Top 52 Katharine Whitehorn Quotes
#1. [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
#2. Have you ever taken something out of the clothes hamper because it had become, relatively, the cleanest thing?
Katharine Whitehorn
#3. In my next life I want to be a pessimist. Then other people could spend all their time cheering me up.
Katharine Whitehorn
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Why do born-again people so often make you wish they'd never been born the first time?
Katharine Whitehorn
#9. 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
#11. Hats divide generally into three classes: offensive hats, defensive hats, and shrapnel.
Katharine Whitehorn
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. Have you ever taken anything out of the clothes basket because it had become, relatively, the cleaner thing?
Katharine Whitehorn
#17. From a commercial point of view, if Christmas did not exist it would be necessary to invent it.
Katharine Whitehorn
#18. 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
#19. A good marriage is like Dr Who's Tardis: small and banal from the outside but spacious and interesting from within.
Katharine Whitehorn
#20. Too great a preoccupation with motives (especially one's own motive) is liable to lead to too little concern for consequences.
Katharine Whitehorn
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. I used to think the only use for sport was to give small boys something else to kick besides me.
Katharine Whitehorn
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. [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
#28. Filing is concerned with the past; anything you actually need to see again has to do with the future.
Katharine Whitehorn
#29. 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
#30. The main purpose of children's parties is to remind you that there are children more awful than your own.
Katharine Whitehorn
#31. 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
#33. 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
#35. 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
#36. Things a mother should know: how to comfort a son without exactly saying Daddy was wrong.
Katharine Whitehorn
#37. The rule is not to talk about money with people who have much more or much less than you.
Katharine Whitehorn
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. Being young is not having any money; being young is not minding not having any money.
Katharine Whitehorn
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. It beats me how Freud could say "What do women want?" as if we all must want the same thing.
Katharine Whitehorn
#44. The wind of change, whatever it is, blows most freely through an open mind ...
Katharine Whitehorn
#45. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#52. 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
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