Top 40 Maureen Dowd Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.”

— Maureen Dowd

Featured in: Self-Love Quotes, Fulfillment Quotes, Motivational Quotes for Women, Expectations Quotes, Strong Women Quotes

2. “Afghanistan is more than the ‘graveyard of empires.’ It’s the mother of vicious circles.”

— Maureen Dowd

3. “Just because digital technology makes connecting possible doesn’t mean you’re actually reaching people.”

— Maureen Dowd

4. “Wooing the press is an exercise roughly akin to picnicking with a tiger. You might enjoy the meal, but the tiger always eats last.”

— Maureen Dowd

5. “Women are affected by lunar tides only once a month; men have raging hormones every day.”

— Maureen Dowd

6. “Digital platforms are worthless without content. They’re shiny sacks with bells and whistles, but without content, they’re empty sacks. It is not about pixels versus print. It is not about how you’re reading. It is about what you’re reading.”

— Maureen Dowd

Featured in: Reading Quotes

7. “Are women necessary? Not with Ava around.”

— Maureen Dowd

8. “The sounds of silence are a dim recollection now, like mystery, privacy and paying attention to one thing – or one person – at a time.”

— Maureen Dowd

9. “Perpetual optimism is annoying. It is a sign that you are not paying attention.”

— Maureen Dowd

10. “It takes a lot of adrenaline and fear to make me actually write.”

— Maureen Dowd

11. “Everybody is continuously connected to everybody else on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Reddit, e-mailing, texting, faster and faster, with the flood of information jeopardizing meaning. Everybody’s talking at once in a hypnotic, hyper din: the cocktail party from hell.”

— Maureen Dowd

12. “Don’t write anything down, but save everything that anyone else writes down.”

— Maureen Dowd

13. “If wit is the most sophisticated form of humor, pranks are the most juvenile.”

— Maureen Dowd

14. “I don’t understand men. I don’t even understand what I don’t understand about men.”

— Maureen Dowd

15. “As blue chips turn into penny stocks, Wall Street seems less like a symbol of America’s macho capitalism and more like that famous Jane Austen character Mrs. Bennet, a flibbertigibbet always anxious about getting richer and her ‘poor nerves.’”

— Maureen Dowd

16. “The Obamas, especially Michelle, have radiated the sense that Americans do not appreciate what they sacrifice by living in a gilded cage. They’ve forgotten Rule No. 1 of politics: No one sheds tears for anyone lucky enough to live at the White House.”

— Maureen Dowd

17. “If you’re famous enough, the rules don’t apply.”

— Maureen Dowd

18. “Celebrity distorts democracy by giving the rich, beautiful, and famous more authority than they deserve.”

— Maureen Dowd

19. “We are riveted by the soap operas of public lives. We admire the famous most for what makes them infamous: it reassures us that they are not better and no happier than all the people with their noses pressed hard against the glass.”

— Maureen Dowd

20. “When you’re young, and even at times when you’re older, it’s hard to fathom this: What needs to be nurtured is the stuff that’s different, that sets you apart from the pack, rather than the stuff that helps you blend in.”

— Maureen Dowd

21. “Celebrity is the religion of our time.”

— Maureen Dowd

22. “President Bush was once asked which Presidential speech he admired most. He replied that it was the one Teddy Roosevelt had in his pocket that had helped cushion the blow of a would-be assassin’s bullet.”

— Maureen Dowd

23. “Military guys are rarely as smart as they think they are, and they’ve never gotten over the fact that civilians run the military.”

— Maureen Dowd

24. “Women have become so obsessed with not withering, they’ve forgotten that there are infinite ways to be beautiful.”

— Maureen Dowd

25. “The insane have achieved political respectability while the sane act too good for it all. The irrational celebrate while the rational act bored and above-it-all.”

— Maureen Dowd

26. “Zingers should glow with intelligence as well as drip with contempt.”

— Maureen Dowd

27. “The Mormons even baptized Anne Frank. It took Ernest Michel, then chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, three years to get Mormons to agree to stop proxy-baptizing Holocaust victims.”

— Maureen Dowd

28. “When I need to work up my nerve to write a tough column, I try to think of myself as Emma Peel in a black leather catsuit.”

— Maureen Dowd

29. “Reagan didn’t socialize with the press. He spent his evenings with Nancy, watching TV with dinner trays. But he knew that to transcend, you can’t condescend.”

— Maureen Dowd

30. “It is men’s worst fear, personally and professionally, that women will pin the sin on them.”

— Maureen Dowd

31. “Personally, I’ve decided to stop evolving.”

— Maureen Dowd

32. “It is an astonishing thing that historians will look back and puzzle over, that in the 21st century, American women were such hunted creatures. Even as Republicans try to wrestle women into chastity belts, the Vatican is trying to muzzle American nuns.”

— Maureen Dowd

33. “My eating habits were so bad for many years that I didn’t actually know the intricacies of making a salad.”

— Maureen Dowd

34. “The Clintons want to do big worthy things, but they also want to squeeze money from rich people wherever they live on planet Earth, insatiably gobbling up cash for politics and charity and themselves from the same incestuous swirl.”

— Maureen Dowd

35. “I find having a column a very difficult form of journalism. I’m not a natural like Tom Friedman and Anna Quindlen.”

— Maureen Dowd

36. “Even when conservatives have all the marbles, they still act as if they’re under siege. Now that they are under siege, it is no time for them to act as if they’re losing their marbles.”

— Maureen Dowd

37. “For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both.”

— Maureen Dowd

38. “The idea of American exceptionalism doesn’t extend to Americans being exceptional.”

— Maureen Dowd

39. “As a woman, I know that if I write about another woman, it will be perceived as a catfight.”

— Maureen Dowd

40. “Journalism, spooked by rumors of its own obsolescence, has stopped believing in itself. Groans of doom alternate with panicked happy talk.”

— Maureen Dowd

41. “And as far as doing God’s work, I think the bankers who took government money and then gave out obscene bonuses are the same self-interested sorts Jesus threw out of the temple.”

— Maureen Dowd

42. “I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me.”

— Maureen Dowd

43. “As much as anybody since George Wallace or Pat Buchanan, he has overtly sent dog whistles of race out to white working-class voters. That gratuitous defamation of group after group, person after person, is just anathema to Obama. He genuinely believes this guy would be a calamity for the country.” Unlike the Bushes, who outsourced their political thuggery, Donald Trump does his own wet work. “He.”

— Maureen Dowd

44. “Good and evil are not like the Redskins and the Cowboys.”

— Maureen Dowd

45. “Washington is a place where people have always been suspect of style and overt sexuality. Too much preening signals that you’re not up late studying cap-and-trade agreements.”

— Maureen Dowd

46. “Americans want to be protected, but not at the cost of vitiating the values that make us Americans.”

— Maureen Dowd

47. “A friendship between reporter and source lasts only until it is profitable for one to betray the other.”

— Maureen Dowd