A home without a grandmother is like an egg without salt.
A woman must wait for her ovaries to die before she can get her rightful personality back. Post-menstrual is the same as pre-menstrual; I am once again what I was before the age of twelve: a female human being who knows that a month has thirty days, not twenty-five, and who can spend every one of them free of the shackles of that defect of body and mind known as femininity.
America is the only country in the world where you can suffer culture shock without leaving home.
Americans have a neurotic need not to be neurotic.
Americans have gotten the message that life is easier if they don't think straight.
Americans respect talent only insofar as it leads to fame, and we reserve our most fervent admiration for famous people who destroy their lives as well as their talent. The fatal flaws of Elvis, Judy, and Marilyn register much higher on our national applause meter than their living achievements. In Amerca, talent is merely a tool for becoming famous in life so you can become more famous in death- where all are equal.
Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty- as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.
As the only class distinction available in a democracy, the college degree has created a caste society as rigid as ancient India's.
By sending the contradictory message that the famous are just plain folks on Mount Olympus, America has forged a relentless tension between loftiness and accessibility. Stir in the fact that the inborn talent and intelligence needed to achieve fame are immune to distributive tinkering by government programs and you have a definition of fame certain to produce envious rage: somebody screwed democracy.
Chinks in America's egalitarian armor are not hard to find. Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.
Democracy is the crude leading the crud.
Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.
Each time a mediocre singer performs, he is saying, in effect, 'This is good enough for you.' The audience, thrust into that familiar American mood of knowing something is wrong but not knowing what it is, unconsciously absorbs the insult and projects it back onto the mediocre performer in the form of inattention, rudeness and noise.
Episcopalians have always preferred the flying buttress to the pillar of the church.
Familiarity doesn't breed contempt, it is contempt.
Families composed of rugged individualists have to do things obliquely.
God may have loved the common people, but a trip to any shopping mall suggests that He made far too many of them.
Golf is an exercise in Scottish pointlessness for people who are no longer able to throw telephone poles at each other.
He travels fastest who travels alone, and that goes double for she. Real feminism is spinsterhood. It's time America admitted that old maids give all women a good name.
Humor inspires sympathetic, good-natured laughter and is favored by the 'healing power' gang. Wit goes for the jugular, not the jocular, and it's the opposite of football; instead of building character, it tears it down.
I believe in a Republic of Merit in which water is allowed to find its own level, where voters, like drivers, are tested before being turned loose.
I cannot understand why solitary confinement is considered punishment.
I do believe in reincarnation, but I do not believe there is life before noon.
I don't mind being regarded as perverted and unnatural, but I would die if people thought I was a Democrat.
I don't suffer fools, and I like to see fools suffer.
I simply like guns because you can't shoot people without them.
I'd rather rot on my own floor than be found by a bunch of bingo players in a nursing home.
I'm for prayer in the schools because ritual and ceremony are calming and civilizing, and the little fartlings should be tamped down whenever possible.
I've always said that next to Imperial China, the South is the best place in the world to be an old lady.
If whisky or salt won't cure it, then to hell with it. I worry about important things.
In order to molest a child you must first be in the same room with a child, and I don't know how perverts stand it.
In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.
Insecurity breeds treachery: if you are kind to people who hate themselves, they will hate you as well.
It takes only one child to raze a village.
Judge not, lest ye be judged judgmental.
Let's bring back grandmothers! A real family consists of three generations. It's time Americans stopped worrying about interference and being a burden on the children and regrouped under one roof.
Men are not very good at loving, but they are experts at admiring and respecting; the woman who goes after their admiration and respect will often come out better than she who goes out after their love.
Misanthropes have some admirable if paradoxical virtues. It is no exaggeration to say that we are among the nicest people you are likely to meet. Because good manners build sturdy walls, our distaste for intimacy makes us exceedingly cordial 'ships that pass in the night.' As long as you remain a stranger we will be your friend forever.
My object is to live in a place that does not call itself 'the community with a heart.' I want one of those godforsaken towns where all the young people leave and the rest sit on the porch with a rifle across their knees.
Never look on the bright side; the glare is blinding.
Of all the benefits of spinsterhood, the greatest is carte blanche. Once a woman is called 'that crazy old maid' she can get away with anything
Owning your own home is America's unique recipe for avoiding revolution and promoting pseudo-equality at the same time. To keep citizens puttering in their yards instead of sputtering on the barricades, the government has gladly deprived itself of billions in tax revenues by letting home 'owners' deduct mortgage interest payments.
People are so busy dreaming the American Dream, fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be, that they're all asleep at the switch. Consequently we are living in the Age of Human Error.
Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker's already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs.
Since we're all human, since anybody can make mistakes, since nobody's perfect, and since everybody is 'equal,' a human error is Democracy in action.
Southerners are so devoted to genealogy that we see a family tree under every bush.
Southerners have a genius for psychological alchemy. If something intolerable simply cannot be changed, driven away or shot they will not only tolerate it but take pride in it as well.
Stress makes them feel interesting and complex instead of boring and simple, and carries an assumption of sensitivity not unlike the Old World assumption that aristocrats were high-strung. In short, stress has become a status symbol.
Thank God I'm over the hill... None of the things men do to women could possibly happen to me now unless the U.S. is invaded by one of those new Russian republics whose soldiers aren't fussy.
The confidence and security of a people can be measured by their attitude toward laxatives.
The cult of Southern womanhood... with at least five totally different images and asked her to be good enough to adopt all of them. She is required to be frigid, passionate, sweet, bitchy and scatterbrained- all at same time. Her problems spring from the fact that she succeeds.
The feminization of America... has mired us in a soft, sickly, helpless tolerance of everything. America is the girl who can't say no, the town pump who lets anybody have a go at her. We are a single-parent country with no father to cut through the molasses and point out, for example, the inconsistency of embracing warm and compassionate 'values' while condemning cold and detached 'value judgments.'
The joker in the deck of lesbian fidelity is female vanity: no woman of fifty is going to undress in front of a woman of twenty no matter how much she might lust for her.
The more immoral we become in big ways, the more puritanical we become in little ways.
The proliferation of support groups suggests to me that too many Americans are growing up in homes that do not contain a grandmother.
The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners.
There are so many different kinds of people in America, with so many different boiling points, that we don't know how to fight with each other... no American can be sure how or when another will react, so we zap each other with friendliness to neutralize potentially dangerous situations.
There is much to be said for post-menopausal celibacy. Sex is rough on loners because you have to have somebody else around, but now I don't. No more diets to stay slim and desirable: I've had sex and I've had food, and I'd rather eat.
There's no national glue holding us together because somebody put too much pluribus in the unum.
Those colorful denizens of male despair, the Bowery bum and the rail-riding hobo, have been replaced by the bag lady and the welfare mother. Women have even taken over Skid Row.
To me, elitism means a love of excellence and superiority, but America has declared war on both and developed a sick love of the lowest common denominator to make sure no-one becomes too fine for our touted democracy. We are almost at the point of regarding every virtue as elitist.
True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.
We worship education but hate learning. We worship success but hate the successful. We worship fame but hate the famous.
When they came for the smokers, I kept silent because I don't smoke.
When they came for the meat eaters, I kept silent because I'm a vegetarian.
When they came for the gun owners, I kept silent because I'm a pacifist.
When they came for the drivers, I kept silent because I'm a bicyclist.
They never did come for me.
I'm still here because there's nobody left in the secret police except sissies with rickets.
When they came for the meat eaters, I kept silent because I'm a vegetarian.
When they came for the gun owners, I kept silent because I'm a pacifist.
When they came for the drivers, I kept silent because I'm a bicyclist.
They never did come for me.
I'm still here because there's nobody left in the secret police except sissies with rickets.
Why do I hate people? Who else is there to hate?
Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.
Found 66 occurence(s) in 52,456 quotation(s).
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