Mary Astell Quotes

Arthur Miller wouldn't have married me if I had been nothing but a dumb blonde.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Status ought not to be measured by a woman's ability to attract and snare a man..

Poor maids have more lovers than husbands.

A man should be taller, older, heavier, uglier, and hoarser than his wife.

But she took her husband's jokes and joviality as patiently as everything else, considering that "men would be so", and viewing the stronger sex in the light of animals whom it had pleased Heaven to make naturally troublesome, like bulls and turkey-cocks.

What is any respectable girl brought up to do but to catch some rich man's fancy and get the benefit of his money by marrying him?--as if a marriage ceremony could make any difference in the right or wrong of the thing!

I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could... That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend.

Men are forever eager to press drink upon those they consider their superiors, hoping thereby to eliminate that distinction between them.... And women, when confronted by superiors, substitute for drink the crippling liquor of their sex.

Don't you know, that all wives are in the right? It may be you don't, for you are yet a young husband.

I don't want to play sex roles any more. I'm tired of being known as the girl with the shape.

Thanks to feminism, women can now acquire status in two ways: through marriage or their own achievements. Cure cancer or marry the man who does, either way society will applaud. Unless he marries into the British royal family, it doesn't work that way for men. Wives shed no glory on their husbands. Having tea with Nancy Reagan is an honor; having tea with Denis Thatcher is a joke.

The reason husbands and wives do not understand each other is because they belong to different sexes.

It took me a long time to realize that being a girl is so much more powerful than being a guy, but I really saw myself as boy for a long while.

It seems to me that the fact that I am a woman is a bigger issue than the fact that I'm from the East. For me it isn't really important. I've only ever known myself as a woman.

The husband provides direction; the wife, maintenance.

We have the beginnings of feminism starting to rear its head, where all of that got blown up. The whole point of going to college became not to find a husband - screw that! - feminism became, "You don't want anything about a man to be defining you, and you don't want your relationship to define, you! You don't want a relationship to be your happiness. You certainly don't want marriage to be the sole determining reason you live".

My husband says, 'God, Roseanne, I can't remember the last time we had sex.' Well, I can, and that is why we ain't doing it.

I became a stand-up comedienne because I had a sit-down husband.

Here lies my wife: here let her lie! Now she's at rest, and so am I.

In the forties, to get a girl you had to be a GI or a jock. In the fifties, to get a girl you had to be Jewish. In the sixties, to get a girl you had to be black. In the seventies, to get a girl you've got to be a girl.

Is a man satisfied, merely because he is perfumed himself, to mingle with a malodorous crowd?

Pierre Curie, a brilliant scientist, happened to marry a still more brilliant one-Marie, the famous Madame Curie-and is the only great scientist in history who is consistently identified as the husband of someone else.

A man can never compete with a woman's father

People talk about me as masculine. Because of the way I walk and talk and crank out pull-ups and smell like bacon.