Quotes about women

The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.

— Henry Brooks Adams

As vivacity is the gift of women, gravity is that of men.

— Joseph Addison

A man's brain has a more difficult time shifting from thinking to feeling than a women's brain does.

— Barbara De Angelis

Men are just as sensitive, and in some ways more sensitive, than women are.

— Barbara De Angelis

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

When a woman is very, very bad, she is awful, but when a man is correspondingly good, he is weird.

— Minna Antrim

Man forgives women anything save the wit to outwit him.

— Minna Antrim

Women like silent men. They think they're listening.

— Marcel Archard

So it is naturally with the male and the female; the one is superior, the other inferior; the one governs, the other is governed; and the same rule must necessarily hold good with respect to all mankind.

— Aristotle

If all men are born free, why is it that all women are born slaves?

— Mary Astell

Women have got to make the world safe for men since men have made it so darned unsafe for women.

— Lady Nancy Astor

She even had a kind of special position among men: she was an exception, she fitted none of the categories they commonly used when talking about girls; she wasn't a cock-teaser, a cold fish, an easy lay or a sneaky bitch; she was an honorary person. She had grown to share their contempt for most women.

— Margaret Atwood

With men he can be rational and unaffected, but when he has ladies to please, every feature works.

— Jane Austen

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

Men who do not make advances to women are apt to become victims to women who make advances to them.

— Walter Bagehot

Guys are simple... women are not simple and they always assume that men must be just as complicated as they are, only way more mysterious. The whole point is guys are not thinking much. They are just what they appear to be. Tragically.

— Dave Barry

Man loves little and often. Woman much and rarely.

— Basta

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

Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

— John Berger

Men mourn for what they have lost; women for what they ain't got.

— Josh Billings

While farmers generally allow one rooster for ten hens, ten men are scarcely sufficient to service one woman.

— Giovanni Boccaccio

A good cigar is as great a comfort to a man as a good cry is to a woman.

— Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

A woman who looks like a girl and thinks like a man is the best sort, the most enjoyable to be and the most pleasurable to have and to hold.

— Julie Burchill

What a strange thing man is; and what a stranger thing woman.

— Lord Byron

A woman who gives any advantage to a man may expect a lover -- but will sooner or later find a tyrant.

— Lord Byron

There is something to me very softening in the presence of a woman, some strange influence, even if one is not in love with them, which I cannot at all account for, having no very high opinion of the sex. But yet, I always feel in better humor with myself and every thing else, if there is a woman within ken.

— Lord Byron

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

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

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

Whatever evil a man may think of women, there is no woman but thinks more.

— Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort

I don't know why women want any of the things men have when one the things that women have is men.

— Coco Chanel

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

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.

— Lord Chesterfield

It seems as though women keep growing. Eventually they can have little or nothing in common with the men they chose long ago.

— Eugenie Clark

A pretty little collection of weaknesses and a terror of spiders are our indispensable stock-in-trade with the men.

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.

— Cyril Connolly

Love is lost in men's capricious minds, but in women s, it fills all the room it finds.

— John Crowne

Nature makes woman to be won and men to win.

— George William Curtis

Men don't know much about women. We do know when they're happy. We know when they're crying, and we know when they're pissed off. We just don't know in what order these are gonna come at us.

— Evan Davis

Were there no women, men might live like gods.

— Thomas Dekker

There is no kind of harassment that a man may not inflict on a woman with impunity in civilized societies.

— Denis Diderot

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

Once a man is on hand, a woman tends to stop believing in her own beliefs.

— Colette Dowling

A man's idea in a game of cards is war, cruel, devastating, and pitiless. A lady's idea of it is a combination of larceny, embezzlement and burglary.

— Finley Peter Dunne

The woman is the home. That's where she used to be, and that's where she still is. You might ask me, What if a man tries to be part of the home -- will the woman let him? I answer yes. Because then he becomes one of the children.

— Marguerite Duras

Women are an enslaved population -- the crop we harvest is children, the fields we work are houses. Women are forced into committing sexual acts with men that violate integrity because the universal religion -- contempt for women -- has as its first commandment that women exist purely as sexual fodder for men.

— Andrea Dworkin

Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail their failure must be but a challenge to others.

— Amelia Earhart

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

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

And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

— George Eliot

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

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

Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.

— George Eliot

Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Women lie about their age; men lie about their income.

— William Feather

The most important thing in a relationship between a man and a woman is that one of them must be good at taking orders.

— Linda Festa

When men and woman die, as poets sung, his heart's the last part moves, her last, the tongue.

— Benjamin Franklin

Whatever they may be in public life, whatever their relations with men, in their relations with women, all men are rapists and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, their codes.

— Marilyn French

Woman submits to her fate; man makes his.

— Emile Gaboriau

Sure men were born to lie, and women to believe them!

— John Gay

I must have women -- there is nothing unbends the mind like them.

— John Gay

It is the woman who chooses the man who will choose her.

— Paul Geraldy

The female of the genus homo is economically dependent on the male. He is her food supply.

— Charlotte P. Gillman

Girls we love for what they are; men for what they promise to be.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Women still remember the first kiss after men have forgotten the last.

— Remy De Gourmont

The woman's vision is deep reaching, the man's far reaching. With the man the world is his heart, with the woman the heart is her world.

— Betty Grable

Men are motivated and empowered when they feel needed. Women are motivated and empowered when they feel cherished.

— John Gray

Just as women are afraid of receiving, men are afraid of giving.

— John Gray

A women under stress is not immediately concerned with finding solutions to her problems but rather seeks relief by expressing herself and being understood.

— John Gray

When men and women are able to respect and accept their differences then love has a chance to blossom.

— John Gray

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

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

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

Every theory of love, from Plato down teaches that each individual loves in the other sex what he lacks in himself.

— G. Stanely Hall

Men should be saying I want to become a woman. The world would be a far better place if more men wanted to become women, than women wanted to become men.

— Albert Halsey

Women make love for love, men make love for lust.

— Derrick Harge

To be womanly is one thing, and one only; it is to be sensitive to man, to be highly endowed with the sex instinct; to be manly is to be sensitive to woman.

— Jane Harrison

I'm a woman who was raised to believe that you are not complete unless you have a man. Well, in some ways it's true. I am a feminist to a point. But I'm not going to deny the fact that I love to be with men.

— Goldie Hawn

The man of the house can destroy the pleasure of the household, but he cannot make it. That rests with the woman, and it is her greatest privilege.

— Sir Arthur Helps

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

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

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

The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.

— Henry James

Men know that women are an over-match for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.

— Samuel Johnson

Men and women, women and men; it will never work.

— Erica Jong

Men naturally resent it when women take greater liberties in dress than men are allowed.

— Michael Korda

Women receive he insults of men with tolerance, having been bitten in the nipple by their toothless gums.

— Dilys Laing

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 clich? 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

The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.

— D. H. Lawrence

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

The source of all life and knowledge is in man and woman, and the source of all living is in the interchange and the meeting and mingling of these two: man-life and woman-life, man-knowledge and woman-knowledge, man-being and woman-being.

— D. H. Lawrence

Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

When you educate a man you educate an individual; when you educate a woman you educate a whole family.

— Robert M. Maciver

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

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

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

Whether women are better than men I cannot say, but I can say they are certainly no worse.

— Golda Meir

Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.

— H. L. Mencken

A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition.

— H. L. Mencken