Men of ideas and men of action have much to learn from each other, and the truly great are men of both action and abstraction.

Violence isn't the only answer, but it is the final answer.

When men evaluate each other as men, they still look for the same virtues that they'd need to keep the perimeter. Men respond to and admire the qualities that would make men useful and dependable in an emergency. Men have always had a role apart, and they still judge one another according to the demands of that role as a guardian in a gang struggling for survival against encroaching doom. Everything that is specifically about being a man-not merely a person-has to do with that role.

Sometimes men pick fights just for something to do-just to feel something like the threat of harm and the possibility of triumph.

Civilization comes at a cost of manliness. It comes at a cost of wildness, of risk, of strife. It comes at a cost of strength, of courage, of mastery. It comes at a cost of honor. Increased civilization exacts a toll of virility, forcing manliness into further redoubts of vicariousness and abstraction.

A man who is more concerned with being a good man than being good at being a man makes a very well-behaved slave.

There is a difference between being a good man and being good at being a man.