Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Dekker

Strip women out of the world and men might finally manage the fantasy they’re forever selling themselves: self-sufficient, untempted, serenely rational. Dekker’s line flatters that dream while quietly undercutting it. “Like gods” isn’t a serious anthropological claim; it’s a dramatic provocation, the kind of barbed overstatement that plays well onstage because it exposes the gap between male self-mythology and male behavior. Men aren’t thwarted by women, the subtext implies; they’re undone by their own appetites, and women simply happen to be the most legible trigger.

As a Jacobean dramatist writing in a city swollen with commerce, migration, and moral panic, Dekker knew how often “woman” functioned as a catch-all explanation for disorder: lust, vanity, debt, even public scandal. The line taps that misogynist reflex - a familiar rhetorical move in early modern pamphlets and plays - but its theatricality also makes it suspect. The conditional “Were there no…” is a wish, not a plan; it’s the sigh of a man trying to outsource responsibility. If men could live “like gods” only without women, what kind of godhood is that? Fragile, dependent, easily toppled by proximity.

In performance, the quote can land as comic bitterness, not doctrine: a character moment that reveals insecurity disguised as philosophy. Dekker’s real target is the masculine habit of treating desire as fate and blame as a lifestyle.