Sexes Quotes

“What a woman wants is a reaction. What a man wants is a woman.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong.”
― Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

“Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters.”
― Camille Paglia

“Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel.”
― Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis

“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

“How much more generous it would be if, instead of writing parables about childhood wounds, psychologists were to accept that some differences between the sexes just are, that they are in the nature of the beasts, because each sex has an evolved tendency to develop that way in response to experience.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“Women may fail when there is no strength in man”
― Shakespheare

“He who is jealous is better off not dating someone who is bisexual.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Given these differences between the sexes, the sexual revolution was the biggest joke men ever played on women. By convincing them that the old rules didn’t apply and that two could play the predator game, men enticed women to do what men have always wanted women to do. But what a price was paid for the new “freedom.” And predictably, women were the ones who got stuck with the bill.”
― James C. Dobson, Life on the Edge: The Next Generation's Guide to a Meaningful Future

“We may add that it is not an act of justice but of foolish injustice to pretend the sexes are the same. Justice is exercised in respectfully providing for the due needs of each.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“And I saw then again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was. Until then I had rejected him, refused him his own reality. He had been quite right to say that he, the only person on Gethen who trusted me, was the own Gethenian I distrusted. For he was the only one who had entirely accepted me as a human being: who had liked me personally and given me entire personal loyalty, and who therefore had demanded of me an equal degree of recognition, of acceptance. I had not been willing to give it. I had been afraid to give it. I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“And you know women, they're both back there turning it into the crime of the century. Planting it in a little garden in the center of their hearts and watering it with feelings. Talking about it, sharing it. You're a cheat, you're a heartbreaker, you're like a museum exhibit, Everything That's Wrong with Guys.”
― Timothy Hallinan, Little Elvises

“Men and women fall in love abandoning reality in favour of the dream”
― Jeremy Griffith

“But how interesting it would have been if the relationship between the two women had been more complicated. All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. There is an attempt at it in Diana of the Crossways. They are confidantes, of course, in Racine and the Greek tragedies. They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“The battle of the sexes and you're winning hands down.”
― Margaret Way, A Lesson in Loving

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘man’. The Hebrew is ha-adam, which I would argue encompasses both sexes.”
― Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things

“It takes more than balls to be a woman. It takes ovaries.”
― Solange nicole

“And perhaps the sexes are more closely related than we think, and the great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in man and woman, freed of all sense of error and disappointment, seeking one another out not as opposites but as brothers and sisters and neighbours, and they will join together as human beings, to share the heavy weight of sexuality that is laid upon them with simplicity, gravity and patience.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“It’s not that men and women are identical; it’s just that they are so near identical in all but the political abuses and privileges that are lavished on the one and visited on the other that to talk of ‘innate’ differences as significant, even to childbirth, is to hold up the color of the hair, the strength of a limb, a predilection for history over mathematics or vice versa, as a pre-determining factor in who shall be treated how, with no appeal; while to ignore those abuses and privileges is to ignore oppression, exploitation, even genocide, even while these are shaping conscience, consciousness, and rage.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren

“Life is not a competition between men and women, it is a collaboration.”
― David Alejandro Fearnhead

“A woman, unless she is an idiot, sooner or later meets a piece of human wreckage and tries to rescue him. She sometimes succeeds. But a woman, unless she is an idiot, sooner or later finds a sane, healthy man and makes a wreck of him. She always succeeds.”
― Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935-1950

“14. God created two sexes, male and female. They are equal in worth, although each is unique and different. It is not only impossible to blend maleness and femaleness into a single sex (unisex), it is dangerous to even attempt it.”
― James C. Dobson, Life on the Edge: The Next Generation's Guide to a Meaningful Future

“I don’t like boys.”
I shook my head. “That’s no impediment to them. Madame raised gentlemen of both sexes.”
― Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning

“None of them were even married, and the kind of women they got a chance to know weren’t likely to be changed by what a rustler would do to them.”
― Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The Ox-Bow Incident

“We are all mothers, when it comes down to it. And men are all children.”
― Daniel Polansky, Seventh Perfection

“It is that in nearly every human psychological characteristic, men and women overlap. This means that in most cases the differences within the sexes are bigger than the differences between the sexes.”
― Hal Herzog, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals

“Balance is all in the sexes.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“With every male trying to ensure that his life's savings ended up in the right hands -those of his own progeny- an obsession with virginity and chastity became inevitable. Patriarchy, as it's known, can be thought of simply as an outgrowth of male assistance with the rearing of offspring.”
― Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are

“They say eternally, like my correspondent, that the ordinary woman is always a drudge. And what in the name of the Nine Gods, is the ordinary man? These people seem to think that the ordinary man is a Cabinet Minister. They are always talking about man going forth to wiled power, to carve his own way, to stamp his individuality on the world, to command and to be obeyed. This may be true of a certain class. Dukes, perhaps, are not drudges; but then, neither are duchesses.”
― G. K Chesterton, Woman

“Where’s your female Einstein, your Rembrandt? Women! Why were all the Greek and Roman statues of men? Because male beauty is superior in every way”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower