Clare Boothe Luce Quotations

Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego, and lessens the frictions of social contacts.

In the final analysis there is no other solution to man's progress but the day's honest work, the day's honest decision, the day's generous utterances, and the day's good deed.

Money can't buy happiness, but it can make you awfully comfortable while you're being miserable.

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.'

A man's home may seem to be his castle on the outside; inside is more often his nursery.

Courage is the ladder on which all the other virtues mount.

The politicians were talking themselves red, white and blue in the face.

The women who inspired this play deserved to be smacked across the head with a meat ax and that, I flatter myself, is exactly what I smacked them with.

There are no hopeless situations; there are only men who have grown hopeless about them.

In politics women type the letters, lick the stamps, distribute the pamphlets and get out the vote. Men get elected.

A man has only one escape from his old self: to see a different self in the mirror of some woman's eyes.

They say that women talk too much. If you have worked in Congress you know that the filibuster was invented by men.

Censorship, like charity, should begin at home, but, unlike charity, it should end there.

A woman's best protection is a little money of her own.

Nature abhors a virgin - a frozen asset.

I refuse the compliment that I think like a man, thought has no sex, one either thinks or one does not.

It is matrimonial suicide to be jealous when you have a really good reason.

Advertising has done more to cause the social unrest of the 20th century than any other single factor.

There is nothing like a good dose of another woman to make a man appreciate his wife.

They say women talk too much. If you have worked in Congress you know that the filibuster was invented by men.

I don't have a warm personal enemy left. They've all died off. I miss them terribly because they helped define me.

Technological man can't believe in anything that can't be measured, taped, or put into a computer.

Male supremacy has kept woman down. It has not knocked her out.

The oppressed never free themselves - they do not have the necessary strengths.

Women know what men have long forgotten. The ultimate economic and spiritual unit of any civilization is still the family.

Politicians talk themselves red, white, and blue in the face.

But if God wanted us to think with our wombs, why did he give us a brain.

You know, that's the only good thing about divorce; you get to sleep with your mother.

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?

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

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

The main thing is to get what little happiness there is out of life in this wartorn world because ‘these are the good old days’ now.

Enemies may seek our destruction, but they also keep us on our toes and often help us figure out who we are and what we stand for.

If old age means a crown of thorns, the trick is to wear it jauntily.

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.

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.

There aren't many women now I'd like to see as President - but there are fewer men.

If men had to bear babies, there'd never be more than one child in a family.

Remember, whenever a Republican leaves one side of the aisle and goes to the other, it raises the intelligence quotient of both parties.

H. L. Mencken told me once that he answered all his mail, pleasant and unpleasant, with just one line, 'You may be right.' That's the way I feel now. It is in the realm of possibility, just barely, that I could be the one who's wrong.

all history shows that the hand that cradles the rock has ruled the world, not the hand that rocks the cradle!

Communism is the opiate of the intellectuals - With no cure except as a guillotine might be called a cure for dandruff.

What generally passes for 'thought' among the majority of mankind is the time one takes out to rearrange one's prejudices.

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

Communism is the opiate of the intellectuals.

I was wondering today what the religion of the country is - and all I could come up with is sex.

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

my definition of the ideal man is 'that particular man with whom a woman happens to be in love at that particular time.

Guns know no policy except destruction.

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

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.

Women can't have an honest exchange in front of men without having it called a cat fight.

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.

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

Watergate is the great liberal illusion that you can have public virtue without private morality.

A great man is one sentence.

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

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.

They [Democrats] are the troubadours and the crooners of catastrophe.

Nature abhors a vacuum, even in the heads of statesmen.

[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.

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

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

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

Autobiography is mostly alibiography.

When a man can't explain a woman's actions, the first thing he thinks of is the condition of her uterus.

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.

Home is where you hang your architect.

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

[In politics] no good deed goes unpunished

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.

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.

But if God had wanted us to think just with our wombs, why did He give us a brain?

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

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.

Thoughts have no sex.

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

No woman has ever so comforted the distressed or distressed the comfortable. on Eleanor Roosevelt.

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

I don't think my position unusual for a woman. I'm following a perfectly natural urge to do what I like.

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.

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?

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?

All autobiographies are alibi-ographies.

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