. . . money . . . is really the difference between men and animals, most of the things men feel, animals feel, and vice versa, but animals do not know about money.
Gertrude SteinRead
Men cannot count, they do not know that two and two make four if women do not tell them so.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that men may rely on women for clarity and understanding in certain matters, highlighting gender-based perceptions of knowledge.
Gertrude Stein's quote reflects on the idea that societal roles and expectations often dictate what knowledge is considered valid or necessary. It implies that women's insights and contributions are essential for men to grasp certain truths, particularly those related to emotional or relational intelligence, underscoring the collaborative nature of understanding between genders.
Themes
GenderUnderstandingKnowledgeCollaborationRelationships
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about gender roles, this quote can be used to highlight the importance of women's contributions.
More from Gertrude Stein
All quotes βThe creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.
Gertrude SteinRead
If the communication is perfect, the words have life, and that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles.
Gertrude SteinRead
The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.
Gertrude SteinRead
I simply contend that the middle-class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family life, of honorable business methods.
Gertrude SteinRead
It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she allures us to our death.
Gertrude SteinRead
Similar quotes
Like it or not, women are always subject to criticism if they show too much feeling in public.
Hillary ClintonRead
All too often, girls are ignored because their challenges aren't thought to be as serious as those faced by boys.
Kimberle Williams CrenshawRead
I don't hold myself out as a role model. I don't believe that everyone should make the same choices; that everyone has to want to be a CEO, or everyone should want to be a work-at-home mother. I want everyone to be able to choose. But I want us to be able to choose unencumbered by gender choosing for us.
Sheryl SandbergRead
We know in our society, women are valued for their sexual desirability and not necessarily for what they have to say.
Jessica ChastainRead
The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon them.
Naomi WolfRead
Women's lib, Frannie had decided, was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn't get with child, but a woman could---every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath.
Stephen KingRead