Top 60 Clare Boothe Luce Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Clare Boothe Luce

2. “A great man is one sentence.”

— Clare Boothe Luce

3. “Courage is the ladder on which all the other virtues mount.”

— Clare Boothe Luce

4. “A woman’s best protection is a little money of her own.”

— Clare Boothe Luce

5. “Money can’t buy happiness, but it can make you awfully comfortable while you’re being miserable.”

— Clare Boothe Luce

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

— Clare Boothe Luce

7. “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.”

— Clare Boothe Luce

8. “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.”

— Clare Boothe Luce

9. “I hope I shall have ambition until the day I die.”

— Clare Boothe Luce

10. “There aren’t many women now I’d like to see as President – but there are fewer men.”

— Clare Boothe Luce

11. “Home is where you hang your architect.”

— Clare Boothe Luce

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

— Clare Boothe Luce

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

— Clare Boothe Luce

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

— Clare Boothe Luce

15. “Communism is the opiate of the intellectuals – With no cure except as a guillotine might be called a cure for dandruff.”

— Clare Boothe Luce

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

— Clare Boothe Luce

17. “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?”

— Clare Boothe Luce

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

— Clare Boothe Luce

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

— Clare Boothe Luce

20. “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?”

— Clare Boothe Luce

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

— Clare Boothe Luce

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

— Clare Boothe Luce

23. “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.”

— Clare Boothe Luce

24. “What generally passes for ‘thought’ among the majority of mankind is the time one takes out to rearrange one’s prejudices.”

— Clare Boothe Luce

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

— Clare Boothe Luce

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

— Clare Boothe Luce

27. “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.”

— Clare Boothe Luce

28. “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.”

— Clare Boothe Luce

29. “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.”

— Clare Boothe Luce

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

— Clare Boothe Luce

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

— Clare Boothe Luce

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

— Clare Boothe Luce

33. “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.”

— Clare Boothe Luce

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

— Clare Boothe Luce

35. “Nature abhors a virgin – a frozen asset.”

— Clare Boothe Luce

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

— Clare Boothe Luce

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

— Clare Boothe Luce

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

— Clare Boothe Luce

39. “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.”

— Clare Boothe Luce

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

— Clare Boothe Luce

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

— Clare Boothe Luce

42. “Women can’t have an honest exchange in front of men without having it called a cat fight.”

— Clare Boothe Luce

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

— Clare Boothe Luce

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

— Clare Boothe Luce

45. “Guns know no policy except destruction.”

— Clare Boothe Luce

46. “I can’t avoid writing. It’s a sort of nervous tic I have developed since I gave up needlepoint.”

— Clare Boothe Luce

47. “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.”

— Clare Boothe Luce

48. “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?”

— Clare Boothe Luce

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

— Clare Boothe Luce

50. “Autobiography is mostly alibiography.”

— Clare Boothe Luce