quotations about men
Man makes one journey all his living days,
Down through the realms of music and of art;
Down through the halls of fame and glorious praise;
Down through the tears and triumphs of the heart
To some sweet woman waiting some place there.
For her he builds his cities and makes war,
Seeks gold and glorious wealth to store.
EDWIN CURRAN
"The Eternal Quest"
Man, who wert once a despot and a slave,
A dupe and a deceiver! a decay,
A traveler from the cradle to the grave
Through the dim night of this immortal day.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Prometheus Unbound
Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.
SIGMUND FREUD
Civilization and Its Discontents
All men seemed to be self-serving, selfish, insensitive pigs, just waiting for an opportunity to act like greater self-serving, selfish, insensitive pigs.
DAN SIMMONS
Ilium
Living with boys has changed the way I see men. I used to love them in spite of themselves. I've come to love them because of themselves. Collectively, they can be assholes. But so can women, given the same chance. Anyone who thinks estrogen is the antidote for brutality has neither paid much attention to history nor taken an eighth grade girls' gym class. Men may have sins against female kind to atone for, but being born male is not one of them.
KYRAN PITTMAN
Planting Dandelions
Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it. We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother. For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man's toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Lavinia
In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
attributed, Family Circle Magazine, August 9, 2005
Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit Redux