From "In Defense of Women":
On "The Maternal Instinct":
A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom decive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow.
On "Women's Intelligence":This shrewd perception of masculine bombast and make-believe, this acute understanding of man as the eternal tragic comedian, is at the bottom of that compassionate irony which paces under the name of the maternal instinct.
On "The Masculine Bag of Tricks":That it should still be necessary, at this late stage in the senility of the human race, to argue that women have a fine and fluent intelligence, is surely an eloquent proof of the defective observation, incurable prejudice, and general imbecility of their lords and masters. One finds very few professors of the subject, even among admitted feminists, approaching the fact as obvious; pracitcally all of them think it necessary to bring up a vast mass of evidence to establish what should be an axiom.
What men, in their egoism, constantly mistake for a deficiency of intelligence in woman is merely an incapacity for mastering that mass of small intellectual tricks, that complex of petty knowledges, that collection of cerebral rubber stamps, whcih constitutes the chief mental equipment of the average male.
In an essay about literary criticism "Criticism of Criticism of Criticism", he mercilessly attacked academics:
a professor must have a theory, as a dog must have fleas.
As practiced by all such learned and diligent but essentially ignorant and unimaginative men, criticism is little more than a branch of homiletics. They judge a work of art, not by its clarity and sincerity, not by the force and charm of its ideas, not by the technical virtuosity of the artist, not by his originality and artistic courage, but simply and solely by his orthodoxy.