A bachelor is a man who comes to work each morning from a different direction.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Men's second childhood begins when a woman gets a hold of him.
The question arises as to whether it is possible not to live in the world of men and still to live in the world.
A true man hates no one.
The man, most man, works best for men: and, if most man indeed, he gets his manhood plainest from his soul.
Some men are like nails, very easily drawn; others however are more like rivets never drawn at all.
Men in general are quick to believe that which they wish to be true.
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.
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.
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.
If it's true that men are such beasts, this must account for the fact that most women are animal lovers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Someone has to stand up for wimps.
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.
Men's men: gentle or simple, they're much of a muchness.
Men are what their mothers made them.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations.
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?
There must be some reason why a man must be convinced, while a woman must be persuaded.
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.
Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim.
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.
Macho doesn't prove mucho.
I mean to make myself a man, and if I succeed in that, I shall succeed in everything else.
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.
The little man is still a man.
The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough.
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.
When a man is wrong and won't admit it, he always gets angry.
Some men demand rough treatment everywhere!
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.
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.
A hairy body, and arms stiff with bristles, give promise of a manly soul.
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.
It is easier to know men in general, than men in particular.
There are three classes of men; the retrograde, the stationary and the progressive.
How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.
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.
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.
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.
The male sex still constitute in many ways the most obstinate vested interest one can find.
Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
Men are creatures with eight hands.
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.
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.
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.
In the United States adherence to the values of the masculine mystique makes intimate, self-revealing, deep friendships between men unusual.
A man that is ashamed of passions that are natural and reasonable is generally proud of those that are shameful and silly.
It is much more easy to accuse the one sex than to excuse the other.
The most unhappy and frail creatures are men and yet they are the proudest.
Don't accept rides from strange men, and remember that all men are as strange as hell.
Men are nicotine soaked, beer besmirched, whiskey greased, red-eyed devils.
I love the male body, it's better designed than the male mind.
The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.
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.
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.
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.
I require three things in a man. He must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid.
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.
He may have hair upon his chest but, sister, so has Lassie.
It is a man's world, and you men can have it.
Silent men like still waters, are deep and dangerous.
— Proverb
Prudent men woo thrifty women.
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.
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.
There are only two kinds of men; the dead and the deadly.
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.
Man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid of.
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.
To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he's a machine, a walking dildo.
The male function is to produce sperm. We now have sperm banks.
Not only is it harder to be a man, it is also harder to become one.
It is funny the two things most men are proudest of is the thing that any man can do and doing does in the same way, that is being drunk and being the father of their son.
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.
Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.
One of the things being in politics has taught me is that men are not a reasoned or reasonable sex.
No man flatters the woman he truly loves.
All men are two meters tall... give or take a meter.
The intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.
What God wants are men great enough to be small enough to be used.
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.
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.
I only like two kinds of men; domestic and foreign.
I go for two kinds of men. The kind with muscles, and the kind without.
Men are like sheep, of which a flock is more easily driven than a single one.
How dwarfed against his manliness she sees the poor pretension, the wants, the aims, the follies, born of fashion and convention!
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.