Maureen Dowd Quotations

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

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

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

She more than earned her sobriquet, 'Miss Run Amok'.

If that were to happen, the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands.

He exists in the public mind as bits and pieces of his characters-Butch Cassidy's charm, Ben Quick's machismo, Cool Hand Luke's defiance, Harper's irony, Hud's disdain.

Judy told the Times she ... intends to return to the newsroom 'hoping to cover the same thing I've always covered, the threat to country'.

Sorely in need of a tight editorial leash, (Miller) was kept on no leash at all, and that has hurt this paper and its trust with readers.

They have been painting the barn red and white, chasing skunks from the stage, clearing bird nests from the spotlights, scraping mildew from costumes and very gingerly, in the manner of city slickers, shooing snakes out of the yard.

His House colleagues still call him "Jackie One Note"-joking that if you ask him how to solve the problem of teenage pregnancy, he'll tell you to cut taxes.

Tweetin' ain't cheatin'.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.'

Personally, I've decided to stop evolving.

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.'

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

Good and evil are not like the Redskins and the Cowboys.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Feminism died in 1998 when Hillary allowed henchlings and Democrats to demonize Monica as an unbalanced stalker, and when Gloria Steinem defended Mr. Clinton against Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones by saying he had merely made clumsy passes, then accepted rejection, so there was no sexual harassment involved. As to his dallying with an emotionally immature 21-year-old, Ms. Steinem noted, 'Welcome sexual behavior is about as relevant to sexual harassment as borrowing a car is to stealing one.' Surely what's good for the Comeback Kid is good for the Terminator.

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

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

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

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.

Settling is about not embracing what is best for you and accepting what you really don't want. When you settle, you accept less than you deserve. Settling becomes a habit and a way of life, but it doesn't have to be. According to Maureen Dowd, "The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I don't understand men. I don't even understand what I don't understand about men.

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

Celebrity is the religion of our time.

Zingers should glow with intelligence as well as drip with contempt.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Are women necessary? Not with Ava around

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

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

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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