There can be no spirituality, no sanctity, no truth without the female sex.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider, Northern Exposure, Revelations, 1993

I'm just a person trapped inside a woman's body.

Elayne Boosler

How close the sexes sometimes come to one another. It is as much a matter of behavior and the sphere in which they move that separates the masculine part of humanity from the feminine.

Elizabeth Aston, The Exploits & Adventures of Miss Alethea Darcy, 2005

Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another.

George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950), "Pygmalion" (1913)

Misogynist¹: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.

H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

I hate women because they always know where things are.

James Thurber (1894 - 1961)

I hate to hear you talking so like a fine gentleman, and as if women were all fine ladies, instead of rational creatures.

Jane Austen (1775 - 1817), Persuasion², 1818

We certainly do not forget you as soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey³ upon us. You are forced on exertion⁴. You have always a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions. All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one; you need not covet⁵ it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.

Jane Austen (1775 - 1817), Persuasion, 1818

The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness, can be trained to do most things.

Jilly Cooper

Funny business, a woman's career: the things you drop on the way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you'll need them again when you get back to being a woman. It's one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: being a woman. Sooner or later, we've got to work at it, no matter how many other careers we've had or wanted.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909 - 1993), in All About Eve

For all their strength, men were sometimes like little children.

Lawana Blackwell, The Dowry of Miss Lydia Clark, 1999

Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical⁶ dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely⁷ feminine woman.

Margaret Fuller (1810 - 1850), Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 1845

When I think of talking, it is of course with a woman. For talking at its best being an inspiration, it wants a corresponding divine quality of receptiveness, and where will you find this but in a woman?

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809 - 1894)

If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.

Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

When the candles are out all women are fair.

Plutarch (46 AD - 120 AD), Morals

Don't accept rides from strange men, and remember that all men are strange.

Robin⁸ Morgan

Men live in a fantasy world. I know this because I am one, and I actually receive my mail there.

Scott Adams (1957 - )

What is most beautiful in virile⁹ men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

Susan Sontag (1933 - 2004), Against Interpretation¹⁰, 1966

Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.

Timothy Leary (1920 - 1996)

For most of history, Anonymous¹¹ was a woman.

Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941)

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred¹² turned,

Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.

William Congreve (1670 - 1729), The Mourning Bride, 1697, act III scene 8

A woman impudent¹³ and mannish grown is not more loathed¹⁴ than an effeminate man in time of action.

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), Troilus and Cressida, Act III, sc. 3

A woman mov'd is like a fountain troubled, muddy,

ill-seeming, thick, bereft¹⁵ of beauty.

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), Taming of the Shrew, Act V, sc. 2

Age cannot wither¹⁶ her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), Antony and Cleopatra, Act II, sc. 2

Art thou a man? thy form cries out thou art:

Thy tears are womanish; thy wild acts denote

The unreasonable¹⁷ fury of a beast:

Unseemly woman in a seeming man!

Or ill-beseeming beast in seeming both!

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), Romeo and Juliet, Act III, sc. 3

Frailty¹⁸, thy name is woman!

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), "Hamlet", Act 1 scene 2

Give me that man that is not passion's slave, and I will wear him in my hearts core.

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), Hamlet, Act III, sc. 2

Have you not heard it said full oft, a woman's nay¹⁹ doth stand for naught²⁰.

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), The Passionate²¹ Pilgrim

He is the half part of a blessed man,

Left to be finished by such as she;

And she a fair divided excellence²²,

Whose fullness of perfection lies in him.

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), King John, Act II, sc. 4