Katharine Whitehorn Quotes & Sayings

Filing is concerned with the past; anything you actually need to see again has to do with the future. — Katharine Whitehorn

As ridiculous to approve of property and let a few men have a grossly unfair share of it, as say you are all for marriage, and then let one man have all the wives. — Katharine Whitehorn

In my next life I want to be a pessimist. Then other people could spend all their time cheering me up. — Katharine Whitehorn

Why do born-again people so often make you wish they'd never been born the first time? — Katharine Whitehorn

The best career advice to give to the young is, 'Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for doing it.' — Katharine Whitehorn

Too great a preoccupation with motives (especially one's own motive) is liable to lead to too little concern for consequences. — Katharine Whitehorn

Hats divide generally into three classes: offensive hats, defensive hats, and shrapnel. — Katharine Whitehorn

Whereas a lot of men used to ask for conversation when they really wanted sex, nowadays they often feel obliged to ask for sex even when they really want conversation. — Katharine Whitehorn

Spring makes everything look filthy. — Katharine Whitehorn

It beats me how Freud could say "What do women want?" as if we all must want the same thing. — Katharine Whitehorn

There's comfort to an awful old dressing-gown a pretty peignoir is powerless to provide, and aging bra elastic, is, I suspect, as near to liberation as most women ever get. — Katharine Whitehorn

The case against censoring anything is absolute: ... nothing that could be censored can be so bad in its effects, in the long run, as censorship itself. — Katharine Whitehorn

Next and hardy annuals are the ones that never come up at all. — Katharine Whitehorn

One reason you are stricken when your parents die is that the audience you've been aiming at all your life - shocking it, pleasing it - has suddenly left the theater. — Katharine Whitehorn

It has long been my boast that I can read or eat anything. But unfortunately, although I eat like a Hoover, I read so slowly that I am always on the smart book three years after everyone else has finished. — Katharine Whitehorn

When it comes to housework the one thing no book of household management can ever tell you is how to begin. Or maybe I mean why. — Katharine Whitehorn

Being young is not having any money; being young is not minding not having any money. — Katharine Whitehorn

An office party is not, as is sometimes supposed, the Managing Director's chance to kiss the tea-girl. It is the tea-girl's chance to kiss the Managing Director (however bizarre an ambition this may seem to anyone who has seen the Managing Director face on). — Katharine Whitehorn

[On the English climate:] People get a bad impression of it by continually trying to treat it as if it was a bank clerk, who ought to be on time on Tuesday next, instead of philosophically seeing it as a painter, who may do anything so long as you don't try to predict what. — Katharine Whitehorn

The main purpose of children's parties is to remind you that there are children more awful than your own. — Katharine Whitehorn

The wind of change, whatever it is, blows most freely through an open mind ... — Katharine Whitehorn

[On Malcolm Muggeridge:] He thinks he was knocked off his horse by God, like St. Paul on the road to Damascus. His critics think he simply fell off it from old age. — Katharine Whitehorn

I just wish, when neither of us has written to my husband's mother, I didn't feel so much worse about it than he does. — Katharine Whitehorn

As anyone who has ever fallen foul of an airport, a conventional hospital or a bad restaurant knows, misery is made up of little things ... — Katharine Whitehorn

I wouldn't say when you've seen one Western you've seen the lot; but when you've seen the lot you get the feeling you've seen one. — Katharine Whitehorn

Any committee that is the slightest use is composed of people who are too busy to want to sit on it for a second longer than they have to. — Katharine Whitehorn

In our society mothers take the place elsewhere occupied by the Fates, the System, Negroes, Communism or Reactionary Imperialist Plots; mothers go on getting blamed until they're eighty, but shouldn't take it personally. — Katharine Whitehorn

The rule is not to talk about money with people who have much more or much less than you. — Katharine Whitehorn

I yield to no one in my admiration for the office as a social center, but it's no place actually to get any work done. — Katharine Whitehorn

American patriotism is generally something that amuses Europeans, I suppose because children look idiotic saluting the flag and because the constitution contains so many cracks through which the lawyers may creep. — Katharine Whitehorn

The disease is painless; it's the cure that hurts. — Katharine Whitehorn

Things a mother should know: how to comfort a son without exactly saying Daddy was wrong. — Katharine Whitehorn

I am all for people having their heart in the right place; but the right place for a heart is not inside the head. — Katharine Whitehorn

I cannot for the life of me see why the umpires, the only two people on a cricket field who are not going to get grass stains on their knees, are the only two people allowed to wear dark trousers. — Katharine Whitehorn

A good marriage is like Dr Who's Tardis: small and banal from the outside but spacious and interesting from within. — Katharine Whitehorn

It might be marvelous to be a man - then I could stop worrying about what's fair to women and just cheerfully assume I was superior, and that they had all been born to iron my shirts. Better still, I could be an Irish man - then I would have all the privileges of being male without giving up the right to be wayward, temperamental and an appealing minority. — Katharine Whitehorn

Outside every thin woman is a fat man trying to get in. — Katharine Whitehorn

From a commercial point of view, if Christmas did not exist it would be necessary to invent it. — Katharine Whitehorn

There are some circles in America where it seems to be more socially acceptable to carry a hand-gun than a packet of cigarettes. — Katharine Whitehorn

A food is not necessarily essential just because your child hates it. — Katharine Whitehorn

It would be nice to think that a censor could allow a genuine work of artistic seriousness and ban a titillating piece of sadism, but it would take a miracle to make such a distinction stick. — Katharine Whitehorn

I am firm. You are obstinate. He is a pig-headed fool. — Katharine Whitehorn

It is a pity that so often the only way to treat girls like people seems to be to treat them like boys. — Katharine Whitehorn

Does anybody who gave up smoking to save a pound a week have a pound at the end of the week? Not on your life. — Katharine Whitehorn

No nice men are good at getting taxis. — Katharine Whitehorn

Have you ever taken anything out of the clothes basket because it had become, relatively, the cleaner thing? — Katharine Whitehorn

I used to think the only use for sport was to give small boys something else to kick besides me. — Katharine Whitehorn

Have you ever taken something out of the clothes hamper because it had become, relatively, the cleanest thing? — Katharine Whitehorn

The Life and Soul, the man who will never go home while there is one man, woman or glass of anything not yet drunk. — Katharine Whitehorn

Americans, indeed, often seem to be so overwhelmed by their children that they'll do anything for them except stay married to the co-producer. — Katharine Whitehorn

I suppose we all share this pipe-dream of being able to reach out a hand and find anything at will; what is amazing is that we think that good filing could somehow make it comes true. On the contrary: putting a letter into a filing system is like releasing your ferret in the Hampton Court maze. — Katharine Whitehorn

It's a pity more men are not bastards by birth instead of vocation. — Katharine Whitehorn

And what would happen to my illusion that I am a force for order in the home if I wasn't married to the only man north of the Tiber who is even untidier than I am? — Katharine Whitehorn