Marya Mannes Quotes

81 Sourced Quotes

He had the familiar defense of all those who wield great power in a popular medium: 'We only give the public what it wants —.' It is the most useful, and least valid, reason for having no convictions that I know of.

Marya Mannes
All wars derive from lack of empathy: the incapacity of one to understand and accept the likeness or difference of another. Whether in nations or the encounters of race and sex, competition then replaces compassion, subjection excludes mutuality.

Marya Mannes
Who's kidding whom? What's the difference between Giant and Jumbo? Quart and full quart? Two-ounce and big two-ounce? What does Extra Long mean? What's a tall 24-inches? And what busy shopper can tell?

Marya Mannes
When women can cherish the vulnerability of men as much as men can exult in the strength of women, a new breed could lift a ruinous yoke from both.

Marya Mannes
In our society to admit inferiority is to be a fool, and to admit superiority is to be an outcast. Those who are in reality superior in intelligence can be accepted by their fellows only if they pretend they are not.

Marya Mannes
I don't think the advertisers have any real idea of their power not only to reflect but to mould society.

Marya Mannes
Until we know what motivates the hearts and minds of men we can understand nothing outside ourselves, nor will we ever reach fulfillment as that greatest miracle of all, the human being.

Marya Mannes
Advertisers in general bear a large part of the responsibility for the deep feelings of inadequacy that drive women to psychiatrists, pills, or the bottle.

Marya Mannes
A man at his desk in a room with a closed door is a man at work. A woman at a desk in any room is available.

Marya Mannes
There is no trick in being young: it happens to you. But the process of maturing is an art to be learned, an effort to be sustained.

Marya Mannes
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