Women exist in the main solely for the propagation of the species.
[Women are] the second sex, inferior in every respect to the first.
Women are . . . big children all their life--a kind of intermediary stage between the child and the full-grown man.
Women have great talent, but no genius, for they always remain subjective.
It is fitting [for a woman] to amuse man in his hours of recreation, and, in case of need, to console him when he is borne down by the weight of his cares.
Perjury in a court of justice is more often committed by women than by men. It may indeed be questioned whether women ought to be sworn at all.
The fundamental fault of the female character is that it has no sense of justice.
Instead of calling them beautiful, there would be more warrant for describing women as the unaesthetic sex. Neither for music, nor for poetry, nor for fine art, have they really and truly any sense or susceptibility; it is a mockery if they make a pretense of it in order to assist their endeavor to please.
In their hearts women think that it is men’s business to earn money and theirs to spend it--if possible during their husband’s life, but, at any rate, after his death.
Nature has equipped woman . . . with the weapons and requisite for the safeguarding of her existence, and as long as it is necessary for her to have them.
Just as the female ant, after fecundation, loses her wings which are then superfluous, nay, actually a danger to the business of breeding, so after giving birth to one or two a woman generally loses her beauty, probably, indeed, for similar reasons.
Women . . . are dependent, not upon strength, but upon craft; hence their instinctive capacity for cunning, and their ineradicable tendency to say what is not true. . . . Nature has equipped woman, for her defense and protection, with the arts of dissimulation; and all the power which nature has conferred upon man in the shape of physical strength and reason has been bestowed upon woman in this form. Hence dissimulation is innate in woman, and almost as much a quality of the stupid as of the clever.
A woman who is perfectly truthful and not given to dissimulation is perhaps an impossibility.
The lady . . . is a being who should not exist at all; she should be either a housewife or a girl who hopes to become one; and should be brought up, not to be arrogant, but to be thrifty and submissive.
Taken as a whole, women are . . . thorough-going philistines, and quite incurable.