Top 90 Gail Collins Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Non-crazy gun advocates – the ones who aren’t stockpiling in preparation for a zombie invasion – don’t like the idea of expanding background checks because they think it’ll be a lot more paperwork. And it probably would make it more difficult to sell guns at, say, a flea market.”

— Gail Collins

2. “There’s more student debt than credit card debt! Everywhere I go, I run into young people trying to build careers while they keep shelling out money on their education loans. If the economy is looking for a new generation of home-buyers, I can’t imagine they’ll get it from these folks.”

— Gail Collins

3. “DePaulo says that ‘singlism’ – a term she coined and for which we are prepared to forgive her – is not just aimed at unmarried women.”

— Gail Collins

4. “Unfortunately, he was about as deep as a melted ice cube.”

— Gail Collins

5. “I would walk a thousand miles To feel your hugs and see your smiles But then one day we had to part The hardest day, it broke my heart But I still see you every day Because in my heart and mind you stay.”

— Gail Collins

6. “Women are needed in the military because there aren’t enough soldiers, and we’re seeing more women serve.”

— Gail Collins

7. “We always need to remember that behind almost every great moment in history, there are heroic people doing really boring and frustrating things for a prolonged period of time.”

— Gail Collins

8. “An estimated 400 women disguised themselves as men to fight in the Civil War. Many were like Amy Clarke, who enlisted so she could remain with her husband when he joined the Confederate Army. Amy continued to fight after he was killed, and she was wounded herself and taken prisoner.”

— Gail Collins

9. “The history of American women is about the fight for freedom, but it’s less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women’s role that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders.”

— Gail Collins

10. “Illegal immigration can never be completely stopped, no matter how high the wall or how many patrol agents you have watching it.”

— Gail Collins

11. “The middle of ‘America’s Women’ is about the Civil War, and how women, black and white, confronted slavery and abolition. As in every other period of crisis, the rules of sexual decorum were suspended due to emergency.”

— Gail Collins

12. “You know, I have a lot of books on my iPad, but when I try to read them, I find myself wandering off to play games. Those are books I’m interested in. I can’t imagine what would have happened to me in college if my biology class had been on the same computer as ‘Words With Friends’ and ‘Doom.’”

— Gail Collins

13. “The center of our story is the tension between the yearning to create a home and the urge to get out of it. I.”

— Gail Collins

14. “If Christmas is for families, what do you do when there are families scattered all over the country? I am pretty sure God wants to make sure I touch all the bases, even if I spend his actual birthday with Delta Airlines.”

— Gail Collins

15. “Any time you write history, you insert your opinion. You pick and choose what you are going to write about. I feel really happy not inserting myself. I spend too much of my life inserting myself. It’s just great to let other people carry the narrative.”

— Gail Collins

16. “Back in the ’70s when my friends in California were at Berkeley, in-state tuition was around $700 a year.”

— Gail Collins

17. “Billy Jean King could not get credit when her husband was in law school and she was winning the Wimbledon, because he had to sign the cards. You know, you had these cases in the ’70s of women who were mayors who couldn’t get credit unless their husbands signed for them.”

— Gail Collins

18. “When the women’s movement started in the 1960s, there was a vision of a future where women didn’t wear makeup or worry about how their hair looked, and everybody wore sensible, comfortable clothes. It ran into an absolute brick wall.”

— Gail Collins

19. “As long as we decline to allow sick, uninsured people to just lie down and die on the side of the road, everybody has to have insurance for the health care system to work sanely.”

— Gail Collins

20. “The idea that ‘if you don’t like how things are going, you can just leave’ is so ingrained in Texas, the secession movement is no surprise.”

— Gail Collins

21. “For the undocumented immigrants, the big priority is just to get out from the shadows, be able to get a driver’s license, buy an airplane ticket and stop worrying about sudden deportation. But for the country as a whole, it’s crucial that everybody have a citizen’s stake in the nation’s welfare.”

— Gail Collins

22. “I have always believed the iron rule of politics was that women don’t vote for men who yell.”

— Gail Collins

23. “You hear younger women say, ‘I don’t believe I’m a feminist. I believe women should have equal right and I believe in fighting for the rights of other women, but I’m certainly not a feminist. No, no, not that!’ It’s just a word. If you called it ‘Fred’ would it be better?”

— Gail Collins

24. “My all-time favorite program in my entire life was ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer.’”

— Gail Collins

25. “One very clear memory I have of college is that I never learned anything in the big lectures. I have a feeling I’d have done even worse if they’d been on a laptop screen.”

— Gail Collins

26. “The term “tomboy,” one nineteenth-century author recalled, looking back at the pre–Civil War era, “was applied to all little girls who showed the least tendency toward thinking and acting for themselves.”

— Gail Collins

27. “My only thought about Margaret Thatcher is the same one I had about Ronald Reagan. I hated a lot of what they did, but once in a while a country just needs a change.”

— Gail Collins

28. “First they gerrymander us into one-party fiefs. Then they tell us they only care about the swing districts. Then they complain about voter apathy.”

— Gail Collins

29. “The key to success for any woman who wants to have a really serious career and a family is to marry a guy who is going to take at least half the responsibility for the house and kids – and sometimes more than half.”

— Gail Collins

30. “Of course, Texas is so huge it really is empty places; people can easily drive an hour and a half to work every day, so even if they’re actually living in the suburbs, it sure feels as if they’re in a remote location.”

— Gail Collins

31. “When the women’s movement began, it was a middle-class phenomenon. Certainly, black women had other stuff to think about in the ’60s besides a women’s movement. Working-class women were slow to get into it.”

— Gail Collins

32. “For a border state, I would argue that Texas is less lunatic on the subject of immigration issues than other places around it, like Arizona. They’re much more comfortable with their long-term identity as a place with a very large Hispanic population.”

— Gail Collins

33. “It is more a mentality than the actual places people live, as Jefferson and Hamilton would argue about – city versus country. For example, someone could have an empty place mentality yet be living in a condo in Boca Raton.”

— Gail Collins

34. “When I was young if a girl married poor, she became a housekeeper and a drudge. If she married wealthy, she became a pet and a doll. – Susan B. Anthony A.”

— Gail Collins

35. “I just really like Houston despite its craziness. There is a sense of energy and a kind of excitement, ‘We’re going places and God knows what’ll happen next.’ It’s very interesting. It’s very exciting.”

— Gail Collins

36. “Sarah Palin is treated like a bimbo sometimes, but she has never given the public the respect they deserve. She acts silly and doesn’t know stuff. She didn’t even finish her term.”

— Gail Collins

37. “Whenever you bring up women’s internal workings, guys want to change the subject. Unless, of course, they’re trying to change the laws.”

— Gail Collins

38. “For years I’ve been hearing 20-somethings say they don’t expect Social Security to be around when they hit 65. Eventually, I came to realize that they really mean that they just don’t expect to be 65. Or 40. Neither did I, when I was 22.”

— Gail Collins

39. “Sarah Palin is an heir to the women’s movement. She has not been constrained by gender. At no point in her life has she thought, ‘I can’t do that because I’m a woman.’”

— Gail Collins

40. “Personally, I’d be really glad to have a national conversation about whether to outlaw most forms of birth control. For once, the kids and their grandparents would find themselves on the same side.”

— Gail Collins

41. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had conversations with politicians who’ve done something morally reprehensible but not indictable, yet still think they should be able to stay in office. The office isn’t a ‘right.’ It’s a kind of loan.”

— Gail Collins

42. “One line I’d draw would be on raising the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare. It sounds fair, since people are living longer. But it isn’t. Lower income workers are the ones who find it hardest to keep working after 65. And they’ll get penalized with lower benefits.”

— Gail Collins

43. “Once when I was working for the Daily News, I was summoned back to work from vacation because Donald Trump announced he was getting a divorce.”

— Gail Collins

44. “I did some research once on the way people in the past imagined the year 2000. They tended to picture the things they already had getting more sophisticated – flying cars, self-cleaning windows. And the folks in the early 1900s had a wildly optimistic estimate of the future of pneumatic tubes.”

— Gail Collins

45. “As in Europe, the typical American witch-suspect was a woman, frequently middle-aged with few or no children and a reputation as a difficult personality.”

— Gail Collins

46. “The IRS targeting certain groups for harassment because of their politics would be unfair. If we found out the NSA was keeping special tabs on everyone who worshiped at a mosque or took a Bible trip through the Middle East, you’d have an uprising.”

— Gail Collins

47. “You reduce illegal immigration by making it harder to get jobs here, or easier to get jobs south of the border. This idea that we can’t pass an immigration law until we hit some imaginary security target is just a way to derail reform.”

— Gail Collins

48. “Elections have to have at least a little meaning. Obama ran on income tax hikes for the wealthy. People knew they were voting for that. They ‘want’ that. And it’s good policy.”

— Gail Collins

49. “In college, the guys aren’t worrying about whether they’ll be able to pursue their career dreams and still have kids.”

— Gail Collins

50. “The theory that women should only be asked to do work that was safe and relatively mundane was ignored whenever something risky or difficult actually needed to be done.”

— Gail Collins