Maureen Dowd Quotes & Sayings

If there's one thing white men have never had a problem with in this clubby, white marble enclave of Washington, it's getting pulled up the ladder by other men. — Maureen Dowd

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

Obama also allowed Hillary supporters to insert an absurd statement into the platform suggesting that media sexism spurred her loss and that 'demeaning portrayals of women ... dampen the dreams of our daughters' [ ... ] It would have been better to put this language in the platform: 'A woman who wildly mismanages and bankrupts a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar campaign operation, and then blames sexism in society, will dampen the dreams of our daughters.' — Maureen Dowd

Celebrity is the religion of our time. — Maureen Dowd

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

A friendship between reporter and source lasts only until it is profitable for one to betray the other. — Maureen Dowd

Just because digital technology makes connecting possible doesn't mean you're actually reaching people. — Maureen Dowd

{My mom] long ago advised me, when I was feeling blue or self-doubting about men, that the best thing to do was go out and buy a red lipstick or a red dress. 'It will be your red badge of courage,' she said. — Maureen Dowd

Obama hates selling. He thinks people should just accept the right thing to do. — Maureen Dowd

It's passing strange that Obama, carried to a second term by women, blacks and Latinos, chooses to give away the plumiest Cabinet and White House jobs to white dudes. — Maureen Dowd

Celebrity distorts democracy by giving the rich, beautiful, and famous more authority than they deserve. — Maureen Dowd

The Republicans, with their crazed Reagan fixation, are a last-gasp party, living posthumously, fighting battles on sex, race, immigration and public education long ago won by the other side. They're trying to roll back the clock, but time is passing them by. — Maureen Dowd

The guilty pleasure I miss most when I'm out slogging on the campaign trail is the chance to sprawl on the chaise and watch a vacuously spunky and generically sassy chick flick. — Maureen Dowd

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

If you're famous enough, the rules don't apply. — Maureen Dowd

Will Trump, who has scant impulse control and who's willing to say the most insulting, provocative things that people wouldn't say at a dinner party much less a global forum, get into a tweet battle with a madman and start a world war? Will Hillary ever seem on the level? Or will she always be surrounded by a cordon of creepy henchmen and Clinton Inc. sycophants, shrouded in a miasma of money grabs and conveniently disappearing records and emails? Both — Maureen Dowd

The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for. — Maureen Dowd

Women have become so obsessed with not withering, they've forgotten that there are infinite ways to be beautiful. — Maureen Dowd

The idea of American exceptionalism doesn't extend to Americans being exceptional. — Maureen Dowd

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

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

Why can't Google, which likes to see itself as a 'Don't Be Evil' benevolent force in society, just write us a big check for using our stories, so we can keep checks and balances alive and continue to provide the search engine with our stories? — Maureen Dowd

President Obama thinks he can use emotion to bring pressure on Congress. But that's not how adults with power respond to things. — Maureen Dowd

Paul Ryan, who teamed up with Akin in the House to sponsor harsh anti-abortion bills, may look young and hip and new generation, with his iPod full of heavy metal jams and his cute kids. But he's just a fresh face on a Taliban creed - the evermore antediluvian, anti-women, anti-immigrant, anti-gay conservative core. Amiable in khakis and polo shirts, Ryan is the perfect modern leader to rally medieval Republicans who believe that Adam and Eve cavorted with dinosaurs. — Maureen Dowd

Eric Schmidt looks innocent enough, with his watercolor blue eyes and his tiny office full of toys and his Google campus stocked with volleyball courts and unlocked bikes and wheat-grass shots and cereal dispensers and Haribo Gummi Bears and heated toilet seats and herb gardens and parking lots with cords hanging to plug in electric cars. — Maureen Dowd

I feel like I owe it to the readers to try to pull back the veil and give them the honest version of what's going on. But it's not more fun. If Obama, as he does sometimes already, gets a little snippy with me about something I've written, you're thinking, 'Oh God, the president of the United States is already annoyed with me.' — Maureen Dowd

Who knows? If women all end up with the same face and body, men may gravitate toward the quirky. Then the chicks with the laugh lines and love handles will be the lucky ones. — Maureen Dowd

Americans want to be protected, but not at the cost of vitiating the values that make us Americans. — Maureen Dowd

The Mayans were right, as it turns out, when they predicted the world would end in 2012. It was just a select world: the G.O.P. universe of arrogant, uptight, entitled, bossy, retrogressive white guys ... Instead of smallpox, plagues, drought and Conquistadors, the Republican decline will be traced to a stubborn refusal to adapt to a world where poor people and sick people and black people and brown people and female people and gay people count. — Maureen Dowd

Romantic googling can be as dangerous as drunk text messaging. Of course hell hath no fury like a woman who Google-bombs her old flames name with a word like impotent. — Maureen Dowd

American women are evolving backward
becoming more focused on their looks than ever. Feminism has been defeated by narcissism. — Maureen Dowd

The wound-tight, travel-light Obama has a distaste for the adversarial and the random. But if you stick too rigidly to a 'No Drama' rule in the White House, you risk keeping reality at bay. Presidencies are always about crisis management. — Maureen Dowd

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

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

The Republican game is hilariously transparent: if Obama doesn't shift to more muscular postures, he's not a patriot. If he does, he's a flip-flopper. — Maureen Dowd

[On journalists:] We are a noisy, imperfect lot, struggling to scribble what has been called the first draft of history. — Maureen Dowd

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

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

The C.E.O. of Google doesn't look like a Dick Cheney World Domination sort whom we should worry about as Google ogles our houses, our oceans, our foibles, our movements and our tastes. — Maureen Dowd

F.D.R. achieved greatness not by means of imposing his temperament and intellect on the world but by reacting to what the world threw at him. — Maureen Dowd

I find having a column a very difficult form of journalism. I'm not a natural like Tom Friedman and Anna Quindlen. — Maureen Dowd

Women fear that men will have their way and then slither away. Men fear that women will come back and boil their bunnies. — Maureen Dowd

Obama invented himself against all odds and repeated parental abandonment, and he worked hard to regiment his emotions. But now that can come across as imperviousness and inflexibility. He wants to run the agenda; he doesn't want the agenda to run him. Once you become president, though, there's no way to predict what your crises will be. — Maureen Dowd

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

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

When I started as a White House correspondent, there was a lot of criticism from guys saying, 'She focuses too much on the person but not enough on policy.' I never understood that argument at all. I just didn't agree with the premise. — Maureen Dowd

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

Maybe Obama was not even the person he was waiting for. — Maureen Dowd

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

We are supposed to believe that every dollar given to a Clinton is a dollar that improves the world. But is it? Clintonworld is a galaxy where personal enrichment and political advancement blend seamlessly, and where a cast of jarringly familiar characters pad their pockets every which way to Sunday. — Maureen Dowd

Obama sees himself as such a huge change that he can be cautious about other societal changes. But what he doesn't realize is that legalizing gay marriage is like electing a black president. Before you do it, it seems inconceivable. Once it's done, you can't remember what all the fuss was about. — Maureen Dowd

Women are affected by lunar tides only once a month; men have raging hormones every day. — Maureen Dowd

We've become a nation of Frankensteins, and our monster is us. With everyone working so hard at altering their facades, we no longer have natural selection. We have unnatural selection. — Maureen Dowd

When you go into a fight saying you're probably going to lose, you're probably going to lose. — Maureen Dowd

Good and evil are not like the Redskins and the Cowboys. — Maureen Dowd

One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly. — Maureen Dowd

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

Women can stand on the Empire State Building and scream to the heavens that they are equal to men and liberated, but until they have the same anatomy, it's a lie. It's more of a man's world today than ever. Men can eat their cake in unlimited bakeries. — Maureen Dowd

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

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

If Americans are worried about money in politics, there is no larger concern than the Clintons, who are cosseted in a world where rich people endlessly scratch the backs of rich people. — Maureen Dowd

Materialism has defeated feminism as well. In a sign of the times, Gloria Steinem was on the picket line when the first American DeBeers store opened on Fifth Avenue in June 2005, protesting the evictions of Bushmen in Botswana to make room for diamond miners and the charges that the company dealt in "blood diamonds" used to finance civil wars in Africa.
Her presence meant nothing to young Hollywood beauties who are pleased to shill for the diamond industry in magazine layouts and personal appearances.
As Steinem stood outside, Lindsay Lohan was inside the party, gushing over the possibility that she could get to wear one of the big rocks.
Asked by reporters about the Bushmen controversy, she shrugged it off: "I don't get involved in any drama. — Maureen Dowd

Don't write anything down, but save everything that anyone else writes down. — Maureen Dowd

McChrystal never should have been hired for this job given the outrageous cover-up he participated in after the friendly fire death of Pat Tillman. He was lucky to keep the job after his 'Seven Days in May' stunt in London last year when he openly lobbied and undercut the president on the surge.
But with the latest sassing, and the continued Sisyphean nature of the surge he urged, McChrystal should offer his resignation. He should try subordination for a change. — Maureen Dowd

So this general with the background in intelligence who is supposed to conquer Afghanistan can't even figure out what Rolling Stone is? We're not talking Guns & Ammo here; we're talking the antiwar hippie magazine. — Maureen Dowd

We no longer have natural selection. We have unnatural selection. Survival of the fittest has been replaced by survival of the fakest. — Maureen Dowd

McChrystal's defenders at the Pentagon were making the case Tuesday that the president and his men - (the McChrystal snipers spared Hillary) - must put aside their hurt feelings about being painted as weak sisters. Obama should not fire the serially insubordinate general, they reasoned, because that would undermine the mission in Afghanistan, and if that happens, then Obama would be further weakened.
So the commander in chief can be bad-mouthed as weak by the military but then he can't punish the military because that would make him weak? It's the same sort of pass-the-Advil vicious circle reasoning the military always uses. — Maureen Dowd

Instead of broadening the choices of how to look good, we have only broadened the ways we try to look alike. Women are headed toward one face, one body and one expression. — Maureen Dowd

For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both. — Maureen Dowd

If wit is the most sophisticated form of humor, pranks are the most juvenile. — Maureen Dowd

Now that Hillary [Clinton] has won Pennsylvania, it will take a village to help Obama escape from the suffocating embrace of his rival. Certainly Howard Dean will be of no use steering her to the exit. It's like Micronesia telling Russia to denuke. — Maureen Dowd

We had the Belle Epoque. Now we have the Botox Epoque, permeated by plastic emotions from antidepressants and plastic veneers from collagen, silicone, cosmetic surgery and Botox. — Maureen Dowd

My eating habits were so bad for many years that I didn't actually know the intricacies of making a salad. — Maureen Dowd

Personally, I've decided to stop evolving. — Maureen Dowd

I'm into clothes, but in a way that's related to wanting to walk into a film noir movie. You know, I love to go to vintage stores, but mostly it's stuff that I don't have anywhere to wear ... I don't have the life that goes with the clothes. — Maureen Dowd

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

Zingers should glow with intelligence as well as drip with contempt. — Maureen Dowd

I don't understand men. I don't even understand what I don't understand about men. — Maureen Dowd

Perpetual optimism is annoying. It is a sign that you are not paying attention. — Maureen Dowd

Afghanistan is more than the 'graveyard of empires.' It's the mother of vicious circles. — Maureen Dowd

Are women necessary? Not with Ava around — Maureen Dowd

As a woman, I know that if I write about another woman, it will be perceived as a catfight. — Maureen Dowd

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

Journalism, spooked by rumors of its own obsolescence, has stopped believing in itself. Groans of doom alternate with panicked happy talk. — Maureen Dowd

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

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

It takes a lot of adrenaline and fear to make me actually write. — Maureen Dowd

It is men's worst fear, personally and professionally, that women will pin the sin on them. — Maureen Dowd