Marya Mannes Quotes

81 Sourced Quotes

The right to choose death when life no longer holds meaning is not only the next liberation but the last human right.

Marya Mannes
There's always a job for an engineer
(But nobody wants a poet).

Marya Mannes
You mix the affluence of the white and the poverty of the black and you do not get a civilized society. Integration on an equal level is one thing. Mixing on an unequal level is another.

Marya Mannes
All people talk of money sometimes, everywhere. But not for all people, everywhere, is money the addiction, the obsession, the stimulant, that it seems to be in New York. It is a large part of the clamor, and it is the voice — quite literally — of the man in the street.

Marya Mannes
The incredible new medical technology has made it possible for highly disciplined teams of surgeons... to keep stricken organisms alive even if the brain is irretrievably damaged or lung and heart incapable of functioning without mechanical help. Now it is not dust to dust, but human to vegetable.

Marya Mannes
People on horses look better than they are. People in cars look worse than they are.

Marya Mannes
Until a child can meet reality, he must live in fantasy. But he must create his own fantasy. And it is television's primary damage that it provides ten million children with the same fantasy, ready-made and on a platter.

Marya Mannes
Fear has always been a diminisher of life. Whether bred in the bogs of superstition or clothed in the brocades of dogma and ritual, the specter of death has reduced the living to supplicants, powerless.

Marya Mannes
The suppression of civil liberties is to many less a matter for horror than the curtailment of the freedom to profit.

Marya Mannes
I would call an intellectual one whose instrument of work — his mind — is also his major source of pleasure; a man whose entertainment is his intelligence.

Marya Mannes
The barbarian weapon is fission: the splitting asunder. It has been perfected for death. Our only weapon is fusion: an imperfect process still, though designed for life.

Marya Mannes
Flirtation... is a graceful salute to sex, a small impermanent spark between one human being and another, between a man and a woman not in need of fire.

Marya Mannes
Hoary idea, in any case, expecting a woman to surrender her name to her husband's in exchange for his. Why? Would any man submerge his identity and heritage to the woman he wed?

Marya Mannes
Promiscuous... was a word I had never applied to myself. Possibly no one ever does, for it is a sordid word, reducing many valuable moments to nothing more than doglike copulation.

Marya Mannes
What is asserted by a man is an opinion; what is asserted by a woman is opinionated. A woman with ideas and the ability to express them is something of a social embarrassment, like an unhousebroken pet.

Marya Mannes
Art can excite, titillate, please, entertain, and sometimes shock; but its ultimate function is to ennoble.

Marya Mannes
Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist as long as she manages also to be a good wife, mother, good-looking, good-tempered, well-dressed, well-groomed, unaggressive.

Marya Mannes
Know the difference between Giant and Jumbo? Between two-ounce and a big two-ounce? Between a quart and a full quart? What's a tall 24-inch? What does Extra Long mean? Who's kidding who?

Marya Mannes
The art of flirtation is dying. A man and woman are either in love these days or just friends. In the realm of love, reticence and sophistication should go hand in hand, for one of the joys of life is discovery. Nowadays, instead of progressing from vous to tu, from Mister to Jim, it's 'darling' and 'come to my place' in the first hour.

Marya Mannes
A candidate for office can have no greater advantage than muddled syntax; no greater liability than a command of language.

Marya Mannes
Euthanasia... is simply to be able to die with dignity at a moment when life is devoid of it.

Marya Mannes