“Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.”

— Oscar Wilde

Last update Sept. 27, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same." by Oscar Wilde?

Oscar Wilde812

Irish writer and poet 1854–1900

Related quotes

“It is not monogamy when there is one legal wife, and mistresses out of sight.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

Cultural and Religious Heritage of India: Islam http://books.google.co.in/books?id=e2yvoujPJCYC&pg=PA109, p. 109

“Just ask yourselves, historians, when was monogamy introduced on to the face of the earth? When those buccaneers, who settled on the peninsula where Rome now stands, could not steal women enough to have two or three apiece, they passed a law that a man should have but one woman. And this started monogamy and the downfall of the plurality system. In the days of Jesus, Rome, having dominion over Jerusalem, they carried out the doctrine more or less. This was the rise, start and foundation of the doctrine of monogamy; and never till then was there a law passed, that we have any knowledge of, that a man should have but one wife.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Journal of Discourses 12:262 (Aug. 9, 1868)
1860s

“Many marriages would be better if the husband and wife clearly understood that they're on the same side.”

Zig Ziglar (1926–2012) American motivational speaker

“His wife is, it occurs to Harry, a channel that can't be switched. The same slightly too-high forehead, the same dumb stubborn slot of a mouth, day after day, same time, same station.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“Monogamy is absolutely imperative. The minute you start fiddling around outside the idea of monogamy, nothing satisfies anymore. Suppose you make love to an exciting woman other than your wife, it can’t remain enough to go bed with her there must be something else, something more than the absolute compulsion of the body. But if there is something more, it will eventually destroy either you or your marriage.”

Richard Burton (1925–1984) Welsh actor

In James Robert Parish The Hollywood Book of Breakups http://books.google.com/books?id=gSh2HyQ8OsQC&pg=PT348, John Wiley & Sons, 20-Dec-2010, p. 348

“Asking for efficiency and adaptability in the same program is like asking for a beautiful and modest wife. Although beauty and modesty have been known to occur in the same woman, we'll probably have to settle for one or the other. At least that's better than neither.”

Gerald M. Weinberg (1933–2018) American computer scientist

Source: The Psychology of Computer Programming, 1971, Chapter 2, page 22

“Too many good things all seem the same after a while.”

Amy Tan The Joy Luck Club

Source: The Joy Luck Club

“For too many centuries women have been being muses to artists. I wanted to be the muse, I wanted to be the wife of the artist, but I was really trying to avoid the final issue — that I had to do the job myself.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

“We have too many cellphones. We've got too many Internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

"Ray Bradbury hates big government: ‘Our country is in need of a revolution’" in The Los Angeles Times : Hero Complex (16 August 2010) http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2010/08/16/ray-bradbury-is-sick-of-big-government-our-country-is-in-need-of-a-revolution/

“It's so childish, "greatest country in the world." It's like saying, "I have the greatest wife in the world. Not just the one best suited for me, the greatest wife in the world. And if you could have my wife, you'd kill your wife."”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

The Decider (21 July 2007)

“Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Oscar Wilde812

Related quotes

Related topics