MAN

 

 

"Who, Gilgamesh, can scale heaven? Only the gods live forever under the Sun. As for Mankind, numbered are their days.".

The Epic of Gilgamesh

 

"Let full be thy belly, Gilgamesh; Make thou merry by day and night! 

Of each day, make a feast of rejoicing; Day and Night, dance thou and play. Let thy garments be sparkling fresh, Bathe in water, let thy head be washed. Pay heed to the little one who holds thy hand. Let thy spouse delight in your bosom. This is the fate of mankind."

Epic of Gilgamesh

 

"Man is declared to be that creature who is constantly in search of himself, a creature who at every moment of his existence must examine and scrutinize the conditions of his existence. he is a being in search of meaning."

-Plato

 

"Man goes constantly in fear of himself. His erotic urges terrify him."

-Georges Bataille

 

 

"Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed."

-Blaise Pascal

 

"Nothing in the world annoys a man moe than not being taken seriously.-Palacio Valdes

 

 

"It's easy to spot a well-informed man-his views coincide with yours."

 

"It is easier to know man in general than to understand one man in particular."

-Le Rochefoucauld

 

"Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for."

-Dag Hammarskjöld

 

 

"The substance of our lives is woman. All other things are irrelevancies, hypocrisies, subterfuges. We sit talking of sports and politics, and all the while our hearts are filled with memories of women and the capture of women."

-George Moore

 

"man is neither angel nor brute, and the unfortunate thing is that he who would act the angel acts the brute.

They want to get out of themselves and escape from the man. That is madness; instead of changing into angels, they change

into beasts; instead of  raising themselves, they lower themselves."

-Montaigne  Of Experience

 

 

"....and take high abstracted man alone, and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point take mankind in mass, and for the most part they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary."

-Herman Melville

 

 

"A man has generally the good or ill qualities which he attributes to mankind."

-William Shenstone

 

 

"Man....is born without his own consent; his organization does in no wise depend on himself; his ideas come to him involuntarily; his habits are in the power of those who cause him to contract them; he is unceasingly modified by causes, whether visible or concealed, over which he has no control; which necessarily regulate his mode of existence, give the hue to his way of thinking, and determine his manner of acing. he is good or bad, happy or miserable, wise or foolish, reasonable or irrational, without his will being for any thing in their various states. Nevertheless....it is pretended he is a free agent, or....determines his own will, and regulates his own condition."

-Paul Henry Thiry Baron D'Holbach   (guillotined 1789)

 

 

"Whoever would withdraw the seeds of these qualities (ambition, jealousy, envy, revenge, superstition, and despair) from the constitution of man, would destroy the fundamental condition of human life....Vices have their place in nature, and are employed to make up the warp of our union, as poisons are useful in the preservation of our health."

-Montaigne

 

"....man is a frivolous and incongruous creature, and perhaps, like a chess-player, loves the process of the game and not the end of it. And who knows (there is no saying with certainty), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other words, in life itself....."

-Dostoevsky Notes from Undergound

 

"Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and enviable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail."

-Henry David Thoreau   Walden, or, Life in the Woods, 1854

 

 

"All men naturally hate each other."

-Blaise Pascal

 

 

"The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith."

-T.S. Eliot  intro to Pascal's Pensees

 

 

"Men can not remain children forever; they must in the end go out into "hostile life.' We may call this 'education to reality.'"

-Sigmund Freud

 

 

"What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty..."

William Shakespeare

 

 

"Since man's ambition is unlimited, since his pursuit and achievement of values is a lifelong process-and the higher the values, the harder the struggle-man needs a moment, an hour or some period of time in which he can experience the sense of his completed task, the sense of living in a universe where his values have been successfully achieved. It is like a moment of rest, a moment to gain fuel to move further.'

-The Romantic manifesto

 

 

 

"A man is a god in ruins."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 1836

 

 

"We are forced, as a species, to walk through life laden down with genetic baggage of five million years of savannah psychology and the inherited traits that preceded the hominids."

-Robert Winston

 

 

"For good, or for ill....Homo sapiens is inescapably a tribal animal."

-David Berreby

Us and Them

 

 

"Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is."

-Albert Camus (1913-60)

 

 

"The natural man has a difficult time getting along in this world. Half the people think he is a scoundrel because he is not a hypocrite."

-Edgar Watson Howe

 

 

"They range from animals to gods. They pray for you and they prey on you. They are bears for punishment and brutes for revenge. They want to be Everyone. Everywhere, Everything. Their restlessness fills them with wonderings and spurs them into wanderings. They are creatures of moods and modes. They try to look different but deep down underneath they are all alike. They are hero-worshippers and idol-destroyers. They are quick to take sides and quick to swing from side to side. They like individuals who can appraise and praise them. People must be taken as they are and still they want to be taken as they aren't. They have their ways and want to get away with them. They cry for the moon and wail for a place in the sun. They are happiest in the hurly-burly giving and taking, making and losing, to the tune  of a hurdy-gurdy. They try everything once and seldom stop to think twice. but they are blessed with nine lives and often strike twelve at eleventh hours. With people all things are possible; without them, all things are impossible. They must forever be felt and dealt with. To lose contact with them is to lose contact with life."

-P.K. Thomajan

 

"If human beings with the potential for excellence generally have done best in cultures where people believe the universe to have transcendental meaning, one must ask why. The easy answer is that the giants of the past were deluded. They imagined that what they were dong had some transcendental significance, and, lo and behold, their foolishness inspired them to compose better music or paint better pictures. But this line of thought can become embarrassing when one confronts just what those self-deluded people accomplished. is it not implausible that those individuals who accomplished things so beyond the rest of us just happened to be uniformly stupid about the great questions? Another possibility is that they understood things we don't."

-Charles Murray

Human Accomplishment

 

 

"What a chimera, then, is man! What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, helpless earthworm, depository of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error. Glory and scum of the universe."

-Blaise Pascal

 

 

"Man is among many other things, the mistaken animal, the foolish animal. Other species doubtless have much more limited ideas about the world, but what ideas they do have are much less likely to be wrong and are never foolish. White cats do not denigrate black, and dogs do not ask Baal, Jehovah, or other Semitic gods to perform miracles for them."

-George Gaylord Simpson

 

 

"Thus a man can be at once the craftiest of politicians and the dupe of his own verbiage, can have a passion, for brandy and money, and an equal passion for the poetry of George Meredith and under-age girls and his mother, for horse-racing and detective stories and the good of his country-the whole accompanied by a sneaking fear of hell-fire, a hatred of Spinoza and an unblemished record for Sunday church-going."

-Aldous Huxley

 

 

"O, the dissociations of which the human mind is capable, marveled Saladin gloomily. O, the conflicting selves jostling and joggling within these bags of skin. No wonder we are unable to remain focused on anything for long; no wonder we invent remote-control channel-hopping devices. If we turned these instruments on ourselves we'd discover more channels than a cable or satellite mogul ever dreamed of.

-Salman Rushdie

Satanic Verses

 

 

   "This original sin, for Friedrich Nietzsche, was resentment, bad conscience, which developed due to our amputation from our original coordination as warriors, hunters, and "beasts of prey," in civilization. Civilization domesticated humanity, made us docile, "a household pet," although our inner nature continues to rebel against this deformation. "Man, full of emptiness and torn apart with homesickness for the desert has had to create from within himself an adventure, a torture-chamber, an unsafe and hazardous wilderness-this fool, this prisoner consumed with longing and despair, became the inventor of "bad conscience." Modern nihilism revealed "man's sickness of man, of himself," but this "forcible breach from his animal past" suggested, and pressed toward, new conditions of existence, "as though  man were not an end but just a path, an episode, a bridge, a great promise...."

-Daniel Pinchbeck

2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl

 

 

"It is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived."

-Oliver Wendell Holmes

 

 

"Even feminists feel sorry for the state of men today. It must be bad."

The Economist, Dec 22,2001

 

"We are sick of hooking up with guys...I don't care about your Band: What I learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Felons, Faux-sensitive Hipsters and Other Guys I've Dated...Guys talk about 'Star Wars' like it's not a movie made for people half their age; a guy's idea of a perfect night is a hang around the PlayStation with his bandmates, or a trip to Vegas with his college friends...They are more like the kids we babysat than the dads who drove us home."

Julie Klausner   I Don't Care About Your Band

 

Article: "Where Have The Good men Gone? Wall street Journal Feb 19-20  2011

 

"The tragedy of man is perhaps the only significant thing about him."

-Eugene O'Neill  NY Times nov 12,1961

 

 

Why We Oppose Votes for Men

1. BECAUSE man's place is in the armory.

2. Because no really manly man wants to settle any question otherwise than by fighting about it.

3. Because if men should adopt peaceable methods, women would no longer look up to them.

4. Because men will lose their charm if they step out of their natural sphere and interest themselves in other matters than feats of arms, uniforms and drums.

5. Because men are too emotional to vote. Their conduct at baseball games and political conventions shows this, while their innate tendency to appeal to force renders them peculiarly unfit for the task of government"

-Alice Duer Miller 1874-1942

 

 

"The emasculation of society by the smothering effects of modern uniformity has precipitated a severely over-managed, sadly under-led, and passionately un-principled culture from top to bottom. The great cry for the renewal of our civilization is for men to arise and be men."

-Tristan Gylberd 

 

"Manliness consists not in bluff, bravado or lordliness. It consists in daring to do the right and facing consequences whether it is in maters social, political or other. It consists in deeds, not in words."

-Mahatma Gandhi

 

"Don't worry about genius and don't worry about not being clever. Trust rather to hard work, perseverance, and determination. The best motto for a long march is "Don't grumble. Plug on.'

   You hold your future in your hands. Never waver in this belief. Don't swagger. The boy who swaggers-like the man who swaggers-has little else that he can do. he is a cheap-jack crying his own paltry wares. It is the empty tin that rattles most. Be honest. Be loyal. Be kind. Remember that the hardest thing to acquire is the faculty of being unselfish. As a quality it is one of the finest attributes of manliness.

  "Love the sea, the ringing beach and the open downs.

     "keep clean, body and mind."

-Sir Frederick Treves, Bart, KCVO, DB, Sergeant in Ordinary to HM the King.

Surgeon in Ordinary to HRH Prince of Wales, written at 6 Wimpole Street, Cavendish Square, London, on September 2, 1903, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Boy's Own Paper

 

 

"Nothing can lift the heart of man like manhood in a fellow man."

-Herman Melville

 

 

"His school, the Duke used to say, had only one rule, and that was "Be a gentleman." How he defined what a gentleman was he did not say, but what a gentleman was usually became clear when you discovered what a gentleman wasn't. A gentleman wasn't intolerant of others' shortcomings. A gentleman wasn't a whiner, wasn't a gossip, wasn't a boor, wasn't inconsiderate of others' feelings. Once, in a discussion of what the most serious of human crimes might be, he said that he felt the worst was deliberate cruelty. But a close second, he added, was boredom."

Former Headmaster of the Hotchkiss School  -George Van Santvoord

 

 

"We are living at an important and fruitful moment now, for it is clear to men that the images of adult manhood given by the popular culture are worn out; a man can no longer depend on them. By the time a man is thirty-five he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he received in high school do not work in life."

-Robert Bly

 

 

"The masculine principal in Western Civilization is in that state of exacerbation characteristic of all that is about to die. "

Amaury de Riencourt

 

"At the beginning of the 21st century it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that men are in serious trouble. Throughout the world, developed and developing, antisocial behavior is essentially male. Violence, sexual abuse of children, illicit drug use, alcohol misuse, gambling, all are overwhelmingly male activities. The courts and prisons bulge with men. When it comes to aggression, delinquent behavior, risk taking and social mayhem, men win gold."

Anthony Clare

On Men

 

"I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed."

Doris Lessing

 

"The tragedy of man is that he has developed an intelligence eager to uncover mysteries, but not strong enough to penetrate them."

-Hans Zinsser

Rats, Lice and History

 

   "Man is indeed he unknown. he is he enigma of all creation. If, as we believe, God is the great father of life, there is no creature nearer to Him than man. Man is the only creature with God-like attributes. he is the compeer of all creation and the moral, biological and intellectual gulf that sets him apart from animals is so great as to abrogate any possible relationship with them. In times of spiritual doubt i gaze upon my fellow creature Man and wonder how so divine a creature could be-could come into being-apart from a God theory of life. How great man is! Only Man lives as though he was a god! Man is the greatest evidence for God, for in the field of human society God has His most elaborate existence."

-William Roberts

 

 

"Every human life involves an unfathomable mystery, for man is the riddle of the universe, and the riddle of man in his endowment with personal capacities. The stars are not so strange as the mind that studies them, analyzes their light, and measures their distance."

-Henry Emerson Fosdick, D.D.

 

 

"What is this beast we call man?

Keeper of the torch of civilization?

Steward of a commonweal of land?

Proclaimer of hope's exaltation?

Protector of hearth and home?

Standard bearer of truth and life?

Revealer of that may be known?

Mediator and progenitor of all strife?

Indeed, such is man, the manly man;

All these and yet still more; 

The pedestal upon which we stand;

Lest the West pass into misty lore."

-John Buchan (1875-1940)

 

 

"Every man has hated mankind when he was less than a man."

-G.K. Chesterton

 

 

"Everybody has his own theatre, in which he is manager, actor, prompter, playwright, sceneshifter, box keeper, doorkeeper, all in one, and audience into the bargain."

-Julius and Augustus Hare

 

"Only animals who are below civilization and the angels who are beyond it can be sincere. Human beings are, necessarily, actors who cannot become something before they have first pretended to be it; and they can be divided, not into the hypocritical and the sincere, but into the sane who know they are acting and the mad do not."

-W.H. Auden

 

"The question for each man to settle is not what he would do if he had means, time, influence and educational advantages, but what he will do with the things he has."

-Hamilton Wright Mabie

 

 

"Providing for oneïs family as a good husband and father is a watertight excuse for making money hand over fist. Greed may be a sin, exploitation of other people might, on the face of it, look rather nasty, but who can blame a man for "doing the best for his children?"

Eva Figes

View of my Own (Nova 1973)

 

"Men are the enemies of women. Promising sublime intimacy, unequalled passion, amazing security and grace, they nevertheless exploit and injure in a myriad subtle ways. Without men the world would be a better place: softer, kinder, more loving; calmer, quieter, more humane."

Ann Oakley

"Taking it Like a Woman"

 

"Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content. There is nothing in that anguished notion for women to envy."

Camille Paglia

 

"I think were a kind of desperation. We are sort of a maddening luxury. The basic and essential human is the woman, and all that weïre doing is trying to brighten up the place. Thatïs why all the birds who belong to our sex have prettier feathers-because males have got to try and justify their existence."

Orson Welles

 

"Man is just a freak woman, woman a freak man."

-Diderot 

 

"If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills.Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism..Before that projection of the self nothing exists..Man is responsible for what he is. Thus, the first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders."

Sartre

Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre

 

"If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them 'Hold on!'...

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds worth of distance run,

Yours is the earth and everything that is in it

And which is more-you'll be a Man, my son!"

-Rudyard Kipling  If

 

 

"Therefore the man, whoever he is, whose soul is Tranquilized by restraint and consistency and who is at peace with himself so that he neither pines away in distress nor is broken down by fear....he is the wise man of whom we are in quest, he is the happy man..."

-Thomas Jefferson

 

"Apart from being more violent, more prone to disease, more likely to succumb to drugs, bad diet or suicide.men, it seems , are also slightly more stupid than women."

The Economist (Sept 28,1996)

 

"What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?"

Isak Dinesen

 

"If I had to name one quality as the genius of patriarchy, it would be compartmentalization, the capacity for institutionalizing disconnection. Intellect severed from emotion. Thought separated from action. Science split from art. The earth itself divided; national borders. Human beings categorized: by sex, age, race, electricity, sexual preference, height, weight, class, religion, physical ability, ad nauseum. The personal isolated from the political. Sex divorced from love. The material ruptured from the spiritual. The past parted from the present disjointed from the future. Law detached from justice. Vision disassociated from reality."

 Robin Morgan

The Demon Lover

 

"There's nineteen men living in my neighborhood,

Eighteen of them are fools and the one ain't

No doggone good."

Bessie Smith

 

"All would be tyrants if they could.That your Sex are naturally Tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute."

Abigail Adams (in a letter to her husband John Adams)

 

 

"Its a man world, and you men can have it"

 

"Men err when they think they can be inhuman exploiters in their business life, and loving husbands and fathers at home."

Dr. Smiley Blanton

 

 

"Men imagine that a woman has no individual existence, and that she ought always to be absorbed in them."

George Sand

 

 

"Man will become better only when you will make him see what he is like."

Anton Chekov

 

"Man uses his intelligence less in the care of his own species than he does in his care of anything else he owns or governs."

Dr. Abraham Meyerson

 

 

"Man is a make-believe animal-he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part."

Hazlitt

 

 

"Now the fundamental madness or abnormality of men lies in the divergence between essence and personality. The more nearly a man knows himself for what he is, the nearer he approaches wisdom. The more his imagination about himself diverges from what he actually is, the madder he becomes."

Rodney Collin

 

"I grew up to have my fatherïs looks, my fathers speech pattern, my fatherïs posture, my father opinions, and my mothers contempt for my father."

Jules Feifer

 

"The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots."

Rebecca West

 

The three stages of American Family Mens life are..

1. He believes in Santa Claus

2. He doesnït believe in Santa Claus

3. He is Santa Claus!

 

 

"Man is made of mystery and exists for mysteries and visions."

Arthur Machen

 

"Poor little men, poor little cocks! As soon as theyre old enough, they swell their plumage to be conquerors.if they only knew that its enough to be just a little bit wounded and sad in order to obtain everything without fighting for it."

Jean Anoulih (1910-87)

 

"Men are not to be told anything they might find too painful; the secret depths of human nature, the sordid physicality, might overwhelm or damage them. For instance, men often faint at the sight of their own blood, to which they are not accustomed . For this reason you should never stand behind one in the line at the Red Cross donor clinic."

Margaret Atwood

 

"You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise theyre simply unbearable."

Marguerite Duras

 

"The world men inhabit�..is rather bleak. It is a world full of doubt and confusion, where vulnerability must be hidden, not shared; where competition, not cooperation, is the order of the day; where men sacrifice the possibility of knowing their own children and sharing in their upbringing, for the sake of a job they may have chosen by chance, which may not suit them and which many cases dominates their lives to the exclusion of much else."

Anna Ford

 

"All societies on the verge of death are masculine. A society can survive with only one man; no society will survive a shortage of women."

Germaine Greer

Sex and Destiny

 

 

"Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male."

Max Lerner

 

 

"Somewhere in the far past of man something strange happened in his evolutionary development. His skull has enhanced its youthful globularity; he has lost most of his body hair and what remains grows strangely. He demands, because of his immature emergence into the world, a lengthened and protected childhood. Without prolonged familial attendance he would not survive, yet in him reposes the capacity for great art, inventiveness, and his first mental tool, speech, which creates his humanity. He is without doubt the oddest and most unusual evolutionary product that his planet has yet seen."

-Loren Eiseley,

Star Thrower

 

"The male has been persuaded to assume a certain onerous and disagreeable role with the promise of rewards-material and psychological. Women may in the first place even have put it into his head. BE A MAN! May have been, metaphorically, what Eve uttered at the critical moment in the garden of Eden."

Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957)

The Art of being Ruled "Call yourself a Man!"

 

 

"Considering the absence of legal coercion, the surprising thing is that men have for so long, and on the whole, so reliably, adhered to what we might call the �breadwinner ethic.�"

Barbara Ehrenreich

The Hearts of Men

 

 

"My faith in human dignity consists in the belief that man is the greatest scamp on earth. Human dignity must be associated with the idea of a scamp and not with that of an obedient, disciplined and regimented soldier. The scamp is probably the most glorious type of human being."

Lin Yutang

 

"Years ago, manhood was an opportunity for achievement, and now it is a problem to be overcome."

Garrison Keillor

The Book of Guys

 

 

A Man shall and must be valiant: he must be valiant; he must march forward, and quit himself like a man,-trusting imperturbably in the appointment and choice of the upper Powers; and, on the whole, not fear at all. Now and always, the completeness of his victory over Fear will determine how much of a man he is."

Thomas Carlyle (1840)

 

"Some variation of Bionic Man is the ultimate twentieth-century vision, owing his life not to nature but to manmade parts, which are far superior to the original body he got from his mother; and he can be reborn with a screwdriver. This humanoid superhero is as much a product of pure male ideal homosexuality as is his prototype, Christ."

Monica Sjoo & Barbara Mor

The Great Cosmic Mother

 

"Ours is a lost cause and there is no place for us in the natural universe, but we are not, for all that, sorry to be human. We should rather die than live as animals."

Joseph Wood Krutch

 

"Man is a piece of the universe made alive."

-Emerson

 

The Four Ages of Man by W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)

He with body waged a fight,

But body won; it walks upright.

Then he struggled with the heart;

Innocence and peace depart.

Then he struggled with the mind;

His proud heart he left behind.

Now his wars on God begin;

At stroke of midnight God shall win."

 

 

"man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck by the difference between what things are and what they might have been. "

William Hazlitt

 

"The Western Patriarchies cannot change in any radical (i.e. root) way, because they are ontologically based on a cutting off of human roots. The patriarchal West cannot solve its energy problem because our minds and spirits were long cut off from the real source of energy, or creative power. This is the sexual-spiritual source of cosmic ecstasy, which patriarchy has denied in favor of manipulative moralistic and rationalistic energies; and as moral and rational energies themselves dwindle, within a lingering patriarchal framework, only the most decadent, bizarre, and vicious energies seem to erupt in their place. These criminal energies do not result from the absence of patriarchy, as the fundamentalists preach; rather, they are the corrupt residues and grotesque spasms of the dying patriarch himself."

Monica Sjoo & Barbara Mor

The Great Cosmic Mother *

 

 

"Neither his fellows, nor his gods, nor his passions will leave a man alone."

Joseph Conrad

 

 

"Man is the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed; the only animals that is never satisfied."

Henry George (1839-1897)

 

 

"Male power today keeps suggesting that we need more organization, more force, more money , rather than more civilization. "

"Faced with a growing crime rate, runaway drug addiction, rebellion of the young and of women, an arms race, inflation, " recession, racial strife, social unrest, ecological problems, and so much more , man tightens his grip on that sledgehammer and ensconces himself deeper in the 'philosophy that has brought him to the current profusion of impasses."

Konrad Kellen

The Coming Age of Woman Power

 

 

   "And so modern debates about male angst are invariably diverted by that old issue of control in the wilderness. What gets discussed is how men are exercising or abusing their control and power, not whether a lack of mooring, a lack of context, is causing their anguish. ARE MEN REALLY THAT BAD? was how Time magazine sniffily defined the central question in a 1994 cover story, memorably illustrated by a man sporting a business suit, a wedding ring, and a pig's snout for a face. While the image indicted a swinish wallowing in dominance, it left unexamined the American man's more common experience of fear at losing the job that requires the business suit, the family for whom he wears the ring, any context in which to embed his life. If men are the masters of their fate, what do they do about the unspoken sense that they are being mastered, in the marketplace and at home, by forces that seem to be sweeping away the soil beneath their feet? If men are mythologized as the ones who make things happen, then how can they begin to analyze what is happening to them?"

Susan Faludi

Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man

 

 

"He is ready, not to blow himself off the earth, but to demolish what little truth or kindness or understanding there is, with his politics, his 'policies', his lies, his wars, his greed, his fears, his science--particularly his 'social science ' . "

Konrad Kallen

 

 

"That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving: that his origin, his growth, his hopes, and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought or feeling, can preserve a life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system; and the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins-all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation be safely built."

-Bertrand Russell

 

 

"In 1968 Eugene McCarthy pointed out - 'We must make war on everything--not just the Vietnamese but on poverty, disease, drugs . ' This is the super male way."

 

 

"Across that midnight landscape he rides with his toppling burden of despair and hope, bearing with him the beast's face and the dream, but unable to cast off either or to believe in either. For he is man, the changeling, in whom the sense of goodness has not perished, nor an eye for some supernatural guidepost in the night. "

Loren Eisley

The Man Who Saw Through Time

 

 

"Production, some would say, is the male principle in isolation, the male principle wants to exert itself absolutely; it wants to "do everything at once" which is, of course, what doomsday will do."

Wendell Berry

 

 

"Now, let me ask you something: what can one expect from man, considering he's such a strange creature? You can shower upon him all earthly blessings, drown him in happiness so that there'll be nothing to be seen but the bubbles rising to the surface of his bliss, give him such economic security that he won't have anything to do but sleep, nibble at cakes, and worry about keeping world history flowing-and even then, out of sheer spite and in- gratitude, man will play a dirty trick on you. He'll even risk his cake for the sake of the most glaring stupidity, for the most economically unsound nonsense, just to inject into all the soundness, and sense surrounding him some of his own disastrous, fancies and vulgar trivialities, if only to assure himself that men are still men and not piano keys simply responding to the laws of nature."

Dostoevsky

 

"Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;

The proper study of mankind is man.

Placed on this isthmus of a middle state.

A being darkly wise and rudely great:

With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,

With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride.

He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest;

In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast;

In doubt his mind or body to prefer;

Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;

Alike in ignorance, his reason such,

Whether he thinks too little or too much;

Chaos of thought and passion, all confused; Still by himself abused or disabused;

Created half to rise, and half to fall;

Great lord of all things, yea a prey to all;

Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled;

The glory, jest, and riddle of the world."

Alexander Pope (Essay on Man)

 

 

"The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth....He has much more of the external appearance of one brining alien habits from another land that of a mere growth of this one. He has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes; he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter.....Alone among the animals he feels....the mystery of shame. Whether we praise these things as natural to man or abuse them as artificial in nature, they remain in the same sense unique. This is realized by the whole popular instinct called religion."

-G.K. Chesterton

 

 

"Man goes constantly in fear of himself. His erotic urges terrify him."

-Georges Bataille

 

 

"Men are always ready to respect anything that bores them."

Marilyn Monroe

 

 

"As for the war,

That is for men....

-Hector to Andromache, the Iliad

 

 

"the way of a superior man is threefold: virtuous, he is free from anxieties; wise, he is free from perplexities; bold, he is free from fear."

-Confucius

 

 

"Men are more easily taken in, more easily comic. Male society is a comic society. Women, as oppressed people, are almost more free in a certain sense than men. Women have fewer principles dictating their behavior, they are more disrespectful."

-Jean-Paul Sartre

 

 

 

"Man is a texture made up of many threads, an onion made up of a hundred integuments. The ancients knew this well enough, and in the Buddhist Yoga an exact technique was devised for unmasking the illusion of personality."

-Herman Hesse Steppenwolf

See file Mens Lib

 

 

"Man is no accident of birth nor plaything of fate. Through the power within he will overcome indolence, outgrow ignorance, and enter the realm of wisdom. There he will feel a love for all that lives. he will be an everlasting power for good."

-Harold Percival

 

"The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others, rather than his own; and who appears well in any company, a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe."

John Walter Wayland 1899

 

"I see men standing on the edge of knowledge, and holding the light a little farther ahead;  men carving marble into forms ennobling men: men molding people into better instruments of greatness;  men making a  language of music and music out of language; men dreaming of finer lives-and living them.
 

-Will Durant

The Greatest Minds and ideas of All Time

 

 

 

"Man, what a bunch of selfish bastards we are. Gold hoarding abounds. Tea parties rage. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand's gospel of self-interest, is outselling The Audacity of Hope on Amazon.com. And trust in the institutions we've traditionally relied upon to encourage/enforce philanthropy and its evil twin, redistribution, nonprofits, and the church-appears to be at a historic low. What's more, a recent Pew Research Center poll found that Millennials (the 18 to 29 set, whose lives have been entirely molded by information technology) are perhaps the least religious generation on record, with 26 percent reporting no church affiliation whatsoever..."

-Scott Brown  "Instant Karma" Wired Mag May 2010

***************************************************************************************

Book: "What is a Man? 3,000 Years of Wisdom on the Art of Manly Virtue"....Edited by Waller R. Newell

Book: "Y: The Descent of Men" by Steve Jones

Book: :"Adam's Curse: A Future Without Men" by Bryan Sykes

Book: "Humankind: A Brief History" by Felipe Fernandez-Arnesto

Book: "He's All Man": Learning Masculinity, Gayness and Love from American Movies" by John M. Clum

Book: "The Masculine Masquerade: Masculinity and Representation" Ed. by A Perchuk & H. Posner

Book: "From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity" by -Leo Braudy

Book: Book: "A Mind Of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis" by David M. Friedman

Book: "Y: The Descent of Men" by Steve Jones

Book: "Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men" by Michael Kimmel

Katherine Anne Porter

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