Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
—John Berger (1926–2017) English Art Critic, Novelist
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
The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.
—D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English Novelist, Playwright, Poet, Essayist, Literary Critic
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
Women serve but to keep a man from better company.
—William Wycherley (c.1640–1716) English Dramatist
If man knew how women pass the time when they are alone, they’d never marry.
—O. Henry (William Sydney Porter) (1862–1910) American Writer of Short Stories
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
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
Male bashing is everywhere. It would be a mistake to view the current situation as another skirmish in the war between the sexes. Women have been doing the shooting, and men have been burying their heads in the sand, hoping the bullets will miss.
—Warren Farrell (b.1943) American Educator, Activist
Man forgives women anything save the wit to outwit him.
—Minna Antrim (1861–1950) American Writer, Epigrammist
I must have women — there is nothing unbends the mind like them.
—John Gay (1685–1732) English Poet, Dramatist
Sure men were born to lie, and women to believe them!
—John Gay (1685–1732) English Poet, Dramatist
There are always women who will take men on their own terms. If I were a man I wouldn’t bother to change while there are women like that around.
—Ann Oakley (b.1944) English Sociologist, Writer, Feminist
Nature makes woman to be won and men to win.
—George William Curtis (1824–92) American Essayist, Public Speaker, Editor, Author
I declare to you that woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself, and there I take my stand.
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) American Civil Rights Leader
A lady is smarter than a gentleman, maybe, she can sew a fine seam, she can have a baby, she can use her intuition instead of her brain, but she can’t fold a paper in a crowded train.
—Phyllis McGinley (1905–78) American Children’s Books Writer, Poet, Writer of Children’s Books
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 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
There are certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are of pretty woman to deserve them.
—Jane Austen (1775–1817) English Novelist
I don’t know why women want any of the things men have when one the things that women have is men.
—Coco Chanel (1883–1971) French Fashion Designer
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
As vivacity is the gift of women, gravity is that of men.
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719) English Essayist, Poet, Playwright, Politician
God created the flirt as soon as he made the fool.
—Victor Hugo (1802–85) French Novelist
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
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
I have an idea that the phrase ‘weaker sex’ was coined by some woman to disarm the man she was preparing to overwhelm.
—Ogden Nash (1902–71) American Writer of Sophisticated Light Verse
Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions. The woman who rejects the stereotype of feminine weakness and dependence can no longer find much comfort in the cliche that all men are beasts. She has no choice except to believe, on the contrary, that men are human beings, and she finds it hard to forgive them when they act like animals.
—Christopher Lasch (1932–94) American Historian, Moralist, Social 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
Nature has not placed us in an inferior rank to men, no more than the females of other animals, where we see no distinction of capacity, though I am persuaded if there was a commonwealth of rational horses… it would be an established maxim amongst them that a mare could not be taught to pace.
—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) English Aristocrat, Poet, Novelist, Writer
Man made one grave mistake: in answer to vaguely reformist and humanitarian agitation he admitted women to politics and the professions. The conservatives who saw this as the undermining of our civilization and the end of the state and marriage were right after all; it is time for the demolition to begin.
—Germaine Greer (b.1939) Australia Academic, Journalist, Scholar, Writer
Women still remember the first kiss after men have forgotten the last.
—Remy de Gourmont (1858–1915) French Poet, Novelist, Critic
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
Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
—H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) American Journalist, Literary Critic
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
A pretty little collection of weaknesses and a terror of spiders are our indispensable stock-in-trade with the men.
—Colette (1873–1954) French Novelist, Performer
The pretty fellows you speak of, I own entertain me sometimes, but is it impossible to be diverted with what one despises? I can laugh at a puppet show, at the same time I know there is nothing in it worth my attention or regard.
—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) English Aristocrat, Poet, Novelist, Writer
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
Man dreams of fame while woman wakes to love.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92) British Poet
Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man.
—Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) English Writer, Feminist
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
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
Universal manhood suffrage, by establishing an aristocracy of sex, imposes upon the women of this nation a more absolute and cruel despotism than monarchy; in that, woman finds a political master in her father, husband, brother, son. The aristocracies of the old world are based upon birth, wealth, refinement, education, nobility, brave deeds of chivalry; in this nation, on sex alone; exalting brute force above moral power, vice above virtue, ignorance above education, and the son above the mother who bore him.
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) American Civil Rights Leader
O Polly, you might have toyed and kissed, by keeping men off, you keep them on.
—John Gay (1685–1732) English Poet, Dramatist
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
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
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
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
A women knows how to keep quiet when she is in the right, whereas a man, when he is in the right, will keep on talking.
—Malcolm de Chazal (1902–81) Mauritian Writer, Painter, Visionary
Men and women, women and men; it will never work.
—Erica Jong (b.1942) American Novelist, Feminist
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
—Gloria Steinem (b.1934) American Feminist, Journalist, Social Activist, Political Activist