Simone de Beauvoir - Man Quotes

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Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility. But we have seen that it is one of the lies of the serious mind to attempt to give the word "useful" an absolute meaning; nothing is useful if it is not useful to man; nothing is useful to man if the latter is not in a position to define his own ends and values, if he is not free.

Simone de Beauvoir
Woman has always been man's dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.

Simone de Beauvoir
Try to stay a man amongst men … There's no other hope for you.

Simone de Beauvoir
A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.

Simone de Beauvoir
It is among the psychoanalysts in particular that man is defined as a human being and woman as a female—whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.

Simone de Beauvoir
Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority.

Simone de Beauvoir
There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.

Simone de Beauvoir
Every time a man dies, a child dies too, and an adolescent and a young man as well; everyone weeps for the one who was dear to him.

Simone de Beauvoir
This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons hitherto brought forward in explanation of this fact has seemed adequate.

Simone de Beauvoir
The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.

Simone de Beauvoir
Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity.

Simone de Beauvoir
It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.

Simone de Beauvoir
On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself—on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.

Simone de Beauvoir
Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one that you met when you were nineteen.

Simone de Beauvoir
One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, "I will always be here."

Simone de Beauvoir
A conquest of this kind is never finished; the contingency remains, and, so that he may assert his will, man is even obliged to stir up in the world the outrage he does not want. But this element of failure is a very condition of his life; one can never dream of eliminating it without immediately dreaming of death. This does not mean that one should consent to failure, but rather one must consent to struggle against it without respite.

Simone de Beauvoir
It is not mere chance that makes families speak of a child who is 'extraordinary for his age' and also of an old man who is 'extraordinary for his age'; the extraordinariness lies in their behaving like human beings when they are either not yet or no longer men.

Simone de Beauvoir
Man is a talking animal and he will always let himself be swayed by the power of the word.

Simone de Beauvoir
No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.

Simone de Beauvoir
The man of today did not establish this patriarchal regime, but he profits by it, even when he criticizes it. And he has made it very much a part of his own thinking.

Simone de Beauvoir
The moment a woman gets power, she loses the solidarity she had with other women. She will want to be equal in a man's world and will become ambitious for her own sake.

Simone de Beauvoir
The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty.... Only a moral revolution -- not a social or a political revolution -- only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth.

Simone de Beauvoir
In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.

Simone de Beauvoir
A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong.

Simone de Beauvoir
Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know it's exigencies.

Simone de Beauvoir