Mary MacLane Quotes

Your women of honor, as you call em, are only chary of their reputations, not their persons; and 'Tis scandal that they would avoid, not men.

Every man has been brought up with the idea that decent women don't pop in and out of bed; he has always been told by his mother that "nice girls don't." He finds, of course, when he gets older that this may be untrue-but only in a certain section of society.

One may as well preach a respectable mythology as anything else.

It's good to know that if I behave strangely enough, society will take full responsibility for me.

About one thing the Englishman has a particularly strict code. If a bird says Cluk bik bik bik bik and caw you may kill it, eat it or ask Fortnums to pickle it in Napoleon brandy with wild strawberries. If it says tweet it is a dear and precious friend and you'd better lay off it if you want to remain a member of Boodles.

We live in a society in which it is normal to be sick; and sick to be abnormal.

That prudery which survives youth and beauty resembles a scarecrow left in the fields after harvest.

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

Education should not be fun. You are being brought up into society and society has a way of doing things. It may not be pleasant but sooner or later you are going to have to do it anyway.

Men think that self-sacrifice is the most charming of all the cardinal virtues for women, and in order to keep it in healthy working order, they make opportunities for its illustration as often as possible.

Moral severity in women is only a dress or paint which they use to set off their beauty.

We're the victims of a disease called social prejudice, my child. These dear ladies of the law and order league are scouring out the dregs of the town. C'mon be a glorified wreck like me.

It is not always for virtue's sake that women are virtuous.

Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?

Civilization means conforming to a standard of behavior that may not seem natural to us.

People who are the most normal are probably the most crazy.

The fear of being an old maid made young girls rush into matrimony with a recklessness that astonishes.

To be a woman, if not a defect, is at least a peculiarity.

There is no going back to a time when most women will feel compelled to enter or stay in a bad marriage just for economic security or social respectability. So today, the best way to get women once more interested in getting married and having children is for men to accept women's new insistence on equality. This is, I think, why educated women in America, are now more pro - marriage and more disapproving of divorce than other groups of women who have less experience with egalitarian partners or less clout in getting their needs met in relationships.

Everyone knows what a hypocrite is. That's the guy who gripes about the sex, violence and nudity on his VCR.

People talk of the pathos and failure of plain women; but it is a more terrible thing that a beautiful woman may succeed in everything but womanhood.

Sadder than destitution, sadder than a beggar is the man who eats alone in public. Nothing more contradicts the laws of man or beast, for animals always do each other the honor of sharing or disputing each other's food.

To the woman with the least intelligence, there must come, at some time or other, the realization that housework is animal work and that there are other occupations in the world a thousand times more refined, more enriching, for which she is also suited and to which she has a right.

Marriage still means a lot more in the country I come from than it does here. I don't think there's anything to be gained by it for the couple. But for children I think it's an important thing.

We are snared into doing things for which we get called names, and things for which we get hanged, and yet the spirit may well survive - survive the condemnations, survive the halter, by Jove! And there are things - they look small enough sometimes too - by which some of us are totally and completely undone.