Life & Wisdom Quote by W. L. George

W. L. George frames a loaded question as if it were an evenhanded bit of philosophical housekeeping, and that pose is the trick. The first clause quietly smuggles in an old hierarchy: “man” is the measure of the human, “the beast” the cautionary backdrop. Once he’s installed that ladder, he pivots to women - not as subjects in their own right, but as a secondary comparison inside a male-centered universe. The effect is less inquiry than audit: if humanity is defined by what separates men from animals, women must now be tested for their deviation from men.

The subtext is early 20th-century gender anxiety dressed up as cleverness. It’s a time when women’s suffrage, changing labor patterns, and new public roles were disrupting the “natural” story men told about authority. George’s question performs a familiar defensive maneuver: treating women’s equality not as a political demand but as a conceptual puzzle, something to be debated in salons rather than granted in law. It’s a way of recentering male perspective while sounding curious.

Rhetorically, the line works because it weaponizes symmetry. Two parallels (“man vs. beast,” “woman vs. man”) make the second comparison feel inevitable, even though it’s ethically and logically mismatched: one contrasts species, the other contrasts genders within the same species. That slippage reveals the period’s reflexive habit of using “man” as the default human - and “woman” as the deviation requiring explanation.