- WIST is my personal collection of quotations, curated for thought, amusement, turn of phrase, historical significance, or sometimes just (often-unintentional) irony.
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Popular Quotables
- “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National… (7,243)
- “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942) (5,862)
- Agamemnon, ll. 175-183 [tr. Johnston (2007)] (5,854)
- “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933) (4,963)
- Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962) (4,876)
- “On The Conduct of Life” (1822) (3,975)
- “In Search of a Majority,” Speech,… (3,846)
- “Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of… (3,711)
- “A Cult of Ignorance,” Newsweek (21 Jan 1980) (3,181)
- “The Historian as Participant,” Daedalus… (3,178)
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Adams, John • Bacon, Francis • Bible • Bierce, Ambrose • Billings, Josh • Butcher, Jim • Chesterton, Gilbert Keith • Churchill, Winston • Einstein, Albert • Eisenhower, Dwight David • Emerson, Ralph Waldo • Franklin, Benjamin • Fuller, Thomas (1654) • Gaiman, Neil • Galbraith, John Kenneth • Gandhi, Mohandas • Goethe, Johann von • Hazlitt, William • Heinlein, Robert A. • Hoffer, Eric • Huxley, Aldous • Ingersoll, Robert Green • James, William • Jefferson, Thomas • Johnson, Lyndon • Johnson, Samuel • Kennedy, John F. • King, Martin Luther • La Rochefoucauld, Francois • Lewis, C.S. • Lincoln, Abraham • Mencken, H.L. • Orwell, George • Pratchett, Terry • Roosevelt, Eleanor • Roosevelt, Theodore • Russell, Bertrand • Seneca the Younger • Shakespeare, William • Shaw, George Bernard • Stevenson, Adlai • Stevenson, Robert Louis • Twain, Mark • Watterson, Bill • Wilde, Oscar- Only the 45 most quoted authors are shown above. Full author list.
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Quotations about male
Note that not all quotations have been tagged, so the Search function may find additional quotations on this topic.
ANN ANDERSON: Here’s something else you must remember: husbands like to be alone once in awhile.
JENNIE ANDERSON: Why?
ANN ANDERSON: You never know why, but I can always tell when James wants to be alone. A mood comes over him. I can always see it in his eyes before it gets there. I don’t know where the mood comes from or why, but that’s when I leave him alone. It seems sometimes things get so fickle in a man that he comes to feel that everything is closing in on him — and that’s when he wants to be left alone. You understand, don’t you?
JENNIE ANDERSON: No!
Male supremacy: Doctrine built upon three forms of superiority: the ability to grow a handlebar mustache, the ability to answer most of Nature’s calls efficiently, and the possession of pockets.
Marie Shear (1940-2017) American writer and feminist activist
“Media Watch: Celebrating Women’s Words,” New Directions for Women (May/Jun 1986)
(Source)
MEG: They’re either married or gay. And if they’re not gay, they’ve just broken up with the most wonderful woman in the world, or they’ve just broken up with a bitch who looks exactly like me. They’re in transition from a monogamous relationship and they need more space. Or they’re tired of space, but they just can’t commit. Or they want to commit, but they’re afraid to get close. They want to get close, you don’t want to get near them.
Lawrence Kasdan (b. 1949) American screenwriter, director, producer
The Big Chill (1983) [written with Barbara Benedek]
Regarding men.
Like young men from the dawn of time, I decided to choose the risk of death over certain humiliation.
Ben Aaronovitch (b. 1964) British author
Whispers Under Ground (2012)
The problem is that God gives men a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time.
Robin Williams (1951-2014) American comedian and actor
(Attributed)
Unless you intend to kill him immediately thereafter, never kick a man in the balls. Not even symbolically. Or perhaps especially not symbolically.
Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) American writer
Friday [Friday Jones] (1982)
Properly regarded, male vanity is a virtue, not a vice. Treated correctly, it makes him enormously pleasanter to deal with.
Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) American writer
Friday [Friday Jones] (1982)
No, I have never wanted to be a man. I have often wanted to be more effective as a woman, but I have never felt that trousers would do the trick!
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) First Lady of the US (1933-45), politician, diplomat, activist
If You Ask Me (1946)
“The female mind is certainly a devious one, my lord.”
Vetinari looked at his secretary in surprise. “Well, of course it is. It has to deal with the male one.”
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Unseen Academicals (2009)
That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. Why, then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity? Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your sex; regard us then as Beings placed by Providence under your protection, and in imitation of the Supreme Being make use of that power only for our happiness.
Abigail Adams (1744-1818) American correspondent, First Lady (1797-1801)
Letter to John Adams (31 Mar 1776)
There is nothing more contemptible than a bald man who pretends to have hair.
Martial (AD c.39-c.103) Spanish Roman poet, satirist, epigrammatist [Marcus Valerius Martialis]
Epigrams [Epigrammata], Book 10, # 83
Sexes. One has the look of a wound, the other of something skinned.
Joseph Joubert (1754-1824) French moralist
Pensées (1838) [ed. Auster (1983)]
