Top 87 Quotes & Sayings by Clare Boothe Luce - Page 2

Since the birth of our nation, the steady performance of the Marine Corps in fighting America's battles has made it the very symbol of military excellence. The Corps has come to be recognized worldwide as an elite force of fighting men, renowned for their physical endurance, for their high level of obedience, and for the fierce pride they take, as individuals, in the capacity for self discipline.

You know, I have had a terrible life. I married two men I really didn't like. My only daughter was killed in a car accident. My brother committed suicide. Has my life been a life for anyone to envy?

Young men still desire women as much as ever, even though they don't want to marry them as much.

I don't have any warm personal enemies. All the SOBs have died.

All autobiographies are alibi-ographies.

[On Vice-President Henry A. Wallace:] Much of what Mr. Wallace calls his global thinking is, no matter how you slice it, still globaloney.

I hope I shall have ambition until the day I die.

the only time travelers are really gay is when they are traveling for no good reason at all.

It is ridiculous to think that you can spend your entire life with just one person. Three is about the right number. Yes, I imagine three husbands would do it?

Know what Freud wrote in his diary when he was 77? "What do women want? My God, what do they want?" Fifty years this giant brain spends analyzing women. And he still can't find out what they want. So this makes him the world's greatest expert on female psychology?

Greta Garbo: A deer in the body of a woman, living resentfully in the Hollywood zoo.

Communism is the opiate of the intellectuals.

Time comes when every man's got to feel something new--when he's got to feel young again, just because he's growing old. Women are just the same. But when we get that way we change our hairdress. Or get a new cook.

Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego, lessens the friction of social contacts. . . . It is only in lies, wholeheartedly and bravely told, that human nature attains through words and speech the forebearance, the nobility, the romance, the idealism, that-being what it is-it falls so short of in fact and in deed.

I know all about violence and physical abuse because my first husband used to beat me severely when he got drunk. Once, I can remember coming home from a party and walking up our vast marble staircase at the Fifth Avenue house while he was striking me. I thought, If I just gave him one shove down the staircase I would be rid of him forever.

Middle age is the way you would feel about summer if you knew there would never be another spring.

You see few people here in America who really care very much about living a Christian life in a democratic world.

If you ever manage to make a fool of me, I'll deserve what I get.

I am for lifting everyone off the social bottom. In fact, I am for doing away with the social bottom altogether.

I have never met a man [in the military], in or out of uniform, who ever said, "Let's use the missiles." They are even more terrified that the Bishops, because a great many of them don't expect to go to Heaven, which at least the Bishops do.

I wish I were a virgin again. The only fun I ever had was holding out.

A woman can produce what no man can: a child.

Women do generally manage to love the guys they marry more than they manage to marry the guys they love.

I can't avoid writing. It's a sort of nervous tic I have developed since I gave up needlepoint.

If a woman's got any instincts, she feels when her husband's off the reservation.

[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.

Rich women are not too put upon by their children. You don't have to do all the things for a child that those women who had to stay at home did. My Ann had a French governess who took care of her until she was twelve years old and went off to boarding school.