Michael Ondaatje Quotes

Then I realized that most of the world's problems stemmed from macho dickheadism, and if I cold defeat that I could save the world.

Women and gay men have something in common after all: in that they are trying to deal with this goofy egotistical monster called a man.

The overpowering male sex drive must be channeled toward possession of females.

Every time a male coach berates his players by referring to them as “ladies” or tells them to “hike their skirts” while playing, we’re perpetuating an atmosphere where women are not men’s equals.

Male chauvinism is . . . a shrewd method of extracting the maximum of work for the minimum of compensation.

You can't expect everything to happen all at once when it's been such a male-dominated world for so long.

I was raised by a formidable woman. She always pushed me to be competitive in a man's world. That's maybe one of the attractions to journalism in the beginning. It was a male profession, and I was comfortable in that.

I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore.

I've been accused of trying too hard to rescue people

The current male-dominated model of success - which equates success with burnout, sleep deprivation, and driving yourself into the ground - isn't working for women, and it's not working for men, either.

The sexual conquest is huge with men in terms of affirming themselves and their feelings of masculinity. That's a misguided kind of affirmation. That is not helpful, but that stuff happens.

...In every realm of male expression and action, violence is experienced and articulated as love and freedom.

Women are mere "beauties" in men's culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable, artless ingenue.

It is of very doubtful value to enlist the gifts of a woman into fields that have been defined as male; it frightens the men, unsexes the women, and muffles and distorts the contribution women could make.

Like all dominant groups, men seek to promote an image of their subordinate's nature that contributes to the preservation of the status quo. For thousands of years, males have seen women not as women could be, but only as males want them to be.

Power has for so long been a male construct that it distorted the shape of the first women who tried it on, only to find themselves in a sort of straitjacket.

Everything that explains the world has in fact explained a world that does not exist, a world in which men are at the center of the human enterprise and women are at the margin "helping' them. Such a world does not exist - never has.

Visionary idealism is a male art form. The lesbian aesthete does not exist. But if there were one, she would have learned from the perverse male mind.

When I started working in a feminist feminine magazine all my life was about rebelling against male authority, which is authority in general is male, so it was rebelling against everything. Everything that was around me made me angry.

Each woman is made to feel it is her own cross to bear if she can't be the perfect clone of the male superman and the perfect clone of the feminine mystique.

As women, you have to negotiate your way through a man's world.

As a woman who works in a male-dominated business - Hollywood, definitely, being one of them - I instinctually knew what that is like. You have to be strong and take care of yourself.

But boys will be boys, even the ones who are only girls dressed up: That's one of the rules of the world.

Surely we have had enough of confusing maleness with "usefulness" and other human virtues. If men had a more modest view of what their masculinity ought to entail, perhaps they could move on from debilitating feelings of loss to tackling their real economic and political problems.

Men and the world are mutually toxic to each other.