I’m so not macho. It’s crazy. My man cave is so not a man cave.

It is not possible for a man to be elegant without a touch of femininity.

Men walk this tightrope where any sign of weakness illicits shame, and so they’re afraid to make themselves vulnerable for fear of looking weak.

My goal is just to be respected as a man when I walk down the street with my family. I don’t care what your job is, you’re not gonna talk down to me, you’re not gonna try to get a rise out of me. I’m a man first. And in establishing that, some interesting things have happened.

Men who think that a woman’s past love affairs lessen her love for them are usually stupid and weak.

Let men see, let them know, a real man, who lives as he was meant to live.

Until I was a teenager, I used red pokeberries for lipstick and a burnt matchstick for eyeliner. I used honeysuckle for perfume.

You can say, ‚Well, isn’t it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine‘ – well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn’t matter, because that is how it’s represented. It’s been represented like that forever. And there are reasons for it. You can’t change it. It’s not possible. This is underneath everything.

Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.

I think any man who lets a woman pick what he should wear… I mean, you gotta draw the line somewhere as a man. I see these guys, ‚My wife told me to wear this!‘ And I just shake my head.

I’d always tried to resist playing the supervirility thing. I liked showing the vulnerability of age.

Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the sexes.

Come on, you can’t name a truck after a chick.

I’ve always had a problem with the average macho man – they’ve always been a threat to me.

To conclude that women are unfitted to the task of our historic society seems to me the equivalent of closing male eyes to female facts.

Generally speaking, men are held in great esteem in all parts of the world, so why shouldn’t women have their share? Soldiers and war heroes are honored and commemorated, explorers are granted immortal fame, martyrs are revered, but how many people look upon women too as soldiers?

I really don’t like women who try to be men. All these politicians, I think they’re horrendous. We could have a brilliant future, but we have this terrible male vision of destroying everything. They’d better sort themselves out and become more womanly.

I’m always rather nervous about how you talk about women who are active in politics, whether they want to be talked about as women or as politicians.

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door.

If you’re embarrassed because you have some notion about how men are supposed to behave, and it doesn’t include weeping, then you have some personal work to do.

A strong man doesn’t have to be dominant toward a woman. He doesn’t match his strength against a woman weak with love for him. He matches it against the world.

The working men, I’ll go by and they’ll whistle. At first they whistle because they think, ‚Oh, it’s a girl. She’s got blond hair and she’s not out of shape,‘ and then they say, ‚Gosh, it’s Marilyn Monroe!‘

The masculine spirit is under assault. It’s obvious.

I definitely feel closer to the feminine side of the human being than I do the male – or the American idea of what a male is supposed to be. Just watch a beer commercial and you’ll see what I mean.

I truly believe that women should be financially independent from their men. And let’s face it, money gives men the power to run the show. It gives men the power to define value. They define what’s sexy. And men define what’s feminine. It’s ridiculous.

To kids, I’ve always been more than just some big tough black guy. I train to be tough – I box and do karate – but underneath all that toughness is a tender man.

‚I’ll be back‘ always sounded a little girly to me.

The ideal girl is driven, working on something other than modeling or being a singer.

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.

What’s with you men? Would hair stop growing on your chest if you asked directions somewhere?

When I was in college my girl got me a job at the doctor’s office she was working at. I was a file clerk. No disrespect but I don’t think a man can do that job. It takes so much meticulous and precise file-keeping.

I was a very shy character, always feeling uncomfortable because everybody was stronger than I, and always afraid I would look like a sissy. Everybody else played baseball; everybody else did all kinds of athletic things.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

I don’t want to just revolve. I want to evolve. As a man, as a human, as a father, as a lover.

Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.

I’m tough when I have to be, tender when I should be. When you find a really tough guy, he’s not a predator. He doesn’t have to prove himself. Guys who have to pretend to be tough, they ain’t. I’m tough.

I am a tough guy.

I don’t see myself as a pop artist. Like, when you hear ‚pop,‘ you’re like, ‚Oh, bubblegum, jumpy little girly stuff,‘ and I feel like, ‚Uh-uh. That’s not me.‘

A gender line… helps to keep women not on a pedestal, but in a cage.

There are other measures of self-respect for a man, than the number of clean shirts he puts on every day.

I worked with Congress on legislation, gave speeches to CEOs, military generals and Hollywood executives. But I also worked to ensure that my efforts would resonate with kids and families – and that meant doing things in a creative and unconventional way. So, yeah, I planted a garden and hula-hooped on the White House lawn with kids.

Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent.

Boys will be boys. And even that wouldn’t matter if only we could prevent girls from being girls.

Whether women are better than men I cannot say – but I can say they are certainly no worse.

I’m very proud of the Rome episode of ‚No Reservations‘ because it violated all the conventional wisdom about making television. You’re never, ever supposed to do a food or travel show in black and white.

The army teaches boys to think like men.

I always thought that there was nothing an antifeminist would want more than to have women only in women’s organizations, in their own little corner empathizing with each other and not touching a man’s world.

Women’s liberation is just a lot of foolishness. It’s men who are discriminated against. They can’t bear children. And no one is likely to do anything about that.