God cursed the snake, but it finds sustenance everywhere.  God cursed the woman, but all men pursue her.
~ Talmud, Yoma, 75

Adams owed more to the American woman than to all the American men he ever heard of, and felt not the smallest call to defend his sex who seemed able to take care of themselves; but from the point of view of sex he flt much curiosity to know how far the woman was right, and, in pursuing this inquiry, he caught the trick of affirming that the woman was the superior.  Apart from truth, he owed her at least that compliment.
~ Henry Adams in The Education of Henry Adams, chapter 30

Woman is the chain by which man is attached to the chariot of folly.
~ Bharitihari, in The Sringa Satak

Nothing enchants the soul so much as young women. They alone are the cause of evil and there is no other.
~ Bharitihari, in The Sringa Satak

Suffer women once to arrive at an equality with you, and they will from that moment become your superiors.
~ Marcus Porcius Cato

Woman–a foe of friendship, and inescapable punishment, a necessary evil.
~ Saint John Chrysostom

The man’s desire is for the woman; but the woman’s desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.
~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Women and people of low birth are very hard to deal with. If you are friendly they get out of hand, and if you keep your distance, the resent it.
~ Confucius, in Analects

Man is more courageous, pugnacious, and energetic than woman, and has a more inventive genius.
~ Charles Darwin, in The Descent of Man
, ch. 8

And without partiality, a woman of sense and manners is the finest and most delicate part of God’s creation, the glory of her Maker, and the great instance of his singular regard to man, his darling creature, to whom he gave the best gift either God could bestow or man receive.
~ Daniel Defoe

Without women, the beginning of our life would be helpless; the middle devoid of pleasure; and the end, of consolation.
~ Victor Joseph Etienne DeJouy

Women are like elephants to me–I like to look at ‘em, but I wouldn’t want to own one.
~ W. C. Fields

He who trusts women ploughs the wind, sows the barren sea, finds no the bottom of the barren ocean, writes his recollections in the snow, draws water like the Danaides, with pitchers full of holes.
~ Paul Flemin

A man of straw is worth more than a woman of gold.
~ John Florio, in Second Frutes

Man may escape from rope and gun;
Nay, some have outliv’d the doctor’s pill;
Who takes a woman must be undone,
That basilisk is sure to kill.
~ John Gay, in The Beggar’s Opera, Act 2, Scene 8

To call women the weaker sex is a libel: it is man’s injustice to woman. If by stregnth is meant brute strength, then indeed, is woman less brute than man. If by strength is meant moral power, then woman is immeasurably man’s superior. Has she not greater intuition, is she not more self-sacrifincing, has she not greater powers of endurance, has she not greater courage? Without her, man would not be.
~ Mohandes Karamchand Gandhi

God made himself man: granted. The Devil made himself woman.
~ Victor Hugo, in Ruy Blas

The cleverness of men ends where the cleverness of women begins.
~ Henry James, in In the Cage

Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.
~ Samuel Johnson

It is my joy that the female sex, far from being more imperfect than man, is on the contrary the most perfect.
~ Soren Kierkegaard, in Stages on Life’s Way

O why did god
Creator wise, that peopl’d highest Heav’n
With Spirits Masculine, create at last
This noveltie on Earth, this fair defect
Of Nature, and not fill the World at once
With Men as Angels without Feminine,
Or find some other way to generate
Mankind?
~ John Milton, in Paradise Lost

Woman is unspeakably more wicked than man, also cleverer.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, in Ecce Homo, Pt. III, 5

When a woman turns to scholarship there is usually something wrong with her sexually.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil

A woman is only a lesser man.
~ Plato, in The Republic, bk. 5, 455e

Tacitast melior mulier semper quam loquens. [A woman is always worth more seen than heard.]
~ Plautus, in Rudens

The whole education of women should be relative to men. To please them, to be useful to them, to win their love and esteem, to brink them up when young, to tend them when grown, to advise and console them, and to make life sweet and pleasant to them; these are the duties of woman at all times, and what they ought to learn from infancy.
~ Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile

Hence, it will be found that the fundamental fault of the female character is that it has no sense of justice. This is mainly due to the fact, already mentioned, that women are defective in the power of reasoning and deliberation; but it is also traceable to the position which Nature has assigned to them as the weaker sex. They are dependent not upon strength, but upon craft, and hence their incredible capacity for cunning, and their incredible tendency to say what is not true.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer

It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual impulses that could give the name of the fair sex to that undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race, for the whole beauty of sex is bound up with this impulse. Instead of calling them beautiful, there would be more warrant for describing woman as the unaesthetic sex. Neither for music, nor for poetry, nor for fine art have they really and truly any sense of susceptibility; it is mere mockery if they make a pretense of it in order to assist their endeavor to please.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Women are much more like each other than men; they have, in truth, but two passions, vanity and love; these are their universal characteristics.
~ Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

Women, especially, are to be talked to, as below men, and above children.
~ Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.
~ James Stephens, in The Crock of Gold

Women have tongues of craft, and hearts of guile,
They will; they will not; fools that on them trust;
For in their speech is death, hell in their smile.
~ Torquato Tasso, in Jerusalem Delivered, xix, 84

Men at most differ as heaven and earth,
But women, worst and best, as heaven and hell.
~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in “Merlin and Vivien” line 812

If I were asked . . . to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people [Americans] ought to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.
~ Alexis De Tocqueville, in Democracy in America
, pt. II, bk. III, ch. 12

And do you not think that each of you women is an Eve? The judgement of God upon your sex endures even today; and with it inevitably endures your position of criminal at the bar of justice.
~ Tertullian, in The Apparel Of Women
, bk. 1, ch. 1

God created woman only to tame mankind.
~ Voltaire

Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily this is not difficult.
~ Charlotte Whitton

And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man.
~ Bible, Genesis 2

It would seem that fatherhood and personhood are inextricably intertwined. I would love to see this short 30 second clip used in a YouTube debate.

Click on image

Eighty per cent of mankind is stuff to fill graves with.
~ Ford Madox Ford, in Esquire magazine, August 1966

Among the people there are killers who have not yet shed blood, and thieves who have stolen nothing, and liars who have so far told the truth.
~ Kahlil Gibran

Man’s nature is made up of four elements, which produce in him four attributes, namely, the beastly, the brutal, the satanic, and the divine. In man there is something of the pig, the dog, the devil, and the saint.
~ Muhammad Ibn Muhammad Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali, in The Main Problems of Abu Nasr Al-Paraba

I am quite sure that (bar one) I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices or caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed I know it. I can stand any society. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being–that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.
~ Mark Twain, in Harper Magazine, Sept. 1899

Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very, very best he is a sort of low-grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time his is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the “noblest work of God.”
~ Mark Twain, in Letters from the Earth

He also shares with us an account of Plato addressing his students on the subject of anthropology. Plato is said to have defined man as “a featherless biped” for which he was applauded. When Diogenes of Sinope heard this he quickly plucked a chicken and brought it into the lecture hall saying, “Here is Plato’s man.” Plato had to refine his definition by adding “…with broad flat nails.”

I thought of this story this week when we discussed in class the following quote from page 424 of Ferguson’s Church History. “As to method, the Scholastics employed dialectical reasoning, which historically meant oral discussion by question and answer. The scholastic method was a technique of interpreting texts and teaching that involved distinctions, definitions, and disputations. The method involved presenting a problem (quaestio), stating arguments for and against (disputatio), and proposing a solution (sententia).”

I just wanted to remind you that the scholastic method of “making a distinction when there is a confusion” is not original to them.

This technique was being employed by Plato and Diogenes of Sinope in the story above and we engage in it both intuitively and by design in our daily lives. It may be as systematic as in the consideration of both similarities and differences when we engage in the task of establishing the taxonomic rank of living organisms (species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom, domain, life) or as informal as the process we go through in selecting frozen yogurt rather than ice cream.

For those of you who are confused, I have embedded the following video which should clear it all up for you.