Sherman Hemsley Quotes

'Cause when I had my child, people tried to make me feel like life was over for me, and I started to believe that.

So many girls only care about guys and looking good all the time.

The idea of being a single woman in Hollywood is a very peculiar thing.

'Atlanta' is really trying to put that out there: these are just the lives of these people in this city, and this city is its own breathing, living thing, too. So how do you navigate through life, especially with dreams and aspirations in a world that tells you that you don't deserve to have them.

I felt free once I realized I was never going to fit the narrow mold society wanted me to fit in.

Scaling down individually is very hard. Imagine that if you go to a place where everybody is dressed nicely, and you are the only one who doesn't dress nicely. Everybody goes on vacations to a great place and you go to the Jersey shore. It's very hard to do these things without an organized mechanism, but it looks to me like there might be some organized mechanisms.

Conformity may not always reign in the prosperous bourgeois suburb, but it ultimately always governs.

There is one characteristic of the present direction of public opinion, peculiarly calculated to make it intolerant of any marked demonstration of individuality. The general average of mankind are not only moderate in intellect, but also moderate in inclinations: they have no tastes or wishes strong enough to incline them to do anything unusual, and they consequently do not understand those who have, and class all such with the wild and intemperate whom they are accustomed to look down upon.

What is it about conformity itself that causes us all to require it of our neighbors and of our artists and then, with consummate fickleness, to forget those who fall into line and eternally celebrate those who do not?

Those who talk about individuality the most are the ones who most object to deviation, and in a few years it may be the other way around. Some day everybody will just think what they want to think, and then everybody will probably be thinking alike; that seems to be what is happening.

I feel lucky because most of my friends aren't married. So I don't feel that, 'oh, step on it, you're thirty.'

In a country where everyone strives for attention, it is better to be bankrupt than to be nothing.

I must say that I am not very genteel and I feel that gentility has a stranglehold: the neatness, the wonderful tidiness, which is so evident everywhere in England is perhaps more dangerous than it would appear on the surface.

You have to enjoy being a woman. Why should being a woman be such a negative thing where you always have to improve yourself? I have never in my entire life met a man who didn't want to go to bed with me because I was too fat.

Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?

Even if someone is competent, it's so damned easy to crucify him as long as he's only working on his father's account. So at the beginning I certainly wanted to prove myself to my father and the rest of society. That quickly turned into a greater challenge. My lifestyle hasn't changed as a result.

Conformity makes everything easier, if you can still breathe.

Must one dread what others dread?

The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.

It's so trendy, almost bleeding to death. All the cool girls are doing it.

It's not enough just to be a mother. It's not only the social pressure on mothers by certain kinds of feminism and other sources. There is also economic pressure on them.

Am I really admitting that my sister is determined to marry a man she has only seen once and doesn't much like the look of? It is half real and half pretense - and I have an idea that it is a game most girls play when they meet an eligible young men. They just...wonder.

It's always sad to me when certain people are excluded from being considered beautiful... because of someone else's expectation. That bothers me.

Who says that your thirties is when you're supposed to be done? I would like to know who made that rule!

My point is that there are a lot of forces, like the media and the general political rhetoric tells us we should have more. That we should do better than our parents and have a bigger house or a better car.