Top 100 When Men Were Men Quotes
#1. I say it must have been great to grow up when men were men. He says men have always been what the are now, namely incapable of coping with life without the intervention of God the Almighty. Then in the oven behind him my pizza starts smoking and he says case in point.
George Saunders
#2. This is a love story. It's about the good old days, when men were men and women were women and books were books.
Jonathan Galassi
#3. Do you remember a time when men were men? When they would do anything for love, for their friends or for their country?'
No, I don't, but at least I would love to read about those men!
David Cook
#4. I grew up in Beaufort, South Carolina, in a six-room farmhouse with a couple of leaning posts to keep it from fallin'. I came up in a time when men were men.
Joe Frazier
#5. It's what the Taliban does in Afghanistan, it's what gets done in the Middle East, and it's clearly something that certain mainly conservative groups in the United States would like to do. They miss the good old days, when men were men and women were nothing.
Anna Quindlen
#6. A man has integrity if his interest in the good of the service is at all times greater than his personal pride, and when he holds himself to the same line of duty when unobserved as he would follow if his superiors were present
Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall
#7. It was a mystery why the army bothered with a signal communication system when its men were so good at gossip.
Ruth Downie
#8. And there is a proud kind of moderation likewise, when men will take upon them to censure both parties, as if they were wiser than both,
Richard Sibbes
#9. A man becomes creative, whether he is an artist or scientist, when he finds a new unity in the variety of nature. He does so by finding a likeness between things which were not thought alike before.
Jacob Bronowski
#10. The men in those old days of the seventeenth century, when in constant dread of attacks by Indians, always rose when the services were ended and left the house before the women and children, thus making sure the safe exit of the latter.
Alice Morse Earle
#11. This all came of a conversation I had with [John] Steinbeck once when we were standing in a men's room somewhere. Steinbeck asked me why I didn't play the banjo any more and I told him that went out with the high-button shoes.
Eddie Condon
#12. The wizards were civilized men of considerable education and culture. When faced with being inadvertently marooned on a desert island they understood immediately that the first thing to do was place the blame
Terry Pratchett
#13. Men tell stories. Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over.
Kristin Hannah
#14. I have been fascinated by men and women of courage. People who took brave decisions in the service of great causes especially when more comfortable and far less dangerous alternatives were open to them
Gordon Brown
#15. I think that marijuana should be legalized. I think the only reason it isn't legal is because politicians who smoked it when they were young men or young women just don't have the courage when they become politicians to legalize it.
Richard Branson
#16. Rations were scarcely issued, and the men about preparing supper, when rumors that the enemy had been encountered that day near Gettysburg absorbed every other interest, and very soon orders came to march forthwith to Gettysburg.
Joshua Chamberlain
#17. He supposed many men meant no more than that when they said they were in love- not a wild submerge cd of soul, a dipping of all colors into an obscuring dye, such as his love for Nicile had been.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#18. Security, for me, took a tumble not when I read that there were Communists in Hollywood but when I read your editorial in praise of loyalty testing and thought control. If a man is in health, he doesn't need to take anybody else's temperature to know where he is going.
E.B. White
#19. He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust; and she had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable duty.
Edith Wharton
#20. At ordinary times, then, we are perfectly certain that men are not equal. But when, in a democratic country, we think or act politically we are no less certain that men are equal. Or at any rate - which comes to the same thing in practice - we behave as though we were certain of men's equality.
Aldous Huxley
#21. Women didn't come into men's rooms and sink into men's Humes. Women brought laundry and took your seat in the street-car and married you later on when you were old enough to know fetters.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#22. For the thousandth time, Faith wondered why this appealed to her. She detested letting men walk all over her, letting them think they were supreme beings. But when Mr. Meisner did all these diabolical things to her, her body fired up and wanted more.
Cari Silverwood
#23. They were all brave men when faced with death. If they had had half as much fortitude in the face of life, they would have been invincible.
Donald Jack
#24. When a man grows aware of a new way in which to serve God, he should carry it around with him secretly, and without uttering it, for nine months, as though he were pregnant with it, and let others know of it only at the end of that time, as though it were a birth.
Martin Buber
#25. The boys of my people began very young to learn the ways of men, and no one taught us; we just learned by doing what we saw, and we were warriors at a time when boys now are like girls.
Black Elk
#26. There was no justice in the world and evil men prospered. Kachiun struggled not to despair as he wrapped his deel around him, but there were times when he hated as ferociously as Temujin did. There should be justice. There should be revenge.
Conn Iggulden
#27. They were more severely infected than the men, because while men were always getting furious, they calmed down in the end; women, who appeared to be silent, acquiescent, when they were angry flew into a rage that had no end.
Elena Ferrante
#28. Men rush to California and Australia as if the true gold were to be found in that direction but that is to go to the very opposite extreme to where it lies. They go prospecting farther and farther away from the true lead, and are most unfortunate when they think themselves most successful.
Henry David Thoreau
#29. These men were religious when the spirit of religion was buried in forms and ceremonies, and when the priesthood had armed itself with the civil powers to put down all opposition, and suppress all freedom, intellectual, civil, and religious.
Ethan A. Hitchcock
#30. There were days when the Church could club men into obedience by preaching Hell to them, but that day has long passed. The world has outgrown it.
John G. Lake
#31. When I was a kid, I thought movie stars were women and men who were in these great films that we still look at now. But I don't think there are too many films coming out these days that we're going to look at in the future and say, 'This is one of the great ones.'
Lindsay Lohan
#32. On this road they saw some other men, fishers and farmers Elske was told; some of the men were accompanied by women whose hair was wrapped around with colored cloths. These men and women stared at Elske, in her fur boots and wolfskin cloak, but when she stared back and them they looked away.
Cynthia Voigt
#33. We have seen when the earth had to be prepared for the habitation of man, a veil, as it were, of intermediate being was spread between him and its darkness, in which were joined in a subdued measure, the stability and insensibility of the earth, and the passion and perishing of mankind.
John Ruskin
#34. When Anaxagoras was told of the death of his son, he only said, "I knew he was mortal." So we in all casualties of life should say "I knew my riches were uncertain, that my friend was but a man." Such considerations would soon pacify us, because all our troubles proceed from their being unexpected.
Plutarch
#35. I consider myself one of the most fortunate of men, to have lived at a time when some of the old Haidas and their peers among the Northwest Coast peoples were still alive, and to have had the privilege of knowing them.
Bill Reid
#36. You were used to say extremity was the trier of spirits; that common chances common men could bear; that when the sea was calm all boats alike showed mastership in floating
William Shakespeare
#37. You know - we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. 'My God, my God - ' I said to myself, 'It's the Children's Crusade.
Kurt Vonnegut
#38. He felt that when his little men were painted well, they possessed a tension, a suggestion that they might, at any moment, begin to move on their own and charge the French line.
Joe Hill
#39. When I'm by myself, I'm not threatening at all. I get many more invitations than I would if I were traveling with anyone else, especially with a man. But I'm rarely alone. I sit on a park bench and I'm not alone because I pick a park bench where somebody interesting is sitting.
Rita Gelman
#40. The venerable emeritus professors still at Yale when I entered graduate school [in the 1960s] may have been reserved, puritanical WASPs, but they were men of honor who had given their lives to scholarship. Today in the elite schools, honor and ethics are gone.
Camille Paglia
#41. History only existed in the human mind, subject to endless revision. 'each man kills the thing he loves'-Oscar Wilde. You kill it before it kills you, but he was wrong. you killed it by accident. thinking you were doing something else. shattering, when all you wanted to do was keep it safe.
Janet Fitch
#42. There were times, many, many times, when she just didn't get him. She'd heard on numerous occasions that men were bad, wicked creatures, who'd do terrible things at a moment's notice. You wore the wrong skirt or bent over at an inopportune time and BAM. They slipped their penises into you.
Charlotte Stein
#43. When I was a child there were many witches, and they bewitched both cattle and men, especially children.
Martin Luther
#44. When I was growing up in Nigeria - and I shouldn't say Nigeria, because that's too general, but in Afikpo, the Igbo part of the country where I'm from - there were always rites of passage for young men. Men were taught to be men in the ways in which we are not women; that's essentially what it is.
Chris Abani
#45. He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurer's booth at a fair, and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only once; and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive, their effect is gone.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#46. I like the idea of there being times when even words cost so much you used them sparingly. I have known a lot of old men and women who talked as if they were paying Western Union by the word.
Ted Kooser
#47. You can't have it all, all at once. Who - man or woman - has it all, all at once? Over my lifespan I think I have had it all. But in different periods of time things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
#48. The laws of certain states ... give an ownership in the service of Negroes as personal property ... But being men, by the laws of God and nature, they were capable of acquiring liberty - and when the captor in war ... thought fit to give them liberty, the gift was not only valid, but irrevocable.
Alexander Hamilton
#49. Do women in love feel as men do? Do men love as women love? His virgin bride shared her pipe-frame bed all smiles and laughter. When they were intimate to the last degree on that bed, did Lou's experience join his, did his experience match hers, during this moment and that moment?
Annie Dillard
#50. I looked down both ends of the alley. To my left, two men had entered the alley. Their tense body language made me think they meant malice. Plus, what the hell were they doing walking like badasses down an alley when it was pouring rain?
Dennis Liggio
#51. When men desire each other, they crash together like wrecking balls, quenching their need right then and there, as if the world were about to end.
Marisha Pessl
#52. Boys never seemed stupider than when they were surprised by the bad behavior of other men.
Rebecca Scherm
#53. When I was young, all the politicians looked like ancient Latin teachers or greengrocers. They were mumbly, stumbly men with their hair blowing in their eyes, walking into trees, opening the wrong door. They had no idea how to present themselves.
Dylan Moran
#54. Men and parts were waiting when they docked.
Ralph Brandt
#55. tightly and a vein throbbed at his temple. The two guards led Rogers down a long hallway. On each side were barred cell doors. The men behind them had been talking, but when Rogers came into view they abruptly stopped. The prisoners
David Baldacci
#56. The English are no nearer than they were a hundred years ago to knowing what Jefferson really meant when he said that God had created all men equal.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#57. When was the first I knew something about her in a world where men were sex, but women? - weren't we just supposed to get out of the way when we saw it coming?
Vivian Gornick
#58. When he got loaded, the human cannonball knew there were not many men of his caliber.
George Carlin
#59. Had [Winston Churchill] been a stable and equable man, he could never have inspired the nation. In 1940, when all the odds were against Britain, a leader of sober judgment might well have concluded that we were finished.
Anthony Storr
#60. Though you may have known clever men who were indolent, you never knew a great man who was so; and when I hear a young man spoken of as giving promise of great genius, the first question I ask about him always is, Does he work?
John Ruskin
#61. When I was an actor, I worked with lots of men who had a bit of success early on, who were very good looking, who suddenly made a bit of money and who felt no embarrassment - and nor should they have done - about having a good time.
David Nicholls
#62. These men were conscious of the Fall, if they were conscious of nothing else; and the same is true of all heathen humanity. Those who have fallen may remember the fall, even when they forget the height. Some such tantalising blank or break in memory is at the back of all pagan sentiment.
G.K. Chesterton
#63. At eleven, Kate woke Jake up when she went searching in the cooler for juice.
"You know, you used to be peaceful," he grumbled.
"I can't believe you were ever married." Kate said, as she cracked the can open. "What did you do, make her stand in the corner all the time?
Jennifer Crusie
#64. When cities were first founded, an old Egyptian scribe tells us, the mission of the founder was to 'put gods in their shrines.' The task of the coming city is not essentially different: its mission is to put the highest concerns of man at the center of all his activities.
Lewis Mumford
#65. In Ethiopia, where I was born, all the cooks are women. When I grew up in Sweden, my mom and my grandmother did predominantly all the cooking. Then I changed to restaurant kitchens, where all of a sudden there were just more men than women, and I always thought that was weird.
Marcus Samuelsson
#66. Most of us were not afraid of death, only of the act of dying; and there were times when we overcame even this fear. At such moments we were free-men without shadows, dismissed from the ranks of the mortal; it was the most complete experience of freedom that can be granted a man.
Arthur Koestler
#67. There are men who would quickly love each other if once they were speak to each other; for when they spoke they would discover that their souls had only separated by phantoms and delusions.
Ernest Hello
#68. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography.
Oscar Wilde
#69. Chocolate, coffee, and ice cream were far more reliable when it came to providing a good time, and at least they would never disappoint me.
Keri Arthur
#70. When the passage "All men are born free and equal," when that passage was being written were not some of the signers legalised owners of slaves?
Herman Melville
#71. Today, he saw the true cost of two men's immovable wills. He saw what happened when men were forced to fight each other for months on end. It was not merely sickness of the body that plagued sieges, but sickness of the soul that turned men into monsters.
Kiersten White
#72. When all men were of one language, some of them built a high tower, as if they would thereby ascend up to heaven, but the gods sent storms of wind and overthrew the tower, and gave every one his peculiar language; and for this reason it was that the city was called Babylon.
Josephus
#73. Both Bush as well as Tony Blair are undermining an idea [the United Nations]. Is this because the secretary general of the United Nations [Ghanaian Kofi Annan] is now a black man? They never did that when secretary generals were white.
Nelson Mandela
#74. Men say," Liz reaches for her scissors, "'I can't endure it when women cry'
just as people say, 'I can't endure this wet weather.' As if it were nothing to do with the men at all, the crying. Just one of those things that happen.
Hilary Mantel
#75. Men weren't really the enemy - they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.
Betty Friedan
#76. Some men prayed for life and some for death, in languages as varied as their uniforms - the Dutch and Germans and the Scots and French and English tangled side by side, for all men looked alike when they were dying.
Susanna Kearsley
#77. Men and women were doing at their unsurpassed when they were together. It was more or less like the sky and the ground; diverse in nature and was miles apart but they complete each other.
Diyar Harraz
#78. When novelist Margaret Atwood asked women what they feared most from men, they said: 'We're afraid they'll kill us.' When men were asked the same question about women, they said: 'we're afraid they'll laugh at us.
Naomi Wolf
#79. Tennis is a young man's game. Until you're 25, you can play singles. From 25 to 35, you should play doubles. I won't tell you exactly how old I am, but when I played, there were 28 men on the court - just on my side of the net.
George Burns
#80. There are certain moments when we might wish the future were built by men of the past.
Jean Rostand
#81. When at 15, my girlfriends started dropping out of their beloved sports teams, because they didn't want to appear muscle-y, when at 18, my male friends were unable to express their feelings, I decided that I was a feminist.
Emma Watson
#82. When I came up to bat with three men on and two outs in the ninth, I looked in the other team's dugout and they were already in street clothes.
Bob Uecker
#83. She had been with her share of schemers and men who were forever building castles in the sky. All of those dreams made out of clouds; when it rained - and it always did - they were left with nothing but the soggy shirts on their backs.
Ayana Mathis
#84. I don't remember a single day during the time I was minister of gender, foreign minister, vice-president and president when I saw anything on the part of the men that indicated they were undermining me.
Joyce Banda
#85. Bitch, on that world, was what men called women they were extremely fond of or extremely displeased with when the woman was not there.
Samuel R. Delany
#86. It is important to note that when Mary Magdalene and other women were chosen by Jesus to bring the important news to the men, the men did not believe the women. Today 2,000 years later men still don't believe women when they say "We are also chosen by Jesus to be leaders in the church.
Roy Bourgeois
#87. Female authors were still using male names when I was young, or they were neatly shoehorned into 'women's books' except for those few that men could always point at when the disparity was pointed out.
Sherwood Smith
#88. When I was growing up, it was Clint Eastwood, it was Harrison Ford and Steve McQueen - these guys were tough. They were leading men, but they were also tough and physical.
Joe Manganiello
#90. It was really difficult to believe you had a right to argue when you were confronted by wise-looking men telling you that you did not.
Sage Blackwood
#91. When I was a boy," Tyrion replied, "my wet nurse told me that one day, if men were good, the gods would give the world a summer without ending. Perhaps we've been better than we thought, and the Great Summer is finally at hand." He grinned. The
George R R Martin
#92. I will be treble-sinewed, hearted, breathed, And fight maliciously; for when mine hours Were nice and lucky, men did ransom lives Of me for jests; but now I'll set my teeth And send to darkness all that stop me.
William Shakespeare
#93. In a word, why were they not men at worst, when at best they ought to be more of men than other men?
And here lay the difficulty: by no effort could I get the face before me to fit into the clerical mould which I had all ready in my own mind for it.
George MacDonald
#94. If only men were like New York taxi-cabs and had a light that they can switch on when they're interested and off when they're not available. Then you'd know exactly where you were and you wouldn't have to worry about getting it wrong and being horribly embarrassed.
Lucy
Alexandra Potter
#95. Duty reaches down the ages in its effects, and into eternity; and when the man goes about it resolutely, it seems to me now as though his footsteps were echoing beyond the stars, though only heard faintly in the atmosphere of this world.
William Mountford
#96. Why should women settle to think and talk about just femaleness when men were constantly transcending gender?
Chris Kraus
#97. All men were made brothers. The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who was born free should be content when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases.
Chief Joseph
#98. Somebody told me when Abe Lincoln was a young man, studying by firelight, he said, "I will work hard. I will prepare myself. And my time will come." And you know, that's exactly what I said about myself and football - What do you think? Were Abe and I both just lucky ducks?
Deacon Jones
#99. The man who thrusts his manners upon me does as if he were to insist on introducing me to his cabinet of curiosities, when I wished to see himself.
Henry David Thoreau
#100. Even when I knew people were cheating me, what was important was how I behaved, because I have to answer to God. I can't be responsible for other people's actions: They will have to answer to God themselves
Muhammad Ali
