Clare Boothe Luce Quotes

[Elphaba]

Posted: 10/14/08 at 6:43pm

still as amazing as they were then...



• Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, "She doesn't have what it takes." They will say, "Women don't have what it takes.

• Thoughts have no sex.

• Male supremacy has kept woman down. It has not knocked her out.

• If God had wanted us to think with our wombs, why did he give us a brain?

• Censorship, like charity, should begin at home, but unlike charity, it should end there.

• No good deed goes unpunished.

• There are no hopeless situations; there are only men who have grown helpless about them.

• Courage is the ladder on which all the other virtues mount.

• Love is a verb.

• In the final analysis there is no other solution to man's progress but the day's honest work, the day's honest decision, the day's generous influences, and the day's good deed.

• All autobiographies are alibi-ographies.

• They say women talk too much. If you have worked in Congress, you know that the filibuster was invented by men.

• A man's home may seem to be his castle on the outside; inside, it is more often his nursery.

• A man has only one escape from his old self: to see a different self in the mirror of some woman's eyes.

• Money can't buy happiness, but it can make you awfully comfortable while you're being miserable.

• A woman's best production is a little money of her own.

• There is nothing harder than the softness of indifference.

• Advertising has done more to cause the social unrest of the 20th century than any other single factor.

• Communism is the opiate of the intellectuals with no cure except as a guillotine might be called a cure for dandruff.

• Nature abhors a virgin -- a frozen asset.

• I'm in my anecdotage.

• I don't have a warm personal enemy left. They've all died off. I miss them terribly because they helped define me.

• Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego, and lessens the frictions of social contacts.

• They are vulgar and dirty-minded and alien to grace, and I would not, if I could, which I hasten to say I cannot, cross their obscenities with a wit which is foreign to them and gild their futilities with the glamour which by birth and breeding and performance they do not

[best12bars]

Posted: 10/14/08 at 7:29pm

Wonderful quotes, Elph!

Do you know what I miss in today's writing and writers? That fundamental sort of "boldness" demonstrated by Luce.

I miss the clarity and humor of truth.

[Elphaba]

Posted: 10/15/08 at 12:12am

yup.....and by the way, I want your black cat!

[WOSQ]

Posted: 10/15/08 at 1:47pm

Mrs. Luce and Dorothy Parker quite heartily disliked one another.

Once they met at a revolving door.

"Age before beauty." purred Mrs. Luce.

"Pearls before swine." came the retort as a smiling Mrs. Parker went through the door.