Top 90 Gail Collins Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I used to have a sort of soft spot for Huckabee. He seemed to have a genuinely saintly streak, which caused him to defend illegal immigrants and give pardons to criminals who were perhaps a little less rehabilitated than he had imagined.”

— Gail Collins

52. “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

53. “The history of American women is all about leaving home – crossing oceans and continents, or getting jobs and living on their own.”

— Gail Collins

54. “When the simple word processors came in, writing became crisper, less dense – just because of the way we could instantly edit on the screen. Now the ability to mash up words and pictures and links and songs and tweets is what matters. I can’t imagine what writing will be like in 2154.”

— Gail Collins

55. “But it was a moral issue, too, and a number of Northern women felt they had an obligation to fight an institution that broke up families and subjected young women to sexual molestation. Abolition of slavery was different from other reform movements, partly because it drew women so clearly into politics, and partly because it drew them so near to genuine violence.”

— Gail Collins

56. “Natural Texas politicians make terrible, terrible presidential candidates. Phil Gramm, I remember the ‘Phil Gramm for President’ campaign. I thought that was the worst thing in the history of the world, but Rick Perry was possibly worse.”

— Gail Collins

57. “From a very early age, girls were taught to restrain themselves physically and emotionally.”

— Gail Collins

58. “The high point was that the people are really nice – despite the crazy politics – and I loved being there. The hardest part was knowing some of the things I was probably going to write about Texas would make those nice people very unhappy.”

— Gail Collins

59. “Downplaying their faults is pretty much the point of campaigns. But we do count on them living with the constant terror of public rejection.”

— Gail Collins

60. “Certainly people in empty places feel they have the right to do what they want to their property and don’t necessarily see the effect of their pollution or pesticides on others. But Texans have an appreciation for water problems and are very aware of the droughts.”

— Gail Collins

61. “Lobbyists really are experts in their fields and know what they are talking about. That’s why the government always listens to them as they tell the government what it’s doing wrong and what it should be doing instead...”

— Gail Collins

62. “I grew up in one of the most socially conservative neighborhoods in Ohio, and my parents were traditional Catholics. But in her old age, my mother got her home health care from a guy who was gay, who was wonderful to her. Before she died, she rode a float in the Cincinnati Gay Pride Parade.”

— Gail Collins

63. “There’s always been that theory that if a candidate can’t run a decent campaign, he probably can’t run a decent presidency. That might be true, although sadly I must admit that running a brilliant campaign does not translate into running a brilliant White House.”

— Gail Collins

64. “Hillary Clinton almost got to be president. The reasons why she didn’t become president had to do with bad judgments about how to handle the early caucus states, which is not a gender-specific trait.”

— Gail Collins

65. “Despite my excellent mood, I don’t have any sympathy for Romney. If he’d been a good candidate he wouldn’t have had a different campaign for every month on the calendar.”

— Gail Collins

66. “Certainly Nancy Reagan had an extraordinary effect on her husband. I’m truly not sure that, say, Laura Bush had that much effect on the Bush administration. She certainly, you know, seems to be a nice person who I think the public likes. But I can’t really put my finger on any huge impact she’s had.”

— Gail Collins

67. “If you live in a place that you perceive to be a crowded place, you appreciate government; you see it as this thing that protects you against crime, that keeps order, that makes sure that nobody puts a massage parlor next to your house, that keeps other people’s dogs from pooping on the sidewalk.”

— Gail Collins

68. “Well, it’d certainly be fascinating if we discovered that gays were better at being married than heterosexuals are. Talk about irony.”

— Gail Collins

69. “I don’t think the folks in the low-tax states really want to go into a fairness discussion. Residents of Connecticut and New York would love to remind them how much they pay in federal taxes to support programs for Mississippi and South Dakota.”

— Gail Collins

70. “Can I say that I think it should be against the law for one state to use taxpayer money to try to bribe businesses in another state to move? Which then causes the target state to use taxpayer dollars to try to bribe the businesses to stay.”

— Gail Collins

71. “This is the moment when I should also admit that when the Internet first arrived I kept telling people it was a fad.”

— Gail Collins

72. “Over the long run, many of Perry’s stances boil down to following the money.”

— Gail Collins

73. “Women in America will have to find an answer for the pressures of work and family, but if you really care about women’s issues you have to think about women in the world, especially Africa, Asia and the Middle East.”

— Gail Collins

74. “Nobody gets to grow old in the America they grew up in.”

— Gail Collins

75. “You can hit as many revolutions as you want, but women are always going to wear uncomfortable shoes that look good.”

— Gail Collins

76. “There are competing studies on how much crime drops or doesn’t drop when there are strict rules on gun possession and sale. I don’t think there’s any question that New York City’s very tough laws have reduced violence.”

— Gail Collins

77. “In 1838, Connecticut paid $14.50 a month to male teachers and $5.75 a month to women.”

— Gail Collins

78. “At the beginning of his administration, Obama homed right in on Medicare, which he wanted to fix by reducing the overall cost of health care in this country. He risked everything – some would claim he lost everything – by being so single-minded.”

— Gail Collins

79. “When people say this isn’t the America they grew up in, they’re right. Nobody gets to grow old in the America they grew up in.”

— Gail Collins

80. “Once you’re done being president, you tend to want to defend your record more than plumb your inner feelings. I find it hard to imagine Obama going home at night and writing sensitive, introspective journal entries about his meeting with John Boehner.”

— Gail Collins

81. “I used to like John McCain, too, but I must admit that was because he was bucking his party to do things I agreed with. I would not have had that reaction if, say, Bernie Sanders decided to rebel out of principle and support privatizing Social Security.”

— Gail Collins

82. “My own dream is that we discover that the NSA has been secretly keeping files on members of the National Rifle Association.”

— Gail Collins

83. “There have been tons of politicians who were slow to accept equal rights when it meant changes in the established social order. Many eventually came around, admitted they were wrong, and were forgiven. But the ones who actively choose hate-mongering don’t ever get a pass.”

— Gail Collins

84. “I’m being driven crazy by people who are obsessed with limiting the scope of government, but feel perfectly free to demand that government get involved in women’s most personal choices.”

— Gail Collins

85. “No matter what the ladies’ contribution, the Revolution was not fought to prove that all women were created equal.”

— Gail Collins

86. “Child, along with the Grimke sisters, was unusual even among abolitionists in her belief in integration and the equality of the races. The Northern women who worked for abolition were generally not free of racial prejudice – many female abolition societies refused to allow black members.”

— Gail Collins

87. “The near-universal message of television programming was that girls never got to do anything interesting, and then grew up to be women who faded into the woodwork completely.”

— Gail Collins

88. “And even in circumstances less critical, women were almost always welcomed in new enterprises that hadn’t yet become either prestigious or profitable – whether it was early radio or early cattle drives.”

— Gail Collins

89. “It would be hard to find a more perfect example of the contradictions of nineteenth-century womanhood than the workaholic editor continually reminding her readers how lucky they were to be presiding over the hearth rather than engaging in “the silly struggle for honor and preferment” in the outside world.”

— Gail Collins

90. “The first successful sanitary napkins went on sale in 1921, in what must have been one of the most important unheralded moments in the history of American women.”

— Gail Collins

91. “The bottle of morphine is wrapped up and passed to the child over the counter,” a Tennessee doctor wrote. Doctors and pharmacists had little compunction about dispensing narcotics. “Young women cannot go to a ball without taking a dose of morphine to make them agreeable,” a druggist said in 1876. A North Carolina doctor claimed he had given one patient between 2,500 and 3,000 shots over eighteen months “and so far see no signs of the opium habit.”

— Gail Collins

92. “But the Puritan women had crossed a large ocean in very small ships to get to America, and many of them were not feeling particularly deferential. When the residents of Chebacco, a town near Gloucester, decided they wanted to build their own meetinghouse, the men went off to Boston to petition the local authorities for permission. While they were gone, the women built the meetinghouse themselves.”

— Gail Collins