Quotes about marriage

page 9

True Stories I Made Up (2005)

Source: The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Ch. LI

Source: Choice Theory (1997), p. 30

Sing Me Back Home (1981), co-written with Peggy Russell; also quoted in "Country Legend Merle Haggard Dies At 79" at NPR (6 April 2016) http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2016/04/06/473260432/country-legend-merle-haggard-dies-at-79

In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport

Jeremy Irons: power player
The Telegraph
2008-03-13
Chloe
Fox
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3671865/Jeremy-Irons-Power-player.html
2011-08-11

Source: The Puppet Masters (1951), Chapter 21 (p. 116)

Conservative Home interview (2013)

1990s

"The Response" prayer rally, 2011-08-06, quoted in * Kyle
Mantyla
The Response: Bickle Rails Against "Redefining Love" And False Religions
Right Wing Watch
2011-08-06
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/response-bickle-rails-against-redefining-love-and-false-religions
2011-08-06

Some Men are More Perfect Than Others (1973)

And the Greatest of These Is Love, Tambuli, Aug 1984, 1.

from "Salt of the Earth: Christianity and the Catholic Church at the end of the Millennium: An interview with Peter Seewald," by Ratzinger, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997
1990s

volume II, chapter XXI: "General Summary and Conclusion", page 403 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=420&itemID=F937.2&viewtype=image
The Descent of Man (1871)

"The Descent of Islam", National Vanguard magazine (January-February 2003)

Print ad for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, in “Lamb of God’s Chris Adler is Vegetarian,” Peta2.com (20 July 2011) https://www.peta2.com/news/lamb-of-gods-chris-adler/.

Jewish War

"Dr. Robertson Davies".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)

The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia's History (1966)

On Coalition Government (1945)

Marriage.
Table Talk (1689)

Letter to John Hugh Smith (12 February 1909), published in The Letters of Edith Wharton (1988)

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book One: The Revelation of the Deity

Interview for French TV (1998)

12th January 1822) Sketch the first ("There are dark yew-trees gathered round, beneath"
The London Literary Gazette, 1821-1822

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

"The Lees of Happiness"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
Context: It was a marriage of love. He was sufficiently spoiled to be charming; she was ingenuous enough to be irresistible. Like two floating logs they met in a head-on rush, caught, and sped along together.

"I Agree With Me" (July/August 2004)

Markings (1964)
Context: In the faith which is "God's marriage to the soul", you are one in God, and God is wholly in you, just as, for you, He is wholly in all you meet. With this faith, in prayer you descend into yourself to meet the other.

Article XLII.
Provisional Constitution and Ordinances (1858)
Context: The marriage relation shall be at all times respected, and families kept together, as far as possible; and broken families encouraged to reunite, and intelligence offices established for that purpose. Schools and churches established, as soon as may be, for the purpose of reli­gious and other instructions; for the first day of the week, regarded as a day of rest, and appropriated to moral and religious instruction and improvement, relief of the suffering, instruction of the young and ignorant, and the encouragement of personal cleanliness; nor shall any persons be required on that day to perform ordinary manual labor, unless in extremely urgent cases.

Letter http://www.infomotions.com/etexts/literature/american/1700-1799/franklin-paris-247.txt to Abbé Morellet (1779).
Epistles
Context: We hear of the conversion of water into wine at the marriage in Cana as of a miracle. But this conversion is, through the goodness of God, made every day before our eyes. Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy. The miracle in question was only performed to hasten the operation, under circumstances of present necessity, which required it.

The Voluntary Movie Rating System (2004)
Context: By summer of 1966, the national scene was marked by insurrection on the campus, riots in the streets, rise in women's liberation, protest of the young, doubts about the institution of marriage, abandonment of old guiding slogans, and the crumbling of social traditions. It would have been foolish to believe that movies, that most creative of art forms, could have remained unaffected by the change and torment in our society.
The result of all this was the emergence of a "new kind" of American movie — frank and open, and made by filmmakers subject to very few self-imposed restraints.

Cassandra (1860)
Context: Look round at the marriages which you know. The true marriage — that noble union, by which a man and woman become together the one perfect being — probably does not exist at present upon earth.
It is not surprising that husbands and wives seem so little part of one another. It is surprising that there is so much love as there is. For there is no food for it. What does it live upon — what nourishes it? Husbands and wives never seem to have anything to say to one another. What do they talk about? Not about any great religious, social, political questions or feelings. They talk about who shall come to dinner, who is to live in this lodge and who in that, about the improvement of the place, or when they shall go to London. If there are children, they form a common subject of some nourishment. But, even then, the case is oftenest thus, — the husband is to think of how they are to get on in life; the wife of bringing them up at home.
But any real communion between husband and wife — any descending into the depths of their being, and drawing out thence what they find and comparing it — do we ever dream of such a thing? Yes, we may dream of it during the season of "passion," but we shall not find it afterwards. We even expect it to go off, and lay our account that it will. If the husband has, by chance, gone into the depths of his being, and found there anything unorthodox, he, oftenest, conceals it carefully from his wife, — he is afraid of "unsettling her opinions."

"The Uncreating Chaos"
The Still Centre (1939)

Ch 8
The Rahotep series, Book 3: Egypt: The Book of Chaos (2011)
Context: A little distance had opened between us, almost unnoticed, rarely acknowledged. We made love infrequently. The couch was for sleep at the end of exhausting days. I confided in her less often. Perhaps that is the fate of all marriages.

Preface to The Autumn in the Spring (May 1932)
Context: The unreasonable social system, the marriage without freedom, the yoke of traditional ideas, and the family autocracy, destroyed we don't know how many young souls. In my twenty eight years, I already had it accumulated so many, so many shadows. In that autumn smile, in that smiling which was the same as crying, I saw the young people's corpses in the whole past generation. It was as if I heard a painful sound saying: "This must be ended."

2010s
Context: The president recently weighed in on marriage, and you know he said his views were evolving on marriage. Call me cynical, but I wasn't sure his views on marriage could get any gayer. Now, it did kind of bother me though, that he used the justification for it in a Biblical reference. He said the Biblical golden rule caused him to be for gay marriage. And I'm like, what version of the Bible is he reading? It's not the King James Version, it's not the New American Standard Version, it's not the New Revised version; I don't know what version he's getting that from.

Op-Ed essay "In the Name of Politics", in The New York Times (30 March 2005) http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/30/opinion/30danforth.html
Context: As a senator, I worried every day about the size of the federal deficit. I did not spend a single minute worrying about the effect of gays on the institution of marriage. Today it seems to be the other way around.

Is Divorce Wrong? (1889)
Context: Marriages are made by men and women; not by society; not by the state; not by the church; not by supernatural beings. By this time we should know that nothing is moral that does not tend to the well-being of sentient beings; that nothing is virtuous the result of which is not good. We know now, if we know anything, that all the reasons for doing right, and all the reasons against doing wrong, are here in this world.

Interview with Nellie Bly http://www.rarenewspapers.com/view/621269?acl=851761768&imagelist=1, New York World, 2 February 1896, p. 10.
Context: On bicycling: "I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. It gives woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. It makes her feel as if she were independent. The moment she takes her seat, she knows she can't get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle, and away she goes, the picture of free, untrammelled womanhood." On teaching: "In those days, we did not know any other way to control children. We believed in the goodness of not sparing the rod. As I got older, I abolished whipping. If I couldn't manage a child, I thought it my ignorance, my lack of ability, as a teacher. I always felt less the woman when I struck a blow." "I must have an audience to inspire me... to save my life, I couldn't write a speech". "It all rose out of the men refusing to let me speak" at a temperance meeting. "Women were the bond slaves of men". "I know God never made a woman to be bossed by a man". "The law says that only idiots, lunatics and criminals shall be denied the right to vote. So you see with whom all women are classed." "When two people take each other on terms of perfect equality, without the desire of one to control the other to make the other subservient, it is a beautiful thing. It is the truest and highest state of life." "I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man's housekeeper and drudge.... Once men were afraid of women with ideas and a desire to vote. Today, our best suffragists are sought in marriage by the best class of men."

O'Connor, Geoffrey (Director) and Theroux, Louis (Writer). (April 1, 2007). The Most Hated Family in America http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1000764/.
2000s, Insult to God Almighty (2007)
Context: Same-sex marriage, by any name, civil union or otherwise, is the ultimate smashed-mouth in-your-face insult to God Almighty, and you think He's going to let England and America and the rest of this evil world get by with it? God Almighty has not joined fags in holy wedlock. God no longer keeps America safe. America is doomed. We're getting the pants beat off of us, in Iraq, in Afghanistan. God is now America's terrorist, that's who Bush is fighting, that's the terrorist that he best be afraid of. You tweaked His nose, you jackass, you tweaked His nose! God put it in your wicked heart to start that war. That's the message we've got at the funerals of these dead soldiers. God duped you into starting a war, so He could punish you. And any preacher preaching it any other way is a lying hell-bound false prophet. So almost eighteen months now and the siege has got people eating their babies, and their small children, and each other! You're going to eat your babies! God Himself duped Bush into a no-win war, and He did that by the technique of putting a lying spirit in the mouth of all his trusted advisers, to punish America.

Press Statement issued the day before her marriage to Aristotle Onassis, NY Times (20 October 1968)
Context: We know you understand that even though people may be well known they still hold in their hearts the emotions of a simple person for the moments that are the most important of those we know on earth — birth, marriage, death. We wish our wedding to be a private moment in the little chapel among the cypresses of Skorpios.

Bk. 2, Pt.. 5, Ch. 2: The Mother, p. 522
The Second Sex (1949)
Context: The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength, each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving. It is even more deceptive to dream of gaining through the child a plenitude, a warmth, a value, which one is unable to create for oneself; the child brings joy only to the woman who is capable of disinterestedly desiring the happiness of another, to one who without being wrapped up in self seeks to transcend her own existence.

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979).
Context: Speaking of an institution such as marriage as natural is, of course, paying it a compliment, the compliment of saying that it meets a fairly central human need. The fact that it is found in some form in every human society is in a way enough to show. But it might be thought that marriage became thus widespread only because it was, like adequate sanitation, a means to an end. This is pretty certainly what Hume thought, as evidenced by his very confused contrast of natural with artificial virtues. He regarded human sagacity simply as the power to calculate consequences, and counted chastity and fidelity, with justice, as artificial virtues, devices designed merely to produce safety and promote utility. In a species as emotionally interdependent as man this view of marriage is nonsense. Pair-formation could never have entered anybody's head as a device deliberately designated to promote utility.

A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1929)
Context: Marriage is the clue to human life, but there is no marriage apart from the wheeling sun and the nodding earth, from the straying of the planets and the magnificance of the fixed stars. Is not a man different, utterly different, at dawn from what he is at sunset? And a woman too? And does not the changing harmony and discord of their variation make the secret music of life?

Context: I support and have always supported passage of a federal constitutional amendment that defines marriage as a union between one man and one woman. As President, I will fight for passage of this amendment. My personal belief is that marriage is between one man and one woman, for life.

Frontpage Mag - Hamas-linked CAIR Rep. Arrested for Pedophilia http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/258279/hamas-linked-cair-rep-arrested-pedophilia-robert-spencer (10 June 2015)
Context: Islamic apologists in the West argue furiously that child marriage has nothing to do with Islam, and that the idea that Muhammad married a child is the invention of greasy Islamophobes. In reality, few things are more abundantly attested in Islamic law than the permissibility of child marriage.

Listen, Little Man! (1948)
Context: You worship the Christ child. The Christ child was born of a mother who had no marriage certificate. What you worship in the Christ child, you poor little marriage-ridden man, is your own yearning for sexual freedom!

"Introduction" to Diary of a Genius (1974) by Salvador Dalí
Context: The uneasy marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an increasingly surreal world. More and more, we see that the events of our own times make sense in terms of surrealism rather than any other view — whether the grim facts of the death-camps, Hiroshima and Viet Nam, or our far more ambiguous unease at organ transplant surgery and the extra-uterine foetus, the confusions of the media landscape with its emphasis on the glossy, lurid and bizarre, its hunger for the irrational and sensational. The art of Salvador Dalí, an extreme metaphor at a time when only the extreme will do, constitutes a body of prophecy about ourselves unequaled in accuracy since Freud's "Civilization And Its Discontents". Voyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our fears and longings, and our need to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game — these diseases of the psyche Dali has diagnosed with dismaying accuracy. His paintings not only anticipate the psychic crisis which produced our glaucous paradise, but document the uncertain pleasures of living within it. The great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century — sex and paranoia — preside over his life, as over ours.

Sex Slavery (1890)
Context: Why, when murder now is stalking in your streets, when dens of infamy are so thick within your city that competition has forced down the price of prostitution to the level of the wages of your starving shirt makers; when robbers sit in State and national Senate and House, when the boasted "bulwark of our liberties," the elective franchise, has become a U. S. dice-box, wherewith great gamblers play away your liberties; when debauchees of the worst type hold all your public offices and dine off the food of fools who support them, why, then, sits Moses Harman there within his prison cell? If he is so great a criminal, why is he not with the rest of the spawn of crime, dining at Delmonico's or enjoying a trip to Europe? If he is so bad a man, why in the name of wonder did he ever get in the penitentiary? … He looked, this obscenist looked with clear eyes into this ill-got thing you call morality, sealed with the seal of marriage, and saw in it the consummation of immorality, impurity, and injustice. He beheld every married woman what she is, a bonded slave, who takes her master's name, her master's bread, her master's commands, and serves her master's passion; who passes through the ordeal of pregnancy and the throes of travail at his dictation, not at her desire; who can control no property, not even her own body, without his consent, and from whose straining arms the children she bears may be torn at his pleasure, or willed away while they are yet unborn. It is said the English language has a sweeter word than any other, — home. But Moses Harman looked beneath the word and saw the fact, — a prison more horrible than that where he is sitting now, whose corridors radiate over all the earth, and with so many cells, that none may count them.

Context: I don't think the issue's about being against gay marriage. It's about being for traditional marriage and articulating the reason that's important. You have to have a basic family structure. There's never been a civilization that has rewritten what marriage and family means and survived. So there is a sense in which, you know, it's one thing to say if people want to live a different way, that's their business. But when you want to redefine what family means or what marriage means, then that's an issue that should require some serious and significant debate in the public square.

The Pleasures of Love
Context: I am constantly astonished by the people, otherwise intelligent, who think that anything so complex and delicate as a marriage can be left to take care of itself. One sees them fussing about all sorts of lesser concerns, apparently unaware that side by side with them — often in the same bed — a human creature is perishing from lack of affection, of emotional malnutrition.

The Bachelor Home Companion (1986)

Preface
1900s, Getting Married (1908)
Context: There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage. If the mischief stopped at talking and thinking it would be bad enough; but it goes further, into disastrous anarchical action. Because our marriage law is inhuman and unreasonable to the point of downright abomination, the bolder and more rebellious spirits form illicit unions, defiantly sending cards round to their friends announcing what they have done. Young women come to me and ask me whether I think they ought to consent to marry the man they have decided to live with; and they are perplexed and astonished when I, who am supposed (heaven knows why!) to have the most advanced views attainable on the subject, urge them on no account to compromise themselves without the security of an authentic wedding ring.

Context: This [ the Chick-fil-A same-sex marriage controversy] is the perfect American conundrum because it's like: “Ah, you know, we should be moving forward as a country, but also— I want to eat just so much trash, like a garbage monster, as much as I can.”...
Now that you know this shit, don't eat that fuckin' sandwich anymore! It's that simple! You can't get it out of your mind, you know it, you know it, you'll always know it! You can't stop knowing it.
And really— don't fuckin' eat Chick-fil-A! What are you doing?— it's garbage! Treat yourself better. Even if you're not going to treat other people who don't have the same rights as you better, treat yourself better than that.

Source: The Bertrams (1859), Ch. 30
Context: It would seem that the full meaning of the word marriage can never be known by those who, at their first outspring into life, are surrounded by all that money can give. It requires the single sitting-room, the single fire, the necessary little efforts of self-devotion, the inward declaration that some struggle shall be made for that other one.

Source: Prometheus Bound, line 890 (tr. G. M. Cookson)

The Ball and the Cross, part IV: "A Discussion at Dawn", 2nd paragraph
Context: It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their posters, "Mr. Wilkinson Still Safe," or "Mr. Jones, of Worthing, Not Dead Yet." They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all. They cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages that are not judiciously dissolved. Hence the complex picture they give of life is of necessity fallacious; they can only represent what is unusual. However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with the minority.

On depicting adulthood in A Little Life in “An Interview with Hanya Yanagihara” https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-hanya-yanagihara/ in Believer Magazine (2017 Nov 20)

Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Volume 1, p. 50
The Prophets (1962)

On facing abuse head on in “Meena Kandasamy interview: ‘I don’t know if I’m idiotic – or courageous’” https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/meena-kandasamy-interview-i-don-t-know-if-i-m-idiotic-or-courageous-9238644.html in the Independent (2014 Apr 6)

On her book When I Hit You in “Meena Kandasamy: ‘If I was going to write my life story, I would condense that marriage to a footnote’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/25/meena-kandasamy-interview-exquisite-cadavers in The Guardian (2019 Nov 25)

Janaki Bakhle quoted in Vikram Sampath - Savarkar, Echoes from a Forgotten Past, 1883–1924 (2019)

2010 Australian federal election press conference, 2 August 2010
"Julia Gillard on gay marriage" https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=o7h15h6P370, on ABC News, 2 August 2010

Letter to the Marchese di Rudinì (30 April 1892), quoted in Vilfedo Pareto, Liberté économique et les événements d'Italie (1970), p. 49
1890s

Karmas and Diseases, Divine Life Society, http://dlshq.org/download/karmadisease.htm (1959)

Publisher: Faber and Faber, 2017, p. 133
Sleep no more: Six Murderous Tales, published posthumously in 2017

Source: How I Grew (1987), Ch. 1

The Guardians editor Jonathan Watts. With Rousseff on the ropes, Brazil's far right sees an opening https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/05/brazil-far-right-dilma-rousseff-impeachment. The Guardian (5 May 2016).

Waldersee in his diary, 9 November 1890

Foreword to Business as a System of Power (1943), p. vii

Malabar Manual, Page 142 https://archive.org/details/MalabarLogan/page/n154
Malabar Manual (1887)

Malabar Manual, Page 135 https://archive.org/details/MalabarLogan/page/n147
Malabar Manual (1887)

V. Jabotinsky, "A Letter on Autonomy", Evreiskaya zhizn, no. 6, June 1904.
Source: As translated in "Israel Among the Nations : Selection of Zionist Texts" (ed. Zvi Zohar; Jerusalem : World Zionist Organization, Organization Department, Research Section, 1966). Reprinted in L. Brenner, 51 Documents, Barricade Books, 2002, pp. 7–20.

Source: The Science of Rights 1796, p. 406

The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)

2000s, 2009, The Left's love affair with Islam (2009)

I loved to sing and I was given lots of encouragement by a wonderful music teacher Mrs Ann Hill and by my parents who suggested I go to drama school.
As quoted in "Angie Davidson Interviews Elaine Paige" by Angie Davidson in lupus.org.uk http://www.lupus.org.uk/article.php?i=159 (2005)

Jon Hopwood
About, Spartacus Schoolnet biography

NBC News correspondent David Shuster, August 28, 2007, MSNBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20496462/

Raise their children honorably, lovingly and with detachment. A child is a guest in the house, to be loved and respected — never possessed, since he belongs to God. How wonderful, how sane, how beautifully difficult, and therefore true. The joy of responsibility for the first time in my life.
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (1955)

Source: English Proverbs (1670), p. 48

From Her Weblog

The Political Thought of Abdullah Ocalan (2017), Liberating Life: Women's Revolution

Source: Fallen Leaves (2014), Ch. 3 : On Middle Age

The Islamic veil

Actually from 1969 leaflet by The Feminists, "Women: Do You Know the Facts About Marriage?". Its text was reprinted in the anthology Sisterhood is Powerful edited by Robin Morgan.
Misattributed

Source: What is Anthropology? (2nd ed., 2017), Ch. 6 : Kinship

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Twelve, Human Connections: Relationships Changing