Top 80 Florence King Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you ever meet someone who cannot understand why solitary confinement is considered punishment, you have met a misanthrope.”

— Florence King

2. “If we define a misanthrope as ‘someone who does not suffer fools and likes to see fools suffer,’ we have described a person with something to look forward to.”

— Florence King

3. “America is the only country in the world where you can suffer culture shock without leaving home.”

— Florence King

4. “True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.”

— Florence King

5. “I don’t suffer fools, and I like to see fools suffer.”

— Florence King

6. “A home without a grandmother is like an egg without salt.”

— Florence King

7. “Men are not very good at loving, but they are experts at admiring and respecting; the woman who goes after their admiration and respect will often come out better than she who goes out after their love.”

— Florence King

8. “I do believe in reincarnation, but I do not believe there is life before noon.”

— Florence King

9. “Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.”

— Florence King

10. “Insecurity breeds treachery: if you are kind to people who hate themselves, they will hate you as well.”

— Florence King

11. “American couples have gone to such lengths to avoid the interference of in-laws that they have to pay marriage counselors to interfere between them.”

— Florence King

12. “Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker’s already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs.”

— Florence King

13. “Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.”

— Florence King

14. “Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt, it is contempt.”

— Florence King

15. “We worship education but hate learning. We worship success but hate the successful. We worship fame but hate the famous.”

— Florence King

16. “I simply like guns because you can’t shoot people without them.”

— Florence King

17. “We worship education but hate learning.”

— Florence King

18. “People are so busy dreaming the American Dream, fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be, that they’re all asleep at the switch. Consequently we are living in the Age of Human Error.”

— Florence King

19. “It takes only one child to raze a village.”

— Florence King

20. “Oppressed people are treacherous for the simple reason that treachery is both a means of survival and a way to curry favor with one’s oppressor.”

— Florence King

21. “Never look on the bright side. The glare is blinding.”

— Florence King

22. “In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.”

— Florence King

23. “The joker in the deck of lesbian fidelity is female vanity: no woman of fifty is going to undress in front of a woman of twenty no matter how much she might lust for her.”

— Florence King

24. “Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind.”

— Florence King

25. “Wit goes for the jugular, not the jocular, and it’s the opposite of football; instead of building character, it tears it down.”

— Florence King

26. “Golf is an exercise in Scottish pointlessness for people who are no longer able to throw telephone poles at each other.”

— Florence King

27. “Chinks in America’s egalitarian armor are not hard to find. Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.”

— Florence King

28. “I wasn’t used to children and they were getting on my nerves. Worse, it appeared that I was a child, too. I hadn’t known that before; I thought I was just short.”

— Florence King

29. “He travels fastest who travels alone, and that goes double for she. Real feminism is spinsterhood.”

— Florence King

30. “Judge not, lest ye be judged judgmental.”

— Florence King

31. “There is more sexism in a year’s worth of movies than actually exists in a woman’s entire lifetime.”

— Florence King

32. “I don’t mind being regarded as perverted and unnatural, but I would die if people thought I was a Democrat.”

— Florence King

33. “The copyeditor I drew was a brachycephalic, web-footed cretin who should have been in an institution learning how to make brooms.”

— Florence King

34. “Americans are so emotionally fragile that soon we will have to be carried around in plastic bubbles and fed with an eye-dropper.”

— Florence King

35. “Of all the old maid’s blessing, the greatest is carte blanche. Spinsterhood is powerful; once a woman is called “that crazy old maid” she can get away with anything.”

— Florence King

36. “To me, elitism means a love of excellence and superiority, but America has declared war on both and developed a sick love of the lowest common denominator to make sure no-one becomes too fine for our touted democracy. We are almost at the point of regarding every virtue as elitist.”

— Florence King

37. “The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners.”

— Florence King

38. “Real feminism is spinsterhood. It’s time America admitted that old maids give all women a good name.”

— Florence King

39. “Kings and queens might do wicked things, but they don’t nag. One thing I like about Bloody Mary: she never said a word about lung cancer.”

— Florence King

40. “There’s no national glue holding us together because somebody put too much pluribus in the unum.”

— Florence King

41. “Owning your own home is America’s unique recipe for avoiding revolution and promoting pseudo-equality at the same time.”

— Florence King

42. “In Mississippi the important thing is hooch, not bar equipment.”

— Florence King

43. “Episcopalians have always preferred the flying buttress to the pillar of the church.”

— Florence King

44. “Gradually my whole concept of time changed until I thought of a month as having twenty-five days of humanness and five others when I might just as well have been an animal in a steel trap.”

— Florence King

45. “It’s the Government’s job to print the money, deliver the mail and declare war. Now give me my cigarettes.”

— Florence King

46. “There’s something unrefined about a reading woman, they always reek of the lamp. How can she grow up to be a lady if she’s always got her nose in a book? Granny Rudin.”

— Florence King

47. “Resistance to team play seemed to pour like wet cement through my bones, displacing supple marrow, until I was ballasted with my own contempt.”

— Florence King

48. “Randian heroes come off as metaphors for Jews because they are beset by irrational forces that try to bar them from the professions and use their virtues against them to bring about their destruction.”

— Florence King

49. “Spinsterhood is Nature’s Own Feminism.”

— Florence King

50. “The Apologizer Bunny keeps going and going and going.”

— Florence King