唯女子与小人难养也--The Confucius

This sentence from 'the Analects of Confucius' has been 'abused' in real life when people want to defame (not necessarily in an offensive one) women in China. And they could say it with bold assurance in that 'the Confucius said it!'.

Yes, it's true that it's quoted from him. However, by using it, people want to say women and villains (i personally think villain is a much better word than people/men with low birth; people with low birth does not necessarily imply flunkies/villains) are hard to deal with, yet they forget about the textual and social context of the sentence.

The whole sentence is “唯女子与小人为难养也，近之则不孙，远之则怨”, which literally means only women and villains are hard to deal with; if you are friendly with them, they get out of hand, and if you keep your distance, they resent it (the translation's from someone). So literally yes. However, we cannot really interpret it this way without looking at the big picture. Some people begin to think why would the Confucius say something so sexist.

I talked about people misunderstand it partly because of the word '唯', which can mean 'only' here, or functions as a modal particle. I'm not sure how to say this precisely in English; but it's not a problem of language itself, but a question of logic here. For example, you can say, only those children aged 12 or above have access to xx; this does not mean all the children aged 12 or above should; it just suggests that a certain part of them are hard to deal with; Sorry i cannot really state clearly what's in my head; i'm not a person good with words actually.

Moreover, there is a specific reference of 'women and villains' here. It's not just women in general; if you keep reading to the next part of the sentences, '近之则不孙，远之则怨' modifies the nouns women and villains. It's this kind of people that are hard to deal with; not women and villains are hard to deal with, since if you are friendly to them, they get out of hand; if you keep you distance, they resent it.

I am not a well-read person, but from some of the comments i've read, this particular idea sounds very reasonable. Women here refers to the dancing and singing girls that are presented to the king of the country, and villains refers to the asskissers. It is even possible that they may be referring to certain people, the officials or so.

We cannot read things but miss the whole background; it's always important to see close to the contexts, textual contexts as well as social contexts, which makes reading much harder than it appears to be.

However, the one great thing about language itself is that, everyone can speak in a way that they feel comfortable with. I mean, sometimes people just like saying things to express their intended meaning, while it's not consistent with the norm or the standard use or the original meaning of it, as long as they don't care whether or not they sound super educated. You don't always have to be right unless you are doing some serious writing, speeches or translation.