Gender Identity

The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me.

A man falls in love through his eyes, a woman through her imagination, and then they both speak of it as an affair of “the heart.”

A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.

When men and women pick one another up for just a bit of fun, they find they’ve picked up more than they bargained for, because men and women have a top story as well as a ground floor, and you can’t have the one without the other.

Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There is just too much fraternizing with the enemy.

The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.

The Chinese tame fowls by clipping their wings, and women by deforming their feet. A petticoat round the ankles serves equally well.

Home is the girl's prison and the woman's workhouse.

The modern sentimental term for the national minimum of celibacy is Purity.

I have always thought that every woman should marry, and no man.

THERE ARE MEN WHO FEAR REPARTEE IN A WIFE MORE KEENLY THAN A SWORD.

No woman marries for money: they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.

Homosexuality should not be punishable except to protect children.

The word “Jewish” has two meanings: It has to do with (1) nationality and descent; (2) religion. I am a Jew in the first sense but not in the second.

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size.

Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

It’s not the men in my life that counts—it’s the life in my men.

The composition of a tragedy requires testicles.

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.

Varium et mutabile semper Femina.

In politics if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.

No woman in my time will be Prime Minister or Chancellor or Foreign Secretary—not the top jobs. Anyway I wouldn’t want to be Prime Minister. You have to give yourself 100%.