Lewis Thomas Quotes

One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.

I don't have any beauty shop memories. I remember the barber shop.

I am seriously interested in the psychology of childhood. And I've given a lot of my life to trying to see questions of personal development, as well as the great issues of the day, from a child's point of view.

The female experience is different from that of the male, and if, as a male writer, you cannot accept that basic premise, then you will never, ever, be able to write women well.

The female population exceeds the male, you know, especially in New England, which accounts for the high state of culture we are in, perhaps.

The Christian ethic did not raise the worth of female life much above the Jewish: nor did the clinical ethic raise it much above the clerical. This is why most of those identified as witches by male inquisitors were women; and why most of those diagnosed as hysterics by male psychiatrists were also women.

The male is colored much more gorgeously than the female so that he can be shot and made into feather embroidery.

The way in which each human infant is transformed into the finished adult, into the complicated individual version of his city and his century is one of the most fascinating studies open to the curious minded.

Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good.

The range of variation in the female far exceeds the range of variation in the male.

A boy is the only known substance from which a man can be made.

Childhood constitutes the most important element in an adult's life, for it is in his early years that a man is made.

I immediately noticed there were far more male characters than female characters in the programs, even now, in the 21st century.

Meryl [Stripe]spoke out about the low percentage of female critics on Rotten Tomatoes. Why are there 760 male critics and just 168 women? You are immediately [biased] on what kind of films you are being told to go see. What are you told are good films? Male films.

I looked at [Geena Davis] research and see things like 21 percent of filmmakers are women, only 31 percent of speaking roles in popular films are female - you start seeing it everywhere. It's so much bigger. So you've uncovered this groundbreaking data and research.

Deeds are males, words females are.

Sexism is discounting the female experience of powerlessness; the new sexism is discounting the male experience of powerlessness.

Thus we have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard) disagreeable to nearly all the females—and there is more in that than you might suppose.

I feel like male patriarchy generally has been about repressing female sexuality because it's "scary."

I like to think of myself less like 'an adult' and more like a 'former fetus.'

[Footnote:]Each male has from 2 to 790 females with whom he discusses current events. Of these he marries from 3 to 17.

There are many who hold, as I do, that the most important part of life is not the age of university studies, but the first one, the period from birth to the age of six. For that is the time when a man's intelligence itself, his greatest implement, is being formed. But not only his intelligence; the full totality of his psychic powers.

Ever since I was a little child, I refused to see movies of books that I loved. Because you already know what Heidi looks like and she doesn't look like Shirley Temple.

[Footnote:] The female of any species is generally regarded as a relatively anabolic organism, more passive than the male, who is relatively katabolic and active. The fact remains that one frequently runs across a rather katabolic female.

Every man at three years old is half his height