societal expectations quotes

When people say ‚marriage‘ to me… It’s always a means to an end. Everyone’s so in a rush to define the relationship.

I don’t like it when people who are young act like they’re 40. That’s taking too much on. Putting up a shield and trying to act like you’re so mature or whatever – I don’t try to act mature. Some people might say I’m mature for my age, but it’s not something I’m trying to do, you know? I’m just me.

We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.

It’s considered acceptable in our culture to approach perfect strangers, as often or not who may be in extremis, and evangelise. I don’t see why that’s considered a normal thing.

A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.

I have known people who are working class or craftsmen, who happen to be more intellectual than professors.

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

My family didn’t have a lot of money, so I worked my heart out to get my degrees. But the minute I graduated, suddenly everyone was asking me, ‚Well, when are you going to get married and start having kids?‘ And the truth is I had no idea how I would balance the expected role of wife and mother with a challenging career.

As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.

I think women go crazy for a reason. It’s not like it just happens.

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.

We’re always looking over our shoulders, ‚what they will think, what the press will think, what will this one – am I making the right career move?‘ When you’re young you have to do all that to survive, I suppose.

I didn’t think Marilyn Monroe was beautiful. It used to worry me. I thought maybe I’m not put together like the other chaps.

I have said this many times, that there seems to be enough room in the world for mediocre men, but not for mediocre women, and we really have to work very, very hard.

At the end of the day, women are a distraction. Whether you realize it or not.

People make jokes about my bosoms, why don’t they look underneath the breasts at the heart? It’s obvious I’ve got big ones and if people want to assume they’re not mine, then let them.

No one wants to see curvy women.

When a father puts in long hours at work, he’s praised for being dedicated and ambitious. But when a mother stays late at the office, she’s sometimes accused of being selfish, neglecting her kids.

If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her; and if she does not possess them she runs away from herself.

To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.

When everybody looks at our generation of kids, they always call us the misfits – you know, like we just don’t give a damn.

It would have been difficult to have an ugly daughter.

Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.

In the ’50s, too many women, even though they were very smart, they tried to make the man feel that he was brainier. It was a sad thing.

If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? – not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.

A man is as good as he has to be, and a woman as bad as she dares.

Genteel women suppose that those things do not really exist about which it is impossible to talk in polite company.

Fame has also this great drawback, that if we pursue it, we must direct our lives so as to please the fancy of men.

There is no employing class, no working class, no farming class. You may pigeonhole a man or woman as a farmer or a worker or a professional man or an employer or even a banker. But the son of the farmer will be a doctor or a worker or even a banker, and his daughter a teacher. The son of a worker will be an employer – or maybe president.

When I look back over my life it’s almost as if there was a plan laid out for me – from the little girl who was so passionate about animals who longed to go to Africa and whose family couldn’t afford to put her through college. Everyone laughed at my dreams. I was supposed to be a secretary in Bournemouth.

I definitely feel closer to the feminine side of the human being than I do the male – or the American idea of what a male is supposed to be. Just watch a beer commercial and you’ll see what I mean.

My mother told me two things constantly. One was to be a lady and the other was to be independent, and the law was something most unusual for those times because for most girls growing up in the ’40s, the most important degree was not your B.A. but your M.R.S.

In the public eye, girls and women with strong perspectives are hated. If you’re a girl with an opinion, people just hate you. There are still people who are afraid of successful women, and that’s so lame.

I notice that young men go to the universities in order to become doctors or philosophers or anything, so long as it is a title, and that many go in for those professions who are utterly unfit for them, while others who would be very competent are prevented by business or their daily cares, which keep them away from letters.

I was brought up to believe that the worst thing you could do was ‚call attention to yourself,‘ or ‚think you were smart.‘ My mother was an exception to this rule and was punished by the early onset of Parkinson’s disease.

I don’t see myself as beautiful, because I can see a lot of flaws. People have really odd opinions. They tell me I’m skinny, as if that’s supposed to make me happy.

Boys will be boys. And even that wouldn’t matter if only we could prevent girls from being girls.

What good is it being Marilyn Monroe? Why can’t I just be an ordinary woman?

A man has a tendency to accept you the way you are, while most women immediately start to pick flaws and want to change you.

I’m not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself – then they get to say ‚See, you did it yourself.‘

Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That’s not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that’s what life needs to be – and that if it’s not that, it’s all screwed up. It’s not.

People have so many hang-ups about how other people live their lives. People always want to keep you in a little box, or they need to label you and fix you in time and location.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

What is the appropriate behavior for a man or a woman in the midst of this world, where each person is clinging to his piece of debris? What’s the proper salutation between people as they pass each other in this flood?

Women must pay for everything. They do get more glory than men for comparable feats, but, they also get more notoriety when they crash.