Quotes about men

A bachelor is a man who comes to work each morning from a different direction.

— Sholom Aleichem

Men aren't the way they are because they want to drive women crazy; they've been trained to be that way for thousands of years. And that training makes it very difficult for men to be intimate.

— Barbara De Angelis

Poor little men, poor little cocks! As soon as they're old enough, they swell their plumage to be conquerors. If they only knew that it's enough to be just a little bit wounded and sad in order to obtain everything without fighting for it.

— Jean Anouilh

Men are not to be told anything they might find too painful; the secret depths of human nature, the sordid physicalities, might overwhelm or damage them. For instance, men often faint at the sight of their own blood, to which they are not accustomed. For this reason you should never stand behind one in the line at the Red Cross donor clinic.

— Margaret Atwood

Left to itself the masculine imagination has very little appreciation for the here and now; it prefers to dwell on what is absent, on what has been or may be. If men are more punctual than women, it is because they know that, without the external discipline of clock time, they would never get anything done.

— W. H. Auden

The masculine imagination lives in a state of perpetual revolt against the limitations of human life. In theological terms, one might say that all men, left to themselves, become gnostics. They may swagger like peacocks, but in their heart of hearts they all think sex an indignity and wish they could beget themselves on themselves. Hence the aggressive hostility toward women so manifest in most club-car stories.

— W. H. Auden

Men's private self-worlds are rather like our geographical world's seasons, storm, and sun, deserts, oases, mountains and abysses, the endless-seeming plateaus, darkness and light, and always the sowing and the reaping.

— Faith Baldwin

Men's second childhood begins when a woman gets a hold of him.

— Sir James M. Barrie

The question arises as to whether it is possible not to live in the world of men and still to live in the world.

— Louise Bernikow

A true man hates no one.

— Napoleon Bonaparte

The man, most man, works best for men: and, if most man indeed, he gets his manhood plainest from his soul.

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Some men are like nails, very easily drawn; others however are more like rivets never drawn at all.

— John Burroughs

Men in general are quick to believe that which they wish to be true.

— Julius Caesar

Men aren't necessities. They're luxuries.

— Cher

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Bloody men are like bloody buses -- you wait for about a year and as soon as one approaches your stop two or three others appear.

— Wendy Cope

Because it is in the nature of things that they become extreme, we have passed down from manliness to cruelty. If I had been told when I was 20 that there was a tavern in the town where the brave and the cruel were gathered together, I would have run all the way and I would have gone up to the largest and leatheriest of the denizens and said: If you truly love me, kill the bartender.

— Quentin Crisp

If it's true that men are such beasts, this must account for the fact that most women are animal lovers.

— Doris Day

You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they're simply unbearable.

— Marguerite Duras

Before they're plumbers or writers or taxi drivers or unemployed or journalists, before everything else, men are men. Whether heterosexual or homosexual. The only difference is that some of them remind you of it as soon as you meet them, and others wait for a little while.

— Marguerite Duras

Only when manhood is dead -- and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it -- only then will we know what it is to be free.

— Andrea Dworkin

In this society, the norm of masculinity is phallic aggression. Male sexuality is, by definition, intensely and rigidly phallic. A man's identity is located in his conception of himself as the possessor of a phallus; a man's worth is located in his pride in phallic identity. The main characteristic of phallic identity is that worth is entirely contingent on the possession of a phallus. Since men have no other criteria for worth, no other notion of identity, those who do not have phalluses are not recognized as fully human.

— Andrea Dworkin

Considering the absence of legal coercion, the surprising thing is that men have for so long, and, on the whole, so reliably, adhered to what we might call the breadwinner ethic.

— Barbara Ehrenreich

Men's men: gentle or simple, they're much of a muchness.

— George Eliot

Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Providing for one's family as a good husband and father is a water-tight excuse for making money hand over fist. Greed may be a sin, exploitation of other people might, on the face of it, look rather nasty, but who can blame a man for doing the best for his children?

— Eva Figes

There must be some reason why a man must be convinced, while a woman must be persuaded.

— Robert B. Fleming

The world men inhabit is rather bleak. It is a world full of doubt and confusion, where vulnerability must be hidden, not shared; where competition, not co-operation, is the order of the day; where men sacrifice the possibility of knowing their own children and sharing in their upbringing, for the sake of a job they may have chosen by chance, which may not suit them and which in many cases dominates their lives to the exclusion of much else.

— Anna Ford

Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim.

— Betty Friedan

The things a man has to have are hope and confidence in himself against odds, and sometimes he needs somebody, his pal or his mother or his wife or God, to give him that confidence. He's got to have some inner standards worth fighting for or there won't be any way to bring him into conflict. And he must be ready to choose death before dishonor without making too much song and dance about it. That's all there is to it.

— Clark Gable

Macho doesn't prove mucho.

— Zsa Zsa Gabor

I mean to make myself a man, and if I succeed in that, I shall succeed in everything else.

— James A. Garfield

Unlike femininity, relaxed masculinity is at bottom empty, a limp nullity. While the female body is full of internal potentiality, the male is internally barren. Manhood at the most basic level can be validated and expressed only in action.

— George Gilder

The little man is still a man.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough.

— Germaine Greer

All societies on the verge of death are masculine. A society can survive with only one man; no society will survive a shortage of women.

— Germaine Greer

When a man is wrong and won't admit it, he always gets angry.

— Thomas C. Haliburton

Some men demand rough treatment everywhere!

— S. C. Hall

A man is in love when something in his head, something in his and chest and something in his pants react to a certain woman.

— Brian Hwang

All men are homosexual, some turn straight. It must be very odd to be a straight man because your sexuality is hopelessly defensive. It's like an ideal of racial purity.

— Derek Jarman

A hairy body, and arms stiff with bristles, give promise of a manly soul.

— (Decimus Junius Juvenalis) Juvenal

During the feminist seventies men were caught between a rock and a hard-on; in the fathering eighties they are caught between good hugs and bad hugs.

— Florence King

It is easier to know men in general, than men in particular.

— Francois De La Rochefoucauld

There are three classes of men; the retrograde, the stationary and the progressive.

— Johann Kaspar Lavater

How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.

— D. H. Lawrence

Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.

— Max Lerner

Men were only made into men with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally a man any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse.

— Wyndham Lewis

The male has been persuaded to assume a certain onerous and disagreeable role with the promise of rewards -- material and psychological. Women may in the first place even have put it into his head. BE A MAN! may have been, metaphorically, what Eve uttered at the critical moment in the garden of Eden.

— Wyndham Lewis

The male sex still constitute in many ways the most obstinate vested interest one can find.

— Lord Longford

Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.

— Norman Mailer

Men are creatures with eight hands.

— Jane Mansfield

The test of man is how well he is able to feel about what he thinks. The test of a woman is how well she is able to think about what she feels.

— Mary Mcdowell

Sometimes I have a notion that what might improve the situation is to have women take over the occupations of government and trade and to give men their freedom. Let them do what they are best at. While we scrawl interoffice memos and direct national or extranational affairs, men could spend all their time inventing wheels, peering at stars, composing poems, carving statues, exploring continents -- discovering, reforming, or crying out in a sacramental wilderness. Efficiency would probably increase, and no one would have to worry so much about the Gaza Strip or an election.

— Phyllis Mcginley

As long as male behavior is taken to be the norm, there can be no serious questioning of male traits and behavior. A norm is by definition a standard for judging; it is not itself subject to judgment.

— Myriam Miedzian

In the United States adherence to the values of the masculine mystique makes intimate, self-revealing, deep friendships between men unusual.

— Myriam Miedzian

A man that is ashamed of passions that are natural and reasonable is generally proud of those that are shameful and silly.

— Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

It is much more easy to accuse the one sex than to excuse the other.

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

The most unhappy and frail creatures are men and yet they are the proudest.

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

Don't accept rides from strange men, and remember that all men are as strange as hell.

— Robin Morgan

Men are nicotine soaked, beer besmirched, whiskey greased, red-eyed devils.

— Carry Nation

I love the male body, it's better designed than the male mind.

— Andrea Newman

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

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Men are the enemies of women. Promising sublime intimacy, unequalled passion, amazing security and grace, they nevertheless exploit and injure in a myriad subtle ways. Without men the world would be a better place: softer, kinder, more loving; calmer, quieter, more humane.

— Ann Oakley

A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt from woman, and it is confirmed only by other men. Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all.

— Camille Paglia

Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content. There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy.

— Camille Paglia

I require three things in a man. He must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid.

— Dorothy Parker

Men are the dreams of a shadow.

— Pindar

There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.

— Plato

Men dream of courtship, but in wedlock wake.

— Alexander Pope

He may have hair upon his chest but, sister, so has Lassie.

— Cole Porter

It is a man's world, and you men can have it.

— Katherine Anne Porter

Silent men like still waters, are deep and dangerous.

— Proverb

Prudent men woo thrifty women.

— German Proverb

Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau

There's so much saint in the worst of them, and so much devil in the best of them, that a woman who's married to one of them, has nothing to learn of the rest of them.

— Helen Rowland

There are only two kinds of men; the dead and the deadly.

— Helen Rowland

Most men act so tough and strong on the outside because on the inside, we are scared, weak, and fragile. Men, not women, are the weaker sex.

— Jerry Rubin

Man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid of.

— George Bernard Shaw

I'm not the man to balk at a low smell, I not the man to insist on asphodel. This sounds like a He-fellow, don't you think? It sounds like that. I belch, I bawl, I drink.

— Dame Edith Sitwell

To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he's a machine, a walking dildo.

— Valerie Solanis

The male function is to produce sperm. We now have sperm banks.

— Valerie Solanis

Not only is it harder to be a man, it is also harder to become one.

— Arianna Stassinopoulos

Since I am a man, my heart is three or four times less sensitive, because I have three or four times as much power of reason and experience of the world -- a thing which you women call hard-heartedness. As a man, I can take refuge in having mistresses. The more of them I have, and the greater the scandal, the more I acquire reputation and brilliance in society.

— Henri B. Stendhal

Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.

— Jonathan Swift

No man flatters the woman he truly loves.

— Tuckerman

All men are two meters tall... give or take a meter.

— Source Unknown

The intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

What God wants are men great enough to be small enough to be used.

— Source Unknown

There is hardly an American male of my generation who has not at one time or another tried to master the victory cry of the great ape as it issued from the androgynous chest of Johnny Weissmuller, to the accompaniment of thousands of arms and legs snapping during attempts to swing from tree to tree in the backyards of the Republic.

— Gore Vidal

I think we're a kind of desperation. We're sort of a maddening luxury. The basic and essential human is the woman, and all that we're doing is trying to brighten up the place. That's why all the birds who belong to our sex have prettier feathers -- because males have got to try and justify their existence.

— Orson Welles

I only like two kinds of men; domestic and foreign.

— Mae West

I go for two kinds of men. The kind with muscles, and the kind without.

— Mae West

Men are like sheep, of which a flock is more easily driven than a single one.

— Richard Whately

How dwarfed against his manliness she sees the poor pretension, the wants, the aims, the follies, born of fashion and convention!

— John Greenleaf Whittier

The Ideal Man should talk to us as if we were goddesses, and treat us as if we were children. He should refuse all our serious requests, and gratify every one of our whims. He should encourage us to have caprices, and forbid us to have missions. He should always say much more than he means, and always mean much more than he says.

— Oscar Wilde

Guys are like full coverage bras they only show you a little of there life never the nipple!

— BPBEE

Well I guess Good men are just hard to find! Maybe they are all on one Boat! If I run across it, Imma hold'em hostage!

— BPBEE

One hand I extend into myself, the other toward others.

— Dejan Stojanovic

A great man is always willing to be little.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

— butler, brett