Quotes about marriage
page 6

“The real difficulties which beset this question, do not arise from anything in Ireland, so much as from the constitution of the Government. This House, and the other House of Parliament, are almost exclusively aristocratic in their character. The Administration is therefore necessarily the same, and on the Treasury benches aristocracy reigns supreme. Not fewer than seven Members of the Cabinet are Members of the House of Lords; and every other Member of it is either a Lord by title, or on the very threshold of the peerage by birth or marriage. I am not blaming them for this; it may even be that from neither House of Parliament can fourteen better men be chosen to fill their places. But I maintain that in the present position of Ireland, and looking at human nature as it is, it is not possible that fourteen Gentlemen, circumstanced as these are, can meet round the Council table, and with unbiassed minds fairly discuss the question of Ireland, as it now presents itself to this House, to the country, and to the world.”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1848/aug/25/employment-of-the-poor-ireland in the House of Commons (25 August 1848). 1840s

Men, World, Birth, Question

“By straying from the text of the Constitution, substantive due process exalts judges at the expense of the People from whom they derive their authority. Petitioners argue that by enshrining the traditional definition of marriage in their State Constitutions through voter-approved amendments, the States have put the issue 'beyond the reach of the normal democratic process'. But the result petitioners seek is far less democratic. They ask nine judges on this Court to enshrine their definition of marriage in the Federal Constitution and thus put it beyond the reach of the normal democratic process for the entire Nation. That a 'bare majority' of this Court is able to grant this wish, wiping out with a stroke of the keyboard the results of the political process in over 30 States, based on a provision that guarantees only 'due process' is but further evidence of the danger of substantive due process.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Obergefell v. Hodges http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf (26 June 2015). 2010s

People

“Marriage is an estate of long duration, and one which should not be entered into lightly or without the approval of our closest friends and relatives.”

Marguerite de Navarre book Heptaméron

Mariage est un état de si longue durée, qu'il ne doit être commencé légèrement, ne sans l'opinion de nos meilleurs amis et parents.
Fourth Day, Novel XL (trans. P. A. Chilton)
L'Heptaméron (1558)

“.. I am always between two currents of thought, first the material difficulties, turning round and round to make a living; and second, study of color. I am always in hope of making a discovery there, to express the love of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colors, their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibrations of kindred tones. To express the thought of a brow by the radiance of a light tone against a sombre background. To express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance. Certainly there is nothing in that of stereoscopic realism, but is it not some thing that actually exists?”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Arles, September 1888; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 531) p. 22 1880s, 1888

Love, Hope, Color, Soul

“The institution of marriage in all societies is a pattern within which the strains put by civilization on males and females alike must be resolved, a pattern within which men must learn, in return for a variety of elaborate rewards, new forms in which sexual spontaneity is still possible, and women must learn to discipline their receptivity to a thousand other considerations.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

"Male and Female" in Ladies' Home Journal, Vol. 66, (September 1949), p. 36;
1940s

Women, Men, Learning

“I'm a man who falls in love so easily, and with such a reckless lack of consideration for the consequences of my actions, that from the very first instant of entering into a marriage I become, almost by definition, an adulterer.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

Love

“Above all, we must have great respect for these people who also suffer and who want to find their own way of correct living. On the other hand, to create a legal form of a kind of homosexual marriage, in reality, does not help these people.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2003

People, Way, Reality, Suffering

“(on her marriage to Andrew Lloyd Webber) It was such a creative time. Everything was happening very fast. He was writing, I was singing. He was inspired, and I was inspired. I didn't really have time to think about it. I didn't really have time to read things about it, either. I got a sense of things, which made me quite nervous at times. But, no, we were running all the time then, doing things. It was fun, but also a lot of pressure.”

Sarah Brightman (1960) British soprano, musical theatre actress, and dancer

The Irish Times (1999)

Thinking, Sense, Singing, Time

“Marriage is tough, because it is woven of all these various elements, the weak and the strong. "In love-ness" is fragile for it is woven only with the gossamer threads of beauty. It seems to me absurd to talk about "happy" and "unhappy" marriages.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906–2001) American aviator and author

War Within and Without (1980)

Love, Beauty, Strong, Happiness

“Between bad ideas of gender neutrality and even worse ideas of the innocence of pornography, we reach the world so vividly described by so many dissatisfied women today, one where men act like stereotypical women, and retreat from real relationships into a fantasy life via pornography (rather than Harlequin novels), and where women conversely act like stereotypical men, taking the lead in leaving their marriages and firing angry charges on the way, out of frustration and withheld sex.”

Mary Eberstadt American writer

Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution https://books.google.it/books?id=7z-hDQAAQBAJ&pg=PT0 (Ignatius Press, 2012), ch. 2.

Life, Women, Men, World

“But when the Muhammedan invaders … conquered the disorganised Hindu hosts, and Hindu young women began to become a prey to the lust of some of the conquerors, the custom of early marriage and the unnatural purdah were introduced by the degenerate Hindus of northern India as refuge against the inroads of Muslim Ghazis in Hindu homes.”

Swami Shraddhanand (1856–1926) Indian monk and philosopher

Hindu Sangathan p. 95, quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2014). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. p.377

Women, Home

“His designs were strictly honorable, as the phrase is; that is, to rob a lady of her fortune by way of marriage.”

Henry Fielding (1707–1754) English novelist and dramatist

Book XI, Ch. 4
The History of Tom Jones (1749)

Way

“Scientific collaborations are akin to marriages, or temporary marriages. Their breakup is not unlike a divorce and rarely avoids acrimony.”

Peter Freund (1936–2018) American physicist

[Peter G. O. Freund, A passion for discovery, World Scientific, 2007, 9812706461, 89]

“Marriage is like a table with four legs - the couple, the children, the parents and the in-laws. Break any of these and the marriage crashes to the floor”

Siddharth Katragadda (1972) Indian writer

page 4
Dark Rooms (2002)

Children, Law, Parent

“Marriage is not something that can be accomplished all at once; it has to be constantly reaccomplished. A couple must never indulge in idle tranquility with the remark: "The game is won; let's relax." The game is never won. The chances of life are such that anything is possible. Remember what the dangers are for both sexes in middle age. A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Marriage

Life, Age, Sex, Game

“The majority's decision today will require States to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and to recognize same-sex marriages entered in other States largely based on a constitutional provision guaranteeing 'due process' before a person is deprived of his 'life, liberty, or property'. I have elsewhere explained the dangerous fiction of treating the Due Process Clause as a font of substantive rights. It distorts the constitutional text, which guarantees only whatever 'process' is 'due' before a person is deprived of life, liberty, and property. Worse, it invites judges to do exactly what the majority has done here.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Obergefell v. Hodges http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf (26 June 2015). 2010s

Life, Sex, Decision, Personality

“Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word — the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.”

Philip Larkin book The Whitsun Weddings

"MCMXIV"
The Whitsun Weddings (1964)

Men, Change, Past

“We should also do away with the idea that a marriage is a sacrament, and that there is any God who is rendered happy by seeing a husband and wife live together, although the husband gets most of his earthly enjoyment from whipping his wife.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Interview with the Chicago Times, Feb. 14, 1881.

God, Idea, Happiness

“The Shoshone, as well as those peoples around the world who still survive at the least complex levels of social organization, know that romantic love exists. But they also recognize it for what it is—in their case, a form of madness. …they regard the participants with tolerance and patience, for they know that the illness will soon go away. …To them, only someone mentally backward would base an institution so important to survival as marriage on romantic love. …it is a life and death business.”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

Love, Life, Death, People

“While the happy couple are enjoying the thrill of the rose garden, the in-laws are saying that they are just not right for each other. We keep telling them that they cannot pay couples to stay together, and it is clear that it will take more than a three-quid-a-week tax break to keep this marriage together.”

Harriet Harman (1950) British politician

During the Queen's Speech Debate, on the newly formed Coalition Government and their policy to provide a tax break to married couples http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmhansrd/cm100525/debtext/100525-0002.htm#10052511000378, 25 May 2010.

Law, Happiness

“The young people who now proposed to devote themselves to intellectual studies no longer took the term to mean attending a university and taking a nibble of this or that from the dainties offered by celebrated and loquacious professors who without authority offered them the crumbs of what had once been higher education. Now they had to study just as stringently and methodically as the engineers and technicians of the past, if not more so. They had a steep path to climb, had to purify and strengthen their minds by dint of mathematics and scholastic exercises in Aristotelian philosophy. Moreover, they had to learn to renounce all those benefits which previous generations of scholars had considered worth striving for: rapid and easy money-making, celebrity and public honors, the homage of the newspapers, marriages with daughters of bankers and industrialists, a pampered and luxurious style of life.”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Life, Money, People, Education

“FYI: The Summer of Gay has been extended into the Year of the Queer. Another heads up: Mad Vow Disease, once limited to wholesome, unimpeachable gay couples earnestly seeking to take on the rights and responsibilities of marriage, has jumped the pen and crossed into the general population.”

Kate Clinton (1947) American comedian

Marriage Mishegas http://progressive.org/?q=node/916 The Progressive, Unplugged

Disease, Summer, Madness

“No doubt his grandmother and his great-grandfather had hoped to empower a senator, enrich a great art collection or encourage a dazzling marriage, but in the end they had mainly subsidized idleness, drunkenness, treachery and divorce.”

Edward St. Aubyn (1960) British writer

At Last, Chapter 6

Hope, Art

“It is within the bonds of marriage that I, for one, found a greater freedom to be and to become and to share myself than I can imagine ever having found in any other kind of relationship.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation (1983)

Imagination, Freedom

“The marriage of convenience has this to recommend it: we are better judges of convenience than we are of love.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Marriage

Love

“As we do all of this work to counter the Islamist extremist ideology, let’s also recognise that we will have to enter some pretty uncomfortable debates – especially cultural ones. Too often we have lacked the confidence to enforce our values, for fear of causing offence. The failure in the past to confront the horrors of forced marriage I view as a case in point. So is the utter brutality of Female Genital Mutilation”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

FGM
2010s, 2015, Speech on extremism (20 July 2015)

Fear, Confidence, Failure, Past

“Once some engineers from the veneer trust laboratory came to me for consultation with a quite skilful presentation of their problems. Diﬀerent productivity is obtained for veneer-cutting machines for diﬀerent types of materials; linked to this the output of production of this group of machines depended, it would seem, on the chance factor of which group of raw materials to which machine was assigned. How could this fact be used rationally?
This question interested me, but nevertheless appeared to be quite particular and elementary, so I did not begin to study it by giving up everything else. I put this question for discussion at a meeting of the mathematics department, where there were such great specialists as Gyunter, Smirnov himself, Kuz’min, and Tartakovskii. Everyone listened but no one proposed a solution; they had already turned to someone earlier in individual order, apparently to Kuz’min. However, this question nevertheless kept me in suspense. This was the year of my marriage, so I was also distracted by this. In the summer or after the vacation concrete, to some extent similar, economic, engineering, and managerial situations started to come into my head, that also required the solving of a maximization problem in the presence of a series of linear constraints.
In the simplest case of one or two variables such problems are easily solved—by going through all the possible extreme points and choosing the best. But, let us say in the veneer trust problem for ﬁve machines and eight types of materials such a search would already have required solving about a billion systems of linear equations and it was evident that this was not a realistic method. I constructed particular devices and was probably the ﬁrst to report on this problem in 1938 at the October scientiﬁc session of the Herzen Institute, where in the main a number of problems were posed with some ideas for their solution.
The universality of this class of problems, in conjunction with their difficulty, made me study them seriously and bring in my mathematical knowledge, in particular, some ideas from functional analysis.
What became clear was both the solubility of these problems and the fact that they were widespread, so representatives of industry were invited to a discussion of my report at the university.”

Leonid Kantorovich (1912–1986) Russian mathematician

L.V. Kantorovich (1996) Descriptive Theory of Sets and Functions. p. 39; As cited in: K. Aardal, ‎George L. Nemhauser, ‎R. Weismantel (2005) Handbooks in Operations Research and Management Science, p. 15-26

Search, Mathematics, Idea, Question

“The criminal law stands to the passion of revenge in much the same relation as marriage to the sexual appetite.”

James Fitzjames Stephen (1829–1894) Indian judge

A General View Of The Criminal Law Of England (1863)

Law, Revenge, Passion

“At the heart of Obama’s narrative was a belief that progress, in the larger scheme of things, was inevitable, and this belief underscored his position on every issue from marriage equality to climate change. His idea of progress was neither the rigid millennial faith of Woodrow Wilson nor Bush’s shallow God-blessed optimism. It was human-scale and incremental.”

George Packer (1960) American journalist and writer

God, Faith, Idea, Optimism

“By 1970, approximately two-thirds of the marriages of those on the tribal rolls were to people who were not, with the result that only 59 percent of births reflected a situation in which both parents registered themselves as possessing any Indian blood at all; U. S. Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare, A Study of Selected Socio-Economic Characteristics of Ethnic Minorities Based on the 1970 Census, Vol. 3: American Indians (Washington, D. C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1974) pp. 74, 78. For effects in terms of the "blood quantum" criteria by which native identity is officially defined in the U. S., see Thorton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival, pp. 174-5. The implications are clear: "Set the blood quantum at one-quarter, hold to it as a rigid definition of Indians, let intermarriage proceed as it [has] and eventually Indians will be defined out of existence"; Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest; The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York; W. W. Norton, 1987) p. 338.”

Ward Churchill (1947) Political activist

[Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools, City Lights Books, San Francisco, CA, November 2004, 88, 0872864340]

People, Health, Education, Birth

“First, weaken the black family, but don't blame it on individual choices. You have to preach that today's weak black family is a legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and racism. The truth is that black female-headed households were just 18 percent of households in 1950, as opposed to about 68 percent today. In fact, from 1890 to 1940, the black marriage rate was slightly higher than that of whites… In New York City, in 1925, 85 percent of black households were two-parent households… Disgustingly, black politicians, civil rights leaders, liberals and the president are talking nonsense about "having a conversation about race." That's beyond useless. Tell me how a conversation with white people is going to stop black predators from preying on blacks. How is such a conversation going to eliminate the 75 percent illegitimacy rate? What will such a conversation do about the breakdown of the black family… Only black people can solve our problems.”

Walter E. Williams (1936) American economist, commentator, and academic

"A case of black self-sabatoge" (31 July 2013)
2010s

People, Truth, Family, Problem

“The panel put targets, for example, on nutrition, education, ending preventable child deaths, encouraging birth registration, putting an end to violence against girls, and child marriage — all of which, if enacted, will improve the lives of billions of children throughout the world.”

Tawakkol Karman (1979) Yemeni journalist, politician, human rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

2000s, Youth Q&A on the U.N. High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 Agenda Report (2009)

Death, Children, World, Education

“Sport, in general, tends to be a good decade behind the rest of society in terms of talking about these issues. There's been a lot of progress. There's women's equality in sport, talking about depression in sport, homophobia in sport, and drugs in sport. I actually think when gay marriage is legalised, and it becomes such a non-issue in wider society, it will likewise become a non-issue in sport.”

Matthew Mitcham (1988) Australian diver

We Asked Australian Diver Matthew Mitcham Why More Gay Athletes Aren't Coming Out https://www.vice.com/en_nz/article/wdapzw/we-asked-olympian-matthew-mitcham-why-more-gay-athletes-arent-coming-out, Vice.nz, October 12, 2016.

Women, Thinking, Sport

“I have to speak candidly to be of value, but I do not want to offend the Muslim community… I think we were progressing very nicely until the surge of Islam came, and if you asked me for my observations, the other communities have easier integration – friends, inter-marriages and so on – than Muslims… I would say, today, we can integrate all religions and races, except Islam.”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

from his book 'Lee Kuan Yew: Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going' (Asia One, March 08 2011 http://www.asiaone.com/News/AsiaOne+News/Singapore/Story/A1Story20110308-267055.html) 2010s

Religion, Communication, Thinking

“A strange effect of marriage, such as the nineteenth century has made it! The boredom of married life inevitably destroys love, when love has preceded marriage. And yet, as a philosopher has observed, it speedily brings about, among people who are rich enough not to have to work, an intense boredom with all quiet forms of enjoyment. And it is only dried up hearts, among women, that it does not predispose to love.”

Stendhal book The Red and the Black

Étrange effet du mariage, tel que l'a fait le XIXe siècle! L'ennui de la vie matrimoniale fait périr l'amour sûrement, quand l'amour a précédé le mariage. Et cependant, dirait un philosophe, il amène bientôt chez les gens assez riches pour ne pas travailler, l'ennui profond de toutes les jouissances tranquilles. Et ce n'est que les âmes sèches parmi les femmes qu'il ne prédispose pas à l'amour.
Vol. I, ch. XXIII
Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) (1830)

Love, Life, Women, People

“Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival…was where love and marriage were brought together. It was an apple of a story. That's my favorite love story.”

Wolfram von Eschenbach (1170–1220) German knight and poet

Joseph Campbell (ed. Robert Walter and Phil Cousineau) The Hero’s Journey (Novato: New World Library, [1990] 2003) p. 104.
Criticism

Love

“What gnashing is not a comfort, what gnawing of the worm is not a tickling, what torment is not a marriage bed to this damnation, to be secluded eternally, eternally, eternally from the sight of God?”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

No. 76, preached to the Earl of Carlisle, c. autumn 1622
LXXX Sermons (1640)

God

“It's a facet of the gay rights movement that people don't think about enough. Why suddenly marriage equality? Because it wasn't until 1981 that the court struck down Louisiana's 'head and master rule,' that the husband was head and master of the house.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Book, 'My Own Words', (2006)

People, Thinking, Housing

“You're saying, no, State said two kinds of marriage: the full marriage, and then this sort of skim-milk marriage.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

United States v. Windsor oral argument,

“If the divorced are remarried civilly, they find themselves in a situation that objectively contravenes God's law. Consequently, they cannot receive Holy Communion as long as this situation persists. This norm is not at all a punishment or a discrimination against the divorced and remarried, but rather expresses an objective situation that of itself renders impossible the reception of Holy Communion: '… If these people were admitted to the Eucharist, the faithful would be led into error and confusion regarding the Church's teaching about the indissolubility of marriage.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

Letter to bishops, Sept. 14, 1994
1990s

God, People, Faith, Law

“Monogamy has a sentimental basis which is quite distinct from the political one of equal numbers of the sexes. Equal numbers in the sexes are quite compatible with a change of partners every day or every hour. Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves, and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock. Accordingly, the people whose conception of marriage is a farm-yard or slave-quarter conception are always more or less in a panic lest the slightest relaxation of the marriage laws should utterly demoralize society; whilst those to whom marriage is a matter of more highly evolved sentiments and needs (sometimes said to be distinctively human, though birds and animals in a state of freedom evince them quite as touchingly as we) are much more liberal, knowing as they do that monogamy will take care of itself provided the parties are free enough, and that promiscuity is a product of slavery and not of liberty.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Preface: "The Personal Sentimental Basis of Monogamy" http://www.enotalone.com/article/13714.html 1900s, Getting Married (1908)

Women, Men, Children, People

“I left Symons’s company newly aware of the unthinking cruelty discreetly coiled within the magnanimous bourgeois assurance that everyone can discover happiness through work and love. It isn’t that these two entities are invariably incapable of delivering fulfilment, only that they almost never do so. And when an exception is represented as a rule, our individual misfortunes, instead of seeming to us quasi-inevitable aspects of life, will weigh down on us like particular curses. In denying the natural place reserved for longing and error in the human lot, the bourgeois ideology denies us the possibility of collective consolation for our fractious marriages and our unexploited ambitions, and condemns us instead to solitary feelings of shame and persecution for having stubbornly failed to become who we are.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), p. 127-128.

Love, Life, Error, Feeling

“Marriage, a market which has nothing free but the entrance.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Attributed

“Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson stand alone above women poets, because poetry's mystical energies are ruled by a hierach requiring the sexual subordination of her petitioners. Women have achieved more as novelists than as poets because the social novel operates outside the ancient marriage of myth and eroticism.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 672

Women

“If people have personal conversations about very emotional matters in public, and people reveal parts of their body that were originally kept covered, and pornography is becoming semi-respectable, it makes you think the push for greater freedom and divesting yourself of inhibitions is a real human need. I'm 54, so I'm further back upon the road. We certainly did a fair amount of divesting ourselves of inhibitions, but there seems to have been a quantum leap in the last half a generation. Maybe we're destined to be freer, but it's taking odd forms, like showing your big gut to all the world and discussing the future of your marriage at a bus stop with 30 people listening in.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

Playboy interview (2003)

People, World, Thinking, Freedom

“What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not we are told expressly: that they neither marry, nor are given in marriage.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

Thoughts on Various Subjects from Miscellanies (1711-1726)

“Love is a wonderful game which begins in fun and ends in marriage.”

Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) American writer

Source: The 10th Victim (1965), Chapter 15 (p. 131)

Love, Game

“Marriage is like the Middle East, isn't it? There's no solution.”

Willy Russell Shirley Valentine

Shirley, page 14.
Shirley Valentine (1986)

“Charles Laughton is superbly vulgar in this whack at the backside of Victorianism. He makes a great vaudeville turn out of the role of an egocentric scoundrel, the prosperous bootmaker who doesn't want to part with his three marriageable daughters because they are too useful as unpaid labor. As the oldest daughter, the spinster in spite of herself, Brenda de Banzie is so "right" that when she marries her father's best workman and puts belching, drunken old Dad out of business, one feels the good old-fashioned impulse to applaud.”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

"Hobson's Choice," pp. 335-336.
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982)

Feeling, Fashion, Business, Parting

“Marriage is god's way to ensure there are few great men”

Siddharth Katragadda (1972) Indian writer

page 55
Dark Rooms (2002)

Men, God, Way

“I have loved flowers that fade,
Within whose magic tents
Rich hues have marriage made
With sweet unmemoried scents:
A honeymoon delight,
A joy of love at sight,
That ages in an hour
My song be like a flower!”

Robert Seymour Bridges (1844–1930) British writer

Bk. II, No. 13, I Have Loved Flowers That Fade http://www.poetry-online.org/bridges_i_have_loved_flowers_that_fade.htm, st. 1 (1879). Shorter Poems (1879-1893)

Love, Age, Flowers, Joy

“Though marriage makes man and wife one flesh, it leaves 'em still two fools.”

William Congreve The Double Dealer

Act II, scene iii
The Double Dealer (1694)

Fools

“There are four stages to marriage. First there's the affair, then there's the marriage, then children, and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

News summaries (31 December 1969)

Children

“Marriage partners, not government, should define the terms and spiritual orientation of their union in accordance with our nation's guarantee of religious freedom.”

Michael Badnarik (1954) American software engineer

Source: Gay Rights http://badnarik.org/plans_gayrights.php

Freedom

“A couple alleged males attempted to sucker punch a 100-pound woman and missed. And they ended up with their faces smashed in and spending the night in the Pima County Jail, where I'm sure — being good liberals — their views on gay marriage will serve them well.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

On two protestors who threw pies at her during a speech, on The Sean Hannity Show (22 October 2004).
2004

Night

“Imagine each family as a kind of little factory--a multiperson unit producing meals, health, skills, children, and self-esteem from market goods and the time, skills, and knowledge of its members. This is only one of the remarkable concepts explored by Gary Becker in his landmark work on the family. Becker applies economic theory to the most sensitive and fateful personal decisions, such as choosing a spouse or having children. He uses the basic economic assumptions of maximizing behavior, stable preferences, arid equilibria in explicit or implicit markets to analyze the allocation of time to child care as well as to careers, to marriage and divorce in polygynous as well as monogamous societies, to the increase and decrease of wealth from one generation to another.”

Gary S. Becker book A Treatise on the Family

Book abstract 2009
A Treatise on the Family, 1981

Fate, Children, Health, Family

“In recent times the rainbow (albeit with some different colors) has come to represent something far different. To many people it means freedom, love, pride, a new era, and, specifically, the LGBTQ movement… But the rainbow itself wasn’t designed to be a symbol of freedom, love, pride, or the LGBTQ movement. God created this beautiful, colorful phenomenon and designated it as a sign of His covenant with Noah and his descendants forever. Sadly, people ignore what God intended the rainbow to represent and proudly wave rainbow-colored flags in defiance of God’s command and design for marriage. Because of this, many Christians shy away from using the rainbow colors. But the rainbow was a symbol of God’s promises before the LGBTQ movement—and will continue to be after that movement has ended. As Christians, we need to take the rainbow back and teach our young people its true meaning.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

Rainbow Lights at the Ark https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2016/12/20/rainbow-lights-at-ark/, Around the World with Ken Ham (December 20, 2016) Around the World with Ken Ham (May 2005 - Ongoing)

Love, God, People, Beauty

“It is possible, after all, to 'fake' the 'realest' possible 'evidence' of heterosexuality: man or woman, one can participate in heterosexual marriage and even help produce a brood of spawn and still 'turn out' to have been 'living a lie,' to have been 'really' gay or lesbian all along. Precisely because there is no final 'proof' of heterosexuality, heterosexuality must constantly set about trying to prove itself, assert itself, insist on itself. Indeed, as Butler argues, heterosexuality as hegemonic institution is finally nothing more than its own repetitive self-insistence, nothing other than 'a constant and repeated effort to imitate its own idealizations' (Bodies 125). Or, as Janet E. Halley puts it in regard to legalistic constructions of heterosexuality, normative heterosexuality 'is a highly unstable, default characterization for people who have not marked themselves or been marked by other as homosexual.”

Calvin Thomas (critical theorist) (1956) American academic

As Halley continues: 'The resulting class of heterosexuals is a default class, home to those who have not fallen out of it.'
Source: Straight with a Twist (2000), p. 28.

People, Lie, Home, Effort

“A man and a woman who, in their young days, agree to have done with sentimental life thereby renounce the search for adventure, the intoxication of new encounters, and the amazing refreshment produced by falling in love again. Their most vital source of energy is cut off; they are doomed to premature insensibility. Their life, scarcely begun, is finished. Nothing can break the monotony of an existence made up of burdens and duties. No further hope, no surprises, no conquests. Their one love will soon be tainted by the cares of housekeeping and the children's education. They will reach old age without ever having known the joys of youth. Marriage destroys romantic love which alone could justify it.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Marriage

Love, Life, Children, Youth

“You tend to have far more real, intense friendships when you are single, perhaps because you can be more honest when you do not have the marriage or someone else's feelings to protect.”

Merle Shain (1935–1989) Canadian writer

Some Men are More Perfect Than Others (1973)

Friendship, Feeling

“The joys of marriage are the heaven on earth,
Life's paradise, great princess, the soul's quiet,
Sinews of concord, earthly immortality,
Eternity of pleasures; no restoratives
Like to a constant woman!”

John Ford (dramatist) The Broken Heart

Act II, sc. ii.
The Broken Heart (c. 1625-33)

Life, Pleasure, Soul, Joy

“That certain women were ready to sell themselves caused no excessive disgust in Isabelle. It was inevitable that a number of both men and women should compromise the institution of marriage by marrying for money, and once that happened there could be no question of impressing on the toughly logical female mind the unique vileness of prostitution. She had sometimes wondered, too, whether the contempt men felt for women who market their favors did not in part proceed from from the sense of grievance eternally felt by buyers against vendors.”

Rebecca West (1892–1983) British feminist and author

Source: The Thinking Reed (1936), Chapter VI

Women, Men, Money, Question

“Not at all. It’s so hectic. On your wedding day, you just wear it for like 6 hours and you’re not even concentrating on it because you’re in another zone. But here, you not thinking of the marriage, you’re just shooting and looking at the watch… oh it’s 9 o’clock, I have to leave. It was nice to wear all this initially, but with time it just gets tiring.”

Drashti Dhami (1985) Indian television actress and model

Talking about heavy jewelry on set http://www.bollywoodlife.com/news-gossip/drashti-dhami-i-dont-take-weight-criticism-negatively-because-i-know-i-need-to-cut-down-a-few-kilos/

Thinking, Wedding, Time

“I'll be eighty this month. Age, if nothing else, entitles me to set the record straight before I dissolve. I've given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can't divorce a book.”

Gloria Swanson (1899–1983) American actress

Quoted in Bill Adler, Funny Ladies: The Best Humor from America's Funniest Women (2001) p. 52 http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KOVGUVYj2XUC&pg=PA52&lpg=PA52&dq=%22Age,+if+nothing+else,+entitles+me+to+set+the+record+straight+before+I+dissolve.%22&source=bl&ots=QGbAVbdU0l&sig=G37ipttwzeIIx1L2CAVM2Mz9M60&hl=en&sa=X&ei=VsszT6XYKMqh0QXs5-CiAg&ved=0CEgQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=%22Age%2C%20if%20nothing%20else%2C%20entitles%20me%20to%20set%20the%20record%20straight%20before%20I%20dissolve.%22&f=false

Books, Age

“As long as Property exists, it will accumulate in Individuals and Families. As long as Marriage exists, Knowledge, Property and Influence will accumulate in Families.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

Letter to Thomas Jefferson (16 July 1814)
1810s

Family, Knowledge

“Whoever escapes marriage
And women's harm, comes to deadly old age
Without any son to support him.”

Stanley Lombardo (1943) Philosopher, Classicist

Theogony, lines 607–609
Translations, Works and Days and Theogony (1993)

Women, Age, Support

“No candidate can win a presidential race advocating gay marriage and opposing the military action in Iraq.”

Dick Morris (1947) American political commentator and consultant

2003-07-31
Dean is a driving force in chasing faithful away
The Daily Courier
4A
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=894&dat=20030731&id=HVcLAAAAIBAJ&pg=4730,5177425

“However important it is that love shall precede marriage, it is far more important that it shall continue after marriage.”

Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–1888) Jewish theologian, germany 19th century

Commentary on Genesis XXIV, 67 quoted by Joseph H. Hertz, Pentateuch, p. 87

Love

“Let me tell you about love, that silly word you believe is about whether you like somebody or whether somebody likes you or whether you can put up with somebody in order to get something or someplace you want or you believe it has to do with how your body responds to another body like robins or bison or maybe you believe love is how forces or nature or luck is benign to you in particular not maiming or killing you but if so doing it for your own good. Love is none of that. There is nothing in nature like it. Not in robins or bison or in the banging tails of your hunting dogs and not in blossoms or suckling foal. Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God. You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn - by practice and careful contemplations - the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it. Which is to say you have to earn God. You have to practice God. You have to think God-carefully. And if you are a good and diligent student you may secure the right to show love. Love is not a gift. It is a diploma. A diploma conferring certain privileges: the privilege of expressing love and the privilege of receiving it. How do you know you have graduated? You don't. What you do know is that you are human and therefore educable, and therefore capable of learning how to learn, and therefore interesting to God, who is interested only in Himself which is to say He is interested only in love. Do you understand me? God is not interested in you. He is interested in love and the bliss it brings to those who understand and share the interest. Couples that enter the sacrament of marriage and are not prepared to go the distance or are not willing to get right with the real love of God cannot thrive. They may cleave together like robins or gulls or anything else that mates for life. But if they eschew this mighty course, at the moment when all are judged for the disposition of their eternal lives, their cleaving won't mean a thing. God bless the pure and holy. Amen.”

Toni Morrison book Paradise

Paradise (1997)

Love, Life, God, Education

“When I graduated from high school, I hoped that one day gay Americans would be able to get married. And now here I am 45 years later officiating same-sex marriages—how can I not be optimistic that the future is bright?”

Daayiee Abdullah (1954) Homosexual Muslim activist

First Gay ‘Imam’ in USA Says ‘Quran Doesn’t Call for Punishment of Homosexuals’ http://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2015/05/159043/first-gay-imam-in-usa-says-quran-doesnt-call-for-punishment-of-homosexuals/ (22 May 2015), Morocco World News.

School, Hope, Sex, Future

“Norfolk: I'm not a scholar, as Master Cromwell never tires of pointing out, and frankly I don't know whether the marriage was lawful or not. But damn it, Thomas, look at those names… You know those men! Can't you do what I did, and come with us for friendship?
More: And when we stand before God, and you are sent to Paradise for doing according to your conscience, and I am damned for not doing according to mine, will you come with me, for friendship?
Cranmer: So those of us whose names are there are damned, Sir Thomas?
More: I don't know, Your Grace. I have no window to look into another man's conscience. I condemn no one.
Cranmer: Then the matter is capable of question?
More: Certainly.
Cranmer: But that you owe obedience to your King is not capable of question. So weigh a doubt against a certainty — and sign.
More: Some men think the Earth is round, others think it flat; it is a matter capable of question. But if it is flat, will the King's command make it round? And if it is round, will the King's command flatten it? No, I will not sign.”

Robert Bolt A Man for All Seasons

Act II
A Man for All Seasons (1960)

Men, God, Friendship, Law

“The question is, in case some of you did not hear it, “Supposing there is a mixed marriage with respect to race; and assuming that both are of the same faith, what is there in scripture that might be against that?” Well, the answer is that there is not a law against it, but there is basically a principle that militates against such marriages, so that you might say they are just barely legal, but in principle scripture is opposed to them. Because the whole point of marriage is that the wife be a help-meet to her husband, and the term help meet means in effect a mirror, an image, one who reflects him spiritually, that is in terms of faith, in terms of a common background, in terms of a common purpose. Now, marriage between persons of very different races generally doesn’t fulfill that requirement, you see. So that it can be technically a marriage, but it isn’t one in which the wife can be a help meet. So that, while it can legally qualify, theologically you could say there are factors that normally in almost 99 cases out of a 100 hundred would militate against it.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, The Law of Divorce (n.d.)

Faith, Law, Question, Help

“The preamble to the Regulation says that women were employed wholesale to entice and take away the wives or female children for purposes of prostitution, and it was common practice among husbands and fathers to desert their families and children. Public conscience there was none, and in the absence of conscience it was futile to expect moral indignation against the social wrongs. Indeed the Brahmins were engaged in defending every wrong for the simple reason that they lived on them. They defended Untouchability which condemned millions to the lot of the helot. They defended caste, they defended female child marriage and they defended enforced widowhood—the two great props of the Caste system. They defended the burning of widows, and they defended the social system of graded inequality with its rule of hypergamy which led the Rajputs to kill in their thousands the daughters that were born to them. What shames! What wrongs! Can such a Society show its face before civilized nations? Can such a society hope to survive?”

Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842–1901) Indian scholar, social reformer and author

In support of the Regulation (VII of 1819) to put a stop to this moral degeneracy such were the questions which Ranade asked. He concluded that on only one condition it could be saved—namely, rigorous social reform. Quoted in Ranade Gandhi & Jinnah
At his 100th Anniversary lecture delivered in 1943 on Ranade, Gandhi & Jinnah by Dr. Ambedkar

Women, Children, Family, Hope

“Marriage is not at all what romantic lovers imagine it to be; it is an institution founded upon an instinct; to be successful, it requires not only physical attraction, but will-power, patience, and the always difficult acceptance of "the other"; finally, if these conditions are fulfilled, a beautiful and lasting affection can be established - a unique and, to those who have never known it, incomprehensible mingling of love, friendship, sensuality, and respect, without which there is no true marriage.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Marriage

Love, Friendship, Beauty, Imagination

“A lot of nonsense is spoken about morality. The world is full of people who have had affairs and most marriages, if you look at the statistics, break down, and does that make people evil? It's they've made bad decisions. It diminishes the situation to say someone is 'morally bankrupt' because they've had an affair.”

Paul Bettany (1971) British actor

Article http://www.paulbettany.net/articles/press.php?p=herald2

People, World, Decision, Evil

“Each person is a wholistic being who has a material aspect and a metaphysical aspect, but who is the soul. The problems of the world are so great that they cannot be adressed by looking at just one aspect of our existence. There must be an appropriate marriage between the material, the metaphysical, and the spiritual. This is not only healthy but it is imperative for our survival.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume I: Uncovering Spiritual Truths in Psychic Phenomena (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 3: Angels and Demigods, p. 47

World, Soul, Problem, Personality

“I heard my mother remark occasionally: 'A man who accepts a job under anyone is a slave.' That impression became so indelibly fixed that even after my marriage I refused all positions. I met expenses by investing my family endowment in land. Moral: Good and positive suggestions should instruct the sensitive ears of children. Their early ideas long remain sharply etched.”

Yukteswar Giri (1855–1936) Indian yogi and guru

Autobiography of a Yogi (1946)

Children, Family, Idea

“I'm not running to bash George Bush. A lot of Americans really love him. They love what he represents, a man who's overcome adversity in his life from alcoholism and pulled his marriage back together and — and moved forward. But I'm running because I think this country must have better leadership in moving forward.”

Wesley Clark (1944) American general and former Democratic Party presidential candidate

Remark, reported in The New York Post (24 November 2003)

Love, Life, Alcohol, Thinking

“Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, "What will you have, sir?"”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

And I said, "A glass of hemlock."
Pt. 2, Ch. 5
Papa Hemingway (1966)

Drink

“Our activists will go around with a priest, a turmeric stub and a ‘mangal sutra’ on February 14. If we come across couples being together in public and expressing their love, we will take them to the nearest temple and conduct their marriage.”

Pramod Muthalik (1963) Indian politician

On Valentine's Day, as quoted in " We’ll not spare dating couples on Valentine’s Day: Muthalik http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/well-not-spare-dating-couples-on-valentines-day-muthalik/article348725.ece", The Hindu (6 February 2009)

Love

“[Same-sex marriage] is probably the biggest issue that will impact our state and our nation in the last, at least, thirty years. I am not understating that.”

Michele Bachmann (1956) American politician

2000s

Sex

“You know, you almost got to be a homosexual to be recognized in the entertainment industry anymore. Ellen [Degeneres], and all the rest. I love them, pray for their souls, but they're immoral. And the Hollywood scene — five and eight and 10 marriages — not something to be emulated.”

Jerry Falwell (1933–2007) American evangelical pastor, televangelist, and conservative political commentator

Televised sermon at the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia (25 June 2006), as quoted in "Falwell on the "moral pervert[s]" in Hollywood: "[Y]ou almost got to be a homosexual to be recognized in the entertainment industry anymore" at Media Matters for America (27 June 2006)

Love, Soul

“A marriage without conflicts is almost as inconceivable as a nation without crises.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Marriage

“If our age is not distinguished for a greatly increased number of happy marriages and a more intelligent approach to the problems of sex, we may surely assert that some forms of misery in the sexual realm are less widespread than they used to be; and of the many people who are unhappy, thousands have some idea of what lies at the root of their unhappiness, and thus far they are better off than their forefathers, who had none, or attributed their distress to sin.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

People, Age, Sex, Intelligence

“It is a vocation, parenting, that is not just all about yourself, because it is all about that future you will never see. It is all about that happiness you will never enjoy. It is all about that person who will grow to a maturity, offering to the world a gift, one element of which may reflect a little contribution from yourself. But long before that gift is finally delivered, you will likely have shuffled off this mortal coil, and not be there to enjoy it. [Parenting] represents the possibility, which in the end is at the heart of the perpetuation of all our human community: the possibility that we will not live for ourselves alone, but will feel a deep and true connection, with a future we will never see, with a progeny we will never meet, but who, in our hearts' imaginations, we contemplate, with a sense of responsibility and obligation. Change the understanding of marriage, and you have changed the understanding of our character in such a way as to break our bond with that future, and to undermine that sense of responsibility.”

Alan Keyes (1950) American politician

National Federation of Republican Assemblies, NYC, August 31, 2004. http://renewamerica.us/archives/speeches/04_08_31nfra.htm. 2009

World, Way, Feeling, Imagination

“There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification. The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy. We have consistently denied the constitutionality of measures which restrict the rights of citizens on account of race. There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause.”

Earl Warren (1891–1974) United States federal judge

Loving v. Virginia http://www.amazon.com/Everyone-African-Science-Explodes-Myth/dp/1633880184/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 (1967). 1960s

Freedom, Personality

“The so-called "don't say gay" law is premised on the misguided belief that, by not talking about gay people, they can simply make us disappear. I am here to tell Tennessee and all LGBT youth and teachers who would be affected by this law, that I am here for you. In fact, I am lending my name to the cause. Any time you need to say the word "gay", you can simply say "Takei". For example, you could safely proclaim you are a supporter of Takei marriage. If you're in a more festive mood, you can march in a Takei pride parade. Even homophobic slurs don't seem as hurtful if someone says, "That is soooo Takei."”

George Takei (1937) American actor and author

Regarding the Tennessee Senate Judiciary Committee passing state senator Stacey Campfield's bill SB49, which bans mentioning homosexuality in public schools prior to ninth grade

People, Youth, Law, Mood

“Marriage was something I thought happened only to other people, like fatal traffic accidents.”

George Alec Effinger book A Fire in the Sun

Source: A Fire in the Sun (1989), Chapter 20 (p. 289).

People

“Marriage is a fight to the death, before which the wedded couple ask a blessing from heaven, because it is the rashest of all undertakings to swear eternal love; the fight at once commences and victory, that is to say liberty, remains in the hands of the cleverer of the two.”

Honoré de Balzac book Physiology of Marriage

Le mariage est un combat à outrage avant lequel les deux époux demandent au ciel sa bénédiction, parce que s'aimer toujours est la plus téméraire des entreprises; le combat ne tarde pas à commencer, et la victoire, c'est-à-dire la liberté, demeure au plus adroit. Part I, Meditation I: The Subject http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Physiology_of_Marriage/Part_1/Med_1. Physiology of Marriage (1829)

Love, Death, Wedding, Victory

“There is a Karmic Rule of Kink (KROK), and it goes something like this: "Dump the honest foot fetishist and you will marry the dishonest necrophiliac." Break up with a guy over his relatively tame fetish — and a foot fetish is about as tame as they get — and KROK will make sure your next boyfriend is some lying corpsefucker who tells you only what you want to hear. ("Honestly, honey, I only like live girls!") Only after you've married the corpsefucker and had a few kids — once extricating yourself from the marriage becomes a hugely complicated ordeal — will he ask you to lie in a tub of ice until you're good and cold. And when you're lying in that tub of ice — and odds are you will, because you won't want to put your poor kids through a divorce — you'll remember that sweet, harmless foot fetishist whose heart you broke back in college, the man you could have married.”

Dan Savage (1964) American sex advice columnist and gay rights campaigner

Mary's Uterus http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/SavageLove?oid=118733, Savage Love column, The Stranger, 14 December 2006

Lie, Guy, Girl, Lying

“In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights. After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as advocates of gay marriage insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one's autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement — the number restriction (two and only two) — is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

2000s, 2006, Pandora and Polygamy (2006)

Love, People

“Arranged Marriages don't always have to be risky. Get to know your future in-laws. She's bound to be like one of them.”

Siddharth Katragadda (1972) Indian writer

page 42
The Other Wife (2003)

Law, Future

“People who are loving toward each other set up their marriages so that it is possible for both partners to get what they need from life and so that no one is expected to give up his needs to meet those of his spouse. And when their partner meets one of their needs they accept it as a gift, instead of viewing each unmet one as if it were a betrayal.”

Merle Shain (1935–1989) Canadian writer

Some Men are More Perfect Than Others (1973)

Love, Life, People, Betrayal

“In France, for instance, I'm told that marriage is now frequently contracted in seven-year terms where either party may move on when their term is up. How shallow and how different from the Europe of the past.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

[2007-05-06, Romney Reaches to the Christian Right, Perry Bacon Jr., The Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/05/AR2007050501081.html]
2007 campaign for Republican nomination for United States President

Past

“My friend, there is something very serious in this business. The Holy Ghost carries on the whole Christian system in this earth. Not a baptism, not a marriage, not a sacrament can be administered but by the Holy Ghost, Who is transmitted from age to age by laying the hands of the Bishop on the heads of candidates for the ministry.... There is no authority, civil or religious — there can be no legitimate government — but what is administered by this Holy Ghost. There can be no salvation without it — all without it is rebellion and perdition, or, in more orthodox words, damnation... Your prophecy, my dear friend, has not become history as yet. I have no resentment of animosity against the gentleman [Jefferson] and abhor the idea of blackening his character or transmitting him in odious colors to posterity. But I write with difficulty and am afraid of diffusing myself in too many correspondences. If I should receive a letter from him, however, I should not fail to acknowledge and answer it.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

Adams as misquoted by David Barton, in "The Dream of Dr. Benjamin Rush & God's Hand in Reconciling John Adams and Thomas Jefferson" in WallBuilders (June 2008) http://www.wallbuilders.com/LIBissuesArticles.asp?id=10152; omitting many words, giving a very misleading impression that Adams (who did not believe in the Christian Trinity) is endorsing the viewpoint that a government must be administered by the Holy Ghost to be legitimate. Barton went on to use another version, substituting some of Adams' words with false ones: Misattributed

Age, Color, History, Idea

“But Rizvi has summarized them in the following words from Waliullah’s magnum opus in Arabic, Hujjat-Allah al-Baligha: “According to Shah Wali-Allah the mark of the perfect implementation of the Sharia was the performance of jihad. There were people, said the Shah, who indulged in their lower nature by following their ancestral religion, ignoring the advice and commands of the Prophet Mohammed. If one chose to explain Islam to people like this it was to do them a disservice. Force, said the Shah, was the better course - Islam should be forced down their throats like bitter medicine to a child. This, however, was possible only if the leaders of the non-Muslim communities who failed to accept Islam were killed, the strength of the community was reduced, their property confiscated and a situation was created which led to their followers and descendants willingly accepting Islam. Another means of ensuring conversions was to prevent other religious communities from worshipping their own gods. Moreover, unfavourable discriminating laws should be imposed on non-Muslims in matters of rule of retaliation, compensation for manslaughter, and marriage and political matters. However, the proselytization programme of Shah Wali-Allah only included the leaders of the Hindu community. The low class of the infidels, according to him, were to be left alone to work in the fields and for paying jiziya. They like beasts of burden and agricultural livestock were to be kept in abject misery and despair.””

Shah Waliullah Dehlawi (1703–1762) Indian muslim scholar

S.A.A. Rizvi, Shah Wali-Allah and His Times, Canberra. 1980, p.285-6 Quoted from Goel, Sita Ram (1995). Muslim separatism: Causes and consequences. ISBN 9788185990262

God, People, Religion, Law

“The reclusive man who marries the gregarious woman, the timid woman who marries the courageous man, the idealist who marries the realist — we can all see these unions: the marriages in which tenderness meets loyalty, where generosity sweetens moroseness, where a sense of beauty eases some aridity of the spirit, are not so easy for outsiders to recognize; the parties themselves may not be fully aware of such elements in a good match.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

The Pleasures of Love.

Beauty, Courage, Sense, Loyalty

“… when there are marriages between races, very often it is not the best of either. And this is another factor that commonly militates against the success of such marriages, in that it is the lower levels that tend to unite in most cases.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, The Law of Divorce (n.d.)

Success

“As a Christian, same-sex marriage is not allowed. Woman was made for man, man was made for woman. For me, it’s common sense. Will you see any animals where male is to male and female is to female? The animals are better. They know how to distinguish, male or female. If we approve male on male, female on female, then man is worse than animal. Right? Even among animals… those of the same sex are not allowed to lie together. But I’m not condemning them. Just the marriage, the committing of sin against God.”

Manny Pacquiao (1978) Filipino boxer, basketball player, singer and politician, dancer.

Pacquiao's stand on Same-Sex marriage As quoted in Manny Pacquiao’s stand on same-sex marriage: ‘Mas masahol pa sa hayop ang tao’ http://www.interaksyon.com/interaktv/manny-pacquiaos-stand-on-same-sex-marriage-mas-masahol-pa-sa-hayop-ang-tao InterAksyon, February 15, 2016

God, Lie, Sex, Sense

“If the second marriage really succeeds, the first one didn't really fail.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Marriage

Quotes about marriage page 6

Quotes about marriage
page 6