Women and Men
Woman was God’s second mistake.
Friedrich Nietzsche
When God made man, she was only testing.
Graffiti in ladies’ lavatory, London W11
‘O Grandson of Conn, O Cormac,’ said Carbre, ‘how do you distinguish women?’
‘Not hard to tell,’ said Cormac. ‘I distinguish them, but I make no difference among them.’
They are crabbed as constant companions
haughty when visited,
lewd when neglected …
stubborn in a quarrel,
not to be trusted with a secret …
boisterous in their jealousy …
lustful in bed …
Better to whip than to humour them …
better to scourge than to gladden them …
They are waves that drown you,
they are fires that burn you …
they are moths for sticking to one,
they are serpents for cunning …
The Instructions of King Cormac MacAirt
To what purpose is it for women to make vows, when men have so many millions of ways to make them break them? And when sweet words, fair promises, tempting, flattering, swearing, lying will not serve to beguile the poor soul, then with rough handling, violence and plain strength of arms they are, or have been heretofore, rather made prisoners to lust’s thieves than wives and companions to faithful honest lovers.
The Law’s Resolutions of Woman’s Rights, published 1632 but probably written in the 1580s
God created Adam, lord of all living creatures, but Eve spoiled it all.
Martin Luther
All men are rapists and that’s all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws and their cocks.
Marilyn French
The male is by nature superior, and the female inferior: the one rules and the other is ruled.
Aristotle, Politics, I.5
A good part – and definitely the most fun part – of being a feminist is about frightening men … Of course, there’s a lot more to feminism … but scaring the shit out of the scumbags is an amusing and necessary part because, sadly, a good many men still respect nothing but strength.
Julie Burchill, in Time Out
Nature intended women to be our slaves … they are our property; we are not theirs. They belong to us, just as a tree that bears fruit belongs to a gardener. What a mad idea to demand equality for women! … Women are nothing but machines for producing children.
Napoléon Bonaparte
The male function is to produce sperm. We now have sperm banks.
Valerie Solanas, in S.C.U.M. Manifesto
Marie Stopes was living with him, an arrangement which I would have thought would satisfy any woman’s craving for birth control.
Muriel Spark on Lord Douglas and the campaigner for contraception, Marie Stopes
It’s a pity it was not her parents, rather than her, who thought of birth control.
Muriel Spark on Marie Stopes
Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.
Marie Shear
I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.
Rebecca West
When a woman inclines to learning there is usually something wrong with her sex apparatus.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Interviewer: People think you are very hostile to men.
Andrea Dworkin: I am.
Interviewer: Doesn’t that worry you?
Andrea Dworkin: From what you said, it worries them.
Men are rewarded for learning the practice of violence in virtually any sphere of activity by money, admiration, recognition, respect, and the genuflection of others honoring their sacred and proven masculinity.
Andrea Dworkin
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
A very little wit is valued in a woman; as we are pleased with a few words spoken plain by a parrot.
Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects
Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking upon his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.
Samuel Johnson
I have always been amazed that women are allowed to enter churches. What sort of conversations can they have with God?
Charles Baudelaire
We have no desire to say anything that might tend to encourage women to embark on accountancy, for although women might make excellent book-keepers, there is much in accountancy proper that is, we think, unsuitable for them.
English Institute of Chartered Accountants, in the Accountant (1912)
Do you know why God withheld the sense of humour from women? That we may love you instead of laugh at you.
Mrs Patrick Campbell, an actress, to a man
An ego like a raging tooth.
W.B. Yeats on Mrs Patrick Campbell
All women are little balls of fluff in the eyes of the Creator.
Donald Pomerleau, Baltimore Police Commissioner, testifying in a sex discrimination case
What a mighty man he turns out to be! He raped ten women – I would never have expected this from him. He surprised us all. We all envy him.
Vladimir Putin, Russian President, to visiting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, on Israeli President Moshe Katsav
A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.
Samuel Johnson
These are rare attainments for a damsel, but pray tell me, can she spin?
James I, when introduced to a young girl proficient in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Attrib.
That woman can speak eighteen languages and she can’t say ‘no’ in one of them.
Dorothy Parker of a guest surrounded by men at one of her parties
The only place men want depth in a woman is in her cleavage.
Zsa Zsa Gabor
Beneath this stone, a lump of clay
Lies Arabella Young
Who on the 21st of May
Began to hold her tongue.
Epitaph, Hatfield, Massachusetts
A friend of mine, who is an excellent anatomist, had promised me the first opportunity to dissect a woman’s tongue, and to examine whether there may not be in it certain juices which render it so wonderfully voluble or flippant …
Joseph Addison, in the Spectator, 1711
[Men’s] slanderous tongues are so short, and the time wherein they have lavished out their words freely hath been so long, that they know we cannot catch hold of them to pull them out, and they think we will not write to reprove their lying lips.
Jane Anger, Her Protection for Women, 1589
A Preface.
To all women in general,
and gentle Reader whatsoever
Fie on the falsehood of men, whose minds go oft a-madding and whose tongues cannot so soon be wagging, but straight they fall a-tattling! Was there ever any so abused, so slandered, so railed upon, or so wickedly handled undeservedly, as are we women?
Jane Anger, Her Protection for Women, 1589
The only difference between men is the colour of their neckties.
Helen Broderick in Top Hat
A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small parcel.
John Ruskin
He has the heart of a cucumber fried in snow.
Ninon de l’Enclos, French courtesan, on the Marquis de Sévigné
The more I see of men, the more I admire dogs.
Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné
You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men.
Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson
When a man’s best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.
Edward Abbey
I have … observed, that in all ages [women] have been more careful than the men to adorn that part of the head which we generally call the outside.
Joseph Addison, in the Spectator, 1712
She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and had forgotten to say ‘when’.
P.G. Wodehouse
[She] appeared to have put on her lipstick during an earth tremor.
Bill Bryson on an elderly guest in his hotel
The only time I see a photograph of anybody who looks like me in a women’s magazine is under the word ‘Before’.
Sarah Millican
Take a close-up of a woman past sixty? You might as well use a picture of a relief map of Ireland!
Nancy Astor, asked for a close-up photograph. Attrib.
When I don’t look like a tragic muse, I look like the smoky relic of the great Boston Fire.
Louisa May Alcott on herself
I hate those short skirts, for women’s knees are like badly risen rock-cakes.
Sir Norman Hartnell
Sure, deck your lower limbs in pants;
Yours are the limbs, my sweeting.
You look divine as you advance –
Have you seen yourself retreating?
Ogden Nash
I wonder why men can get serious at all. They have this delicate long thing hanging outside their bodies, which goes up and down by its own will. First of all, having it outside your body is terribly dangerous. If I were a man I would have a fantastic castration complex to the point that I wouldn’t be able to do a thing. Second, the inconsistency of it, like carrying a chance time alarm or something. If I were a man I would always be laughing at myself.
Yoko Ono on Film No.4
Viewed from the side, a woman presents an exaggerated S bisected by an imperfectly straight line, and so she inevitably suggests a drunken dollar-mark.
H.L. Mencken
Give a man a free hand and he’ll run it all over you.
Mae West
God created man with a penis and a brain, but only gave him enough blood to run one at a time.
Stephen Ambrose
For 50 years it was like being chained to an idiot.
Kingsley Amis on finally losing his sex drive
I feel as if I had escaped from a frantic and savage master.
Sophocles on being asked in old age about love
If, sir, I, possessed the power of conveying unlimited sexual attraction through the potency of my voice, I would not be reduced to accepting a miserable pittance from the BBC for interviewing a faded female in a damp basement.
Gilbert Harding, urged to be more ‘sexy’ interviewing Mae West
I used to be Snow White … but I drifted.
Mae West
She’s the original good time that was had by all.
Bette Davis on a starlet of her day
If I ever get hold of that hag, I’ll tear every hair out of her moustache.
Tallulah Bankhead on Bette Davis
Mme de Genlis, in order to avoid the scandal of coquetry, always yielded easily.
Talleyrand
He’s the kind of man who will end up dying in his own arms.
Mamie Van Doren on Warren Beatty
Madame, you must really be more careful. Suppose it had been someone else who found you like this.
Armand-Emmanuel du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu, when he discovered his wife with her lover
She’s like the old line about justice – not only must be done but must be seen to be done.
John Osborne, Time Present
You were born with your legs apart. They’ll send you to the grave in a Y-shaped coffin.
Joe Orton, What the Butler Saw
If the girls at a Yale weekend were laid end to end I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.
Dorothy Parker
Women might be able to fake orgasms, but men can fake whole relationships.
Sharon Stone
She is chaste whom nobody has asked.
Ovid, Amores, I.8
Ladies, just a little more virginity, if you don’t mind.
Herbert Beerbohm Tree, directing a group of actresses
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite virginity.
Daniel Webster on hearing of an exchange of views about his friend Peggy Eaton’s scandalous reputation
… Your virginity, your old virginity, is like one of our French wither’d pears: it looks ill, it eats drily …
William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well
Sara could commit adultery at one end and weep for her sins at the other, and enjoy both operations at once.
Joyce Cary, The Horse’s Mouth
You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think.
Dorothy Parker, in a speech to the American Horticultural Society
Masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.
H.L. Mencken, In Defence of Women
A woman is only a woman,
But a good cigar is a smoke.
Rudyard Kipling; later used by Groucho Marx
There she goes, not with a wimp but a banker.
Paul Desmond on seeing a former girlfriend with a suited man in the street
A woman’s place is in the wrong.
James Thurber
Men are nicotine-stained, beer-besmirched, whisky-greased, red-eyed devils.
Carry Nation
Men’s men: be they gentle or simple, they’re very much of a muchness.
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
Macho isn’t mucho.
Zsa Zsa Gabor
I’ve never found brawn appealing. If I went out with Macho Man I think I’d have a permanent headache. Kind of ‘You Tarzan – Mi-graine’.
Overheard on a bus
Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.
Charlotte Whitton
The five worst infirmities that afflict the female are indocility, discontent, slander, jealously, and silliness.
Confucian Marriage Manual
Women want mediocre men, and men are working to be as mediocre as possible.
Margaret Mead
Men are stupid, and they like big tits.
Marilyn Monroe’s advice to Joan Rivers
Some people think having large breasts makes a woman stupid. Actually, it’s the opposite. A woman having large breasts makes a man stupid.
Rita Rudner
If there is anything more boring to me than the problems of big-busted women, it is the problems of beautiful women.
Nora Ephron
Twenty million young women rose to their feet with the cry ‘we will not be dictated to’ – and promptly became stenographers.
G.K. Chesterton
Why are women … so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Some pale, hueless flicker of sensitivity is in me. God, must I lose it in cooking scrambled eggs for a man?
Sylvia Plath
Once you know what women are like, men get kind of boring. I’m not trying to put them down, I mean I like some of them sometimes as people, but sexually they’re dull.
Rita Mae Brown
Why did God create men? Because vibrators can’t mow the lawn.
Madonna
The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) chromosome is an incomplete X (female) chromosome, that is, has an incomplete set of genes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the chromosome stage.
Valerie Solanas, in S.C.U.M. Manifesto
Man … is an afterthought of creation; he is simply a modification of the female.
Deborah Moggach
If they can put one man on the Moon, why not all of them?
Feminist T-shirt
Militant feminists. I take my hat off to them. They don’t like that.
Milton Jones
Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There’s too much fraternising with the enemy.
Henry Kissinger
I will rather trust a Fleming with my butter, Parson Hugh the Welshman with my cheese, an Irishman with my aqua-vitae bottle, or a thief to walk my ambling gelding, than my wife with herself.
William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor
Bachelors begin at thirty-six. Up till this time they are regarded as single men. Most of them are very tidy, smell of mothballs, and have an obsessional old maid’s fix about one of their ashtrays being moved an inch to the right.
Jilly Cooper, Men and Super Men
Because women can do nothing except love, they’ve given it a ridiculous importance.
W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence
Just the exchange of two momentary desires and the contact of two skins.
Nicolas Chamfort on love, 1805
By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is Infinite, undying –
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.
Dorothy Parker, Enough Rope, ‘Unfortunate Coincidence’
How alike are the groans of love to those of the dying.
Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
Love may arise from a generous sentiment – namely, the liking for prostitution; but it soon becomes corrupted by the liking for ownership.
Charles Baudelaire
Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.
George Bernard Shaw
The cure for love is to be loved back.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Girls bored me – they still do. I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I’ve ever known.
Walt Disney
Madame: I was told that you took the trouble to come here to see me three times last evening. I was not in. And, fearing lest persistence expose you to humiliation, I am bound by the rules of politeness to warn you that I shall never be in.
Gustave Flaubert in a letter to Louise Colet, his former mistress. Colet scribbled on the note ‘lâche, couard et canaille’ (‘poltroon, coward and cur’).
There is no such thing as an ugly woman, but there is such a thing as too little vodka.
Russian saying
Ugliness is superior to beauty because it lasts longer.
Serge Gainsbourg
Now I know the meaning of grotesque.
Sydney Smith on seeing the wife of Dr Grote, Regius Professor of Greek, wearing a turban
You know that look that women get when they want to have sex? Me neither.
Steve Martin
No longer from head to foot than from hip to hip, she is spherical like a globe; I could find out countries in her.
In what part of her body stands for Ireland?
Marry, sir, in her buttocks; I found it out by the bogs.
Where Scotland?
I found it by the barrenness, hard in the palm of the hand.
Where France?
In her forehead, armed and reverted, making war against her heir.
Where England?
I looked for the chalky cliffs, but I could find no whiteness in them. But I guess it stood in her chin, by the salt rheum that ran between France and it.
Where Spain?
Faith, I saw it not; but I felt it hot in her breath.
Where America, the Indies?
O, sir, upon her nose, all o’er embellished with rubies, carbuncles, sapphires, declining their rich aspect to the hot breath of Spain, who sent whole armadas of carracks to be ballast at her nose.
Where stood Belgia, the Netherlands?
O, sir, I did not look so low.
William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors
Fuck-me shoes and a bird’s-nest hairdo.
Germaine Greer on her fellow Guardian writer Suzanne Moore’s dress and appearance
When I first saw Moore I at last understood why Yanks call a woman a broad.
Paul Johnson on Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore
A woman with a heavily-lived face poised unceremoniously on top of a torso like a dressmaker’s dummy.
Paul Johnson on Lynn Barber, in the Spectator
A red-haired, red-faced man of 65 seemingly in transit between Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Peter McKay on Paul Johnson in the Sunday Times
The flashers, grabbers, bottom-pinchers, purse-snatchers, kerb-crawlers, verbal abusers, peeping Toms and the ultimate cowards, the ones who roam in packs, have left an indelible impression on women’s minds and – more in anger than in fear – women are determined to evade, forestall and undermine these invaders of our freedom.
Valerie Grove in the Evening Standard
The Queen is most anxious to enlist every one who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Woman’s Rights’, with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety.
Queen Victoria
No man, not even a doctor, ever gives any other definition of what a nurse should be than this – ‘devoted and obedient’. This definition would do just as well for a porter. It might even do for a horse. It would not do for a policeman.
Florence Nightingale
The legend of the jungle heritage and the evolution of man as a hunting carnivore has taken root in man’s mind … He may even believe that equal pay will do something terrible to his gonads.
Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman
An open invitation to any feminist, any harridan or any rattle-headed female with a chip on her bra strap to take action against her employers.
Tony Marlow MP on equal-pay law
How do you know that an advance was unwanted until you’ve made it?
Alan Clark MP, responding to accusations of sexual harrassment
Homosexuality is a sickness, just as are baby-rape or wanting to become the head of General Motors.
Eldridge Cleaver, black Muslim, Soul on Ice, ‘Notes on a Native Son’
He is the summit of sex, the pinnacle of masculine, feminine and neuter. Everything that he, she and it can ever want. I spoke to sad but kindly men on this newspaper who have met every celebrity coming from America for the past thirty years. They say that this deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered, heap of mother love has had the biggest reception and impact on London since Charlie Chaplin arrived at the same station, Waterloo, on September 12th 1921. This appalling man, and I use the word appalling in no other than its true sense of terrifying, has hit this country in a way that is as violent as Churchill receiving the cheers on VE Day. He reeks of emetic language that can only make grown men long for a quiet corner, an aspidistra, a handkerchief and the old heave-ho. Without doubt he is the biggest sentimental vomit of all time. Slobbering over his Mother, winking at his brother, and counting the cash at every second, this superb piece of calculating candyfloss has an answer for every situation.
William Connor (‘Cassandra’) on Liberace, in the Daily Mirror. The column became the subject of a famous libel case won by the entertainer.
I became one of the stately homos of England.
Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant
A bull who would copulate only with other bulls would be sent to the knackers.
Piers Paul Read, in The Times, 1994
This sort of thing may be tolerated by the French, but we are British – thank God.
Viscount Montgomery of Alamein on the proposed relaxation of laws against homosexuality in 1965
I was too polite to ask.
Gore Vidal, asked whether his first sexual experience was homosexual or heterosexual
If Michelangelo had been a heterosexual, the Sistine Chapel would have been painted basic white and with a roller.
Rita Mae Brown
The middle age of a bugger is not to be contemplated without horror.
Virginia Woolf
She looked like Lady Chatterley above the waist and the gamekeeper below.
Cyril Connolly on Vita Sackville-West
The trouble with Ian is that he gets off with women because he can’t get on with them.
Rosamond Lehmann on Ian Fleming
Online dating: the odds are good, but the goods are odd.
Anonymous online dater
Girlfriend said last night ‘You treat our relationship like some kind of game!’ Which unfortunately cost her 12 points and a bonus chance.
Twitter user @Pundamentalism
They are comforted by our means, they are nourished by the meats we dress; their bodies freed from diseases by our cleanliness, which otherwise would surfeit unreasonably through their own noisomeness. Without our care they lie in their beds as dogs in litter and go like lousy mackerel swimming in the heat of summer.
Jane Anger, Her Protection for Women, 1589
The fastest way to a man’s heart is through his chest.
Roseanne Barr
It makes me feel masculine to tell you that I do not answer questions like this without being paid for answering them.
Lillian Hellman, when asked by Harper’s Magazine when she felt most masculine
Many a man has been a wonder to the world, whose wife and valet have seen nothing in him that was even remarkable. Few men have been admired by their servants.
Michel de Montaigne, Essais, III
No man is a hero to his valet.
Anne-Marie Bigot de Cornuel
But that is not because the hero is no hero, but because the valet is a valet.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is still a horse.
Samuel Johnson
Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both.
Samuel Butler. Attrib.
A woman will always sacrifice herself if you give her the opportunity. It is her favourite form of self-indulgence.
W. Somerset Maugham, The Circle
Laughter is the best medicine, though it tends not to work in the case of impotence.
Jo Brand