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Clare Boothe Luce
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“Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego, and lessens the frictions of social contacts. ... It is only in lies, wholeheartedly and bravely told, that human nature attains through words and speech the forbearance, the nobility, the romance, the idealism that — being what it is — it falls so short of in fact and in deed.”
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“... it's matrimonial suicide to be jealous when you have a really good reason.”
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“Middle age is the way you would feel about summer if you knew there would never be another spring.”
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“You know, that's the only good thing about divorce; you get to sleep with your mother.”
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“Nature abhors ... a virgin — a frozen asset.”
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“... the only time travelers are really gay is when they are traveling for no good reason at all.”
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“Rome is the city above all cities which loses most of its meaning to those who do not bring to it some historical sense, a decent knowledge of art, and a good amount of time. Rome therefore is particularly disturbing to an American.”
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“Guns know no policy except destruction.”
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“Bombs know no ism but barbarism. The laws that successfully govern a peaceful and democratic society do not interfere with the only law bombs know, which is the law of gravity.”
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“There are no hopeless situations; there are only people who have grown hopeless about them.”
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“The best defense against a powerful and positive dynamic ideology is neither verbal attack nor criticism, which are useful, but to set up an equally powerful and dynamic ideology against it.”
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“[On Vice-President Henry A. Wallace:] Much of what Mr. Wallace calls his global thinking is, no matter how you slice it, still globaloney.”
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“What generally passes for 'thought' among the majority of mankind is the time one takes out to rearrange one's prejudices.”
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“To put a woman on the ticket would challenge the loyalty of women everywhere to their sex, because it would be made to seem that the defeat of the ticket meant the defeat for a hundred years of women's chance to be truly equal with men in politics.”
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“Communism is the opiate of the intellectuals [with] no cure except as a guillotine might be called a cure for dandruff.”
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“... my definition of the ideal man is 'that particular man with whom a woman happens to be in love at that particular time.'”
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“No good deed goes unpunished ...”
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“The politicians were talking themselves red, white, and blue in the face.”
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“But if God had wanted us to think just with our wombs, why did He give us a brain?”
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“... all history shows that the hand that cradles the rock has ruled the world, not the hand that rocks the cradle!”
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“They say women talk too much. If you have worked in Congress you know that the filibuster was invented by men.”
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“In politics women ... type the letters, lick the stamps, distribute the pamphlets and get out the vote. Men get elected.”
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“Male supremacy has kept her [woman] down. It has not knocked her out.”
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“The oppressed never free themselves — they do not have the necessary strengths.”
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“Watergate is the great liberal illusion that you can have public virtue without private morality.”
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“Courage is the ladder on which all the other virtues mount.”
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“I'm in my anecdotage.”
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“I don't have a warm personal enemy left. They've all died off. I miss them terribly because they helped define me.”
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“I was wondering today what the religion of the country is — and all I could come up with is sex.”
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“Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there.”
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“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.'”
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“[On Eleanor Roosevelt:] No woman has ever so comforted the distressed — or so distressed the comfortable.”
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“Autobiography is mostly alibiography.”
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“If old age means a crown of thorns, the trick is to wear it jauntily.”
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“A woman can produce what no man can: a child.”
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“It is time to leave this question up to Mother Nature — a difficult lady to fool. You have only to give women the same oppportunities as men, and you will soon find out what is or is not in their nature. What is in women's nature to do they will do, and you won't be able to stop them. But you will also find, and so will they, that what is not in their nature, even if they are given every opportunity, they will not do, and you won't be able to make them do it.”
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“A man's home may seem to be his castle on the outside; inside it is more often his nursery.”
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“There is nothing like a good dose of another woman to make a man appreciate his wife.”
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“Money can't buy happiness, but it can make you awfully comfortable while you're being miserable.”
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“Women do generally manage to love the guys they marry more than they manage to marry the guys they love.”
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“Advertising has done more to cause the social unrest of the 20th century than any other single factor.”
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“Remember, whenever a Republican leaves one side of the aisle and goes to the other, it raises the intelligence quotient of both parties.”
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“[On the Democratic Party:] Its leaders are always troubadors of trouble; crooners of catastrophe ... A Democratic President is doomed to proceed to his goals like a squid, squirting darkness all about him.”
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“Nature abhors a vacuum, even in the heads of statesmen.”
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“I refuse the compliment that I think like a man, thought has no sex, one either thinks or one does not.”
Clare Boothe Luce, U.S. diplomat, writer, member of Congress, playwright, journalist
(1903 - 1987)
Full name: Clare Boothe Brokaw Luce.