Maureen Dowd famous quotes

The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Funny #Success #Motivational Sports

The sounds of silence are a dim recollection now, like mystery, privacy and paying attention to one thing — or one person — at a time.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Silence #Attention #Sound

Paul Ryan, who teamed up with Akin in the House to sponsor harsh anti-abortion bills, may look young and hip and new generation, with his iPod full of heavy metal jams and his cute kids. But he's just a fresh face on a Taliban creed - the evermore antediluvian, anti-women, anti-immigrant, anti-gay conservative core. Amiable in khakis and polo shirts, Ryan is the perfect modern leader to rally medieval Republicans who believe that Adam and Eve cavorted with dinosaurs.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Cute #Believe #Kids

Wooing the press is an exercise roughly akin to picnicking with a tiger. You might enjoy the meal, but the tiger always eats last.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Exercise #Might #Lasts

Tweetin' ain't cheatin'.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Social Media

As a woman, I know that if I write about another woman, it will be perceived as a catfight.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Writing

Journalism, spooked by rumors of its own obsolescence, has stopped believing in itself. Groans of doom alternate with panicked happy talk.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Believe #Rumor #Journalism

A friendship between reporter and source lasts only until it is profitable for one to betray the other.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Lasts #Source #Betray

If you're famous enough, the rules don't apply.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Enough

Perpetual optimism is annoying. It is a sign that you are not paying attention.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Optimism #Attention #Annoying

[On journalists:] We are a noisy, imperfect lot, struggling to scribble what has been called the first draft of history.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Struggle #Firsts #Journalism

Just because digital technology makes connecting possible doesn't mean you're actually reaching people.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Mean #Technology #People

Celebrity is the religion of our time.
-- Maureen Dowd

We are riveted by the soap operas of public lives. We admire the famous most for what makes them infamous: it reassures us that they are not better and no happier than all the people with their noses pressed hard against the glass.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Glasses #People #Noses

If wit is the most sophisticated form of humor, pranks are the most juvenile.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Wisdom #Sophisticated #Pranks

Americans want to be protected, but not at the cost of vitiating the values that make us Americans.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Cost #Want #Values

It is an astonishing thing that historians will look back and puzzle over, that in the 21st century, American women were such hunted creatures. Even as Republicans try to wrestle women into chastity belts, the Vatican is trying to muzzle American nuns.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Trying #Muzzle #Looks

The insane have achieved political respectability while the sane act too good for it all. The irrational celebrate while the rational act bored and above-it-all.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Bored #Political #Insane

It takes a lot of adrenaline and fear to make me actually write.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Writing #Adrenaline

My eating habits were so bad for many years that I didn't actually know the intricacies of making a salad.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Years #Salad #Eating

I feel like I owe it to the readers to try to pull back the veil and give them the honest version of what's going on. But it's not more fun. If Obama, as he does sometimes already, gets a little snippy with me about something I've written, you're thinking, 'Oh God, the president of the United States is already annoyed with me.'
-- Maureen Dowd

#Fun #Thinking #Giving

For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Two #Century #Feds

And as far as doing God's work, I think the bankers who took government money and then gave out obscene bonuses are the same self-interested sorts Jesus threw out of the temple.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Jesus #Thinking #Government

Are women necessary? Not with Ava around
-- Maureen Dowd

The Mormons even baptized Anne Frank. It took Ernest Michel, then chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, three years to get Mormons to agree to stop proxy-baptizing Holocaust victims.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Years #Holocaust #Religion

The idea of American exceptionalism doesn't extend to Americans being exceptional.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Ideas #American Exceptionalism #Exceptional

As blue chips turn into penny stocks, Wall Street seems less like a symbol of America's macho capitalism and more like that famous Jane Austen character Mrs. Bennet, a flibbertigibbet always anxious about getting richer and her 'poor nerves.'
-- Maureen Dowd

#Wall #Character #Blue

Celebrity distorts democracy by giving the rich, beautiful, and famous more authority than they deserve.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Beautiful #Giving #Democracy

Military guys are rarely as smart as they think they are, and they've never gotten over the fact that civilians run the military.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Running #Smart #Military

Settling is about not embracing what is best for you and accepting what you really don't want. When you settle, you accept less than you deserve. Settling becomes a habit and a way of life, but it doesn't have to be. According to Maureen Dowd, "The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for
-- Maureen Dowd

#Want #Way #Settling

Even when conservatives have all the marbles, they still act as if they're under siege. Now that they are under siege, it is no time for them to act as if they're losing their marbles.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Political #Siege #Losing

Zingers should glow with intelligence as well as drip with contempt.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Should #Wells #Contempt

The Clintons want to do big worthy things, but they also want to squeeze money from rich people wherever they live on planet Earth, insatiably gobbling up cash for politics and charity and themselves from the same incestuous swirl.
-- Maureen Dowd

#People #Charity #Earth

Washington is a place where people have always been suspect of style and overt sexuality. Too much preening signals that you're not up late studying cap-and-trade agreements.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Agreement #People #Style

Reagan didn't socialize with the press. He spent his evenings with Nancy, watching TV with dinner trays. But he knew that to transcend, you can't condescend.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Dinner #Evening #Tvs

The Republicans, with their crazed Reagan fixation, are a last-gasp party, living posthumously, fighting battles on sex, race, immigration and public education long ago won by the other side. They're trying to roll back the clock, but time is passing them by.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Sex #Party #Fighting

Digital platforms are worthless without content. They're shiny sacks with bells and whistles, but without content, they're empty sacks. It is not about pixels versus print. It is not about how you're reading. It is about what you're reading.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Reading #Pixels #Digital

I find having a column a very difficult form of journalism. I'm not a natural like Tom Friedman and Anna Quindlen.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Journalism #Natural #Columns

F.D.R. achieved greatness not by means of imposing his temperament and intellect on the world but by reacting to what the world threw at him.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Mean #Greatness #World

Everybody is continuously connected to everybody else on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Reddit, e-mailing, texting, faster and faster, with the flood of information jeopardizing meaning. Everybody's talking at once in a hypnotic, hyper din: the cocktail party from hell.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Party #Talking #Texting

Eric Schmidt looks innocent enough, with his watercolor blue eyes and his tiny office full of toys and his Google campus stocked with volleyball courts and unlocked bikes and wheat-grass shots and cereal dispensers and Haribo Gummi Bears and heated toilet seats and herb gardens and parking lots with cords hanging to plug in electric cars.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Volleyball #Eye #Garden

I don't understand men. I don't even understand what I don't understand about men.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Men

Now that Hillary [Clinton] has won Pennsylvania, it will take a village to help Obama escape from the suffocating embrace of his rival. Certainly Howard Dean will be of no use steering her to the exit. It's like Micronesia telling Russia to denuke.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Russia #Pennsylvania #Use

Feminism died in 1998 when Hillary allowed henchlings and Democrats to demonize Monica as an unbalanced stalker, and when Gloria Steinem defended Mr. Clinton against Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones by saying he had merely made clumsy passes, then accepted rejection, so there was no sexual harassment involved. As to his dallying with an emotionally immature 21-year-old, Ms. Steinem noted, 'Welcome sexual behavior is about as relevant to sexual harassment as borrowing a car is to stealing one.' Surely what's good for the Comeback Kid is good for the Terminator.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Kids #Years #Car

I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Wall #Jeans #Touching

The Obamas, especially Michelle, have radiated the sense that Americans do not appreciate what they sacrifice by living in a gilded cage. They've forgotten Rule No. 1 of politics: No one sheds tears for anyone lucky enough to live at the White House.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Sacrifice #White #Appreciate

When you're young, and even at times when you're older, it's hard to fathom this: What needs to be nurtured is the stuff that's different, that sets you apart from the pack, rather than the stuff that helps you blend in.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Needs #Stuff #Different

Afghanistan is more than the 'graveyard of empires.' It's the mother of vicious circles.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Mother #Circles #Empires

Women have become so obsessed with not withering, they've forgotten that there are infinite ways to be beautiful.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Beautiful #Way #Forgotten

It is men's worst fear, personally and professionally, that women will pin the sin on them.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Men #Sin #Pins

Women are affected by lunar tides only once a month; men have raging hormones every day.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Men #Tides #Months

President Bush was once asked which Presidential speech he admired most. He replied that it was the one Teddy Roosevelt had in his pocket that had helped cushion the blow of a would-be assassin's bullet.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Blow #Presidential #Would Be

Don't write anything down, but save everything that anyone else writes down.
-- Maureen Dowd

#Writing