It was a needless precaution, I felt sure, but men always enjoy marching around with weapons and flexing their figurative muscles, and I saw no reason to deny them this harmless exercise.

Men, like bullets, go farthest when they are smoothest.

In the long run men hit only what they aim at.

Men wanted to be strong. One way to be strong was to be knowledgeable. In so many areas, it was not possible to be knowledgeable without getting a Ph.D. and doing a postdoc. Guns and hunting provided an out for men who wanted to be know-it-alls but who couldn't afford to spend the first three decades of their lives getting up to speed on quantum mechanics or oncology.

No wonder men had more power. They had more power because they didn’t ask anyone else’s permission. They just went ahead and did what they wanted. And they weren’t as scared of being wrong as the women were. For them, getting the result was more important than being right.

Libenter homines id quod volunt credunt. (Roughly: It's easy for men to believe what they want to.)

He could do what all men wanted to, that is, fly

It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.

Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

It's a man's world, and you men can have it.

Men think they may justly do that for which they have a precedent.

Or, obversely, he might kill a man himself. It would be a question of throwing up his rifle, pressing the trigger, and a particular envelope of lusts and anxieties and perhaps some goodness would be quite dead. All as easy as stepping on an insect, perhaps easier…Everything was completely out of whack, none of the joints fitted. The men had been singing in the motor pool, and there had been something nice about it, something childish and brave. And they were here on this road, a point moving along in a line in the vast neutral spaces of the jungle. And somewhere else a battle might be going on. The artillery, the small-arms fire they had been hearing constantly, might be nothing, something scattered along the front, or it might be all concentrated now in the minuscule inferno of combat. None of it matched. The night had broken them into all the isolated units that actually they were.

as they were, and skillful with weapons, they went about where they liked and did as they pleased, approaching the inevitable time when they would cross the wrong man