English Romantic Poet
Men who do not make advances to women are apt to become victims to women who make advances to them.
—Walter Bagehot (1826–77) English Economist, Journalist
Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) (1819–80) English Novelist
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 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
All women are flirts, but some are restrained by shyness, and others by sense.
—Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613–80) French Writer
I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) (1819–80) English Novelist
Man dreams of fame while woman wakes to love.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92) British 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
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
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
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
I must have women—there is nothing unbends the mind like them.
—John Gay (1685–1732) English Poet, Dramatist
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