Daily Inspiration Quote by Ivan Turgenev

A joke that lands like a shrug and a threat, this line is less a “truth” about women than a snapshot of how casually 19th-century masculinity could treat women as both inevitability and target. Turgenev’s ellipses do the real work: they mime a man searching for language, then settling for the oldest refuge of the socially comfortable - a punchline. “Can’t live with ’em” frames women as domestic necessity, the indispensable infrastructure of male life. “Can’t shoot ’em” pretends to be restraint, but it smuggles in the idea that violence is the natural next option, merely disallowed by law, manners, or consequence.

The intent isn’t romantic cynicism; it’s a performance of male camaraderie. The line flatters its speaker as trapped: beholden to women’s presence, annoyed by their agency, redeemed by his supposed self-control. Subtextually, it turns women from people into a problem to manage. Even as a gag, it draws a circle around who gets to be fully human and who exists as a foil for someone else’s frustration.

Context matters because Turgenev is also the novelist who anatomized social change and gendered power with unnerving clarity. Read against his fiction, the quip can register as reported speech - the kind of coarse “wisdom” his era circulated - exposing a culture where misogyny could pass as good humor. The line works because it’s compact, quotable, and ugly in a way that feels “honest,” which is exactly how prejudice survives: by dressing itself as wit.