Naturalists tell us that in all animal species degeneration begins in the female. In civilised society philosophers can apply this observation to morals.
Apparently nature, in giving man an absolutely irradicable taste for women, must have foreseen that, without this precaution, the contempt inspired by the vices of their sex, vanity in particular, would be a great obstacle to the maintenance and propagation of the human species.
A man who professed to esteem women highly was asked if he had enjoyed the favours of many. “Not so many as if I had despised them,” he said.
Whatever evil a man may think of women, there is no woman but thinks more.
Young women have a misfortune which they share with kings, that of having no friends; but happily they feel this misfortune as little as the kings: the latter’s pomp and the former’s vanity spare both that emotion.