Quotes from Martin Van Creveld

Keith Thomas' Magic and the Decline of Religion (1971).

The fact that the Nazis constructed "polarized identities for males and females" and did not accept the feminist dogma about men and women being similar in every respect was said to be one of their worst misdeeds.

For most modern Western men, abandoning their families will result in increasing their dispensable income by as much as three quarters.[167] In the whole of nature, there is no arrangement that is more demanding and more altruistic.

Like most people at the time, Hitler believed that women who did not have children would eventually become mentally ill.

From 1939 to 1944 the proportion of students who were female went up seven-fold, reaching 49.3 percent of the total student body.

By 1908, future justice Louis Brandeis was able present the United States Supreme Court, in Muller v. Oregon, with more than 100 studies on the need to protect women against overwork. The strategy worked, and state regulation of women's work was declared to be constitutional. Yet notably, just three years earlier another court had rejected similar regulation of an industry in which men bore among the heaviest burdens, namely baking.[337

As Plato wrote long ago, the only people who will no longer see war are the dead. Which, of course, is precisely why we need to understand it as best we can.

Whenever fewer women than men study a subject, then this fact is immediately seen as a problem. However, when fewer men take up a subject than women, as is the situation in fields such as foreign languages, most of the liberal arts, and some of the social sciences, nobody seems to care.

For example, at Wigan Pier, later to be made famous by George Orwell, women formed just 5.5 percent of the work force. Of them, not a single one worked underground.[355]

In 1945, out of 52 million American adult women only 19.5 million held jobs. Among married women, only a quarter did.[364] Though the image of Rosie the Riveter dominated propaganda, its link to reality was tenuous. In metal-working plants of all types, male workers outnumbered female ones more than three to one.[365]

in all species for which information is available, once the sex of the fetus is determined, more males than females are aborted.[120]

War was neither a means in the hands of policy nor was it an end in itself. Instead it was regarded as an evil; albeit one that was sometimes made necessary by the imperfection of the world.

The combination of modern anti-discrimination laws, on the one hand, and women's reluctance to pull up their sleeves, on the other, can lead to strange results. Thus, whereas 80 percent of all clerks in the United States are women, the one "clerical" job that involves substantial outdoor walking — mail delivery — is done almost entirely by men.[401

In a passage that foreshadows criticisms of equality from his time to the present, he also mentions the "despotism" of the law required to enforce equality and maintain it.[37]

The usual reason given for women's shorter hours is the famous double burden. However, upon closer inspection, this well-worn argument falls apart.[408]

In reality, all that is needed are a syringe and a few cubic centimeters of semen. Should current experiments with fertilizing eggs with DNA taken from other eggs be extended from mice to humans, soon we will not even need that. The fact that the necessary techniques were invented by men merely adds offense to injury. It is as if each time men try to help women along, men only make themselves more superfluous.

One of them, the philosopher Philostratus, summed up the idea by saying that the great athletes of the past "made war training for sport, and sport training for war." Turning Spartan logic on its head, Plutarch even claimed that the Thebans at the great Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC defeated the Spartans because they had done more training at the palaestra; he also wrote that sport, wrestling specifically included, was an imitation and exercise of war.