Katharine Whitehorn
From a commercial point of view, if Christmas did not exist it would be necessary to invent it.Collection: Christmas
No nice men are good at getting taxis.Collection: Men
A food is not necessarily essential just because your child hates it.Collection: Food
Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for it.Collection: Best
Find out what you like doing best, and get someone to pay you for it.Collection: Inspirational
The wind of change, whatever it is, blows most freely through an open mind.Collection: Blow
The main purpose of children's parties is to remind you that there are children more awful than your own.Collection: Children
The easiest way for your children to learn about money is for you not to have any.Collection: Funny
One reason you are stricken when your parents die is that the audience you've been aiming at all your life - shocking it, pleasing it - has suddenly left the theater.Collection: Parent
It might be marvelous to be a man - then I could stop worrying about what's fair to women and just cheerfully assume I was superior, and that they had all been born to iron my shirts. Better still, I could be an Irish man - then I would have all the privileges of being male without giving up the right to be wayward, temperamental and an appealing minority.Collection: Giving Up
Why do born-again people so often make you wish they'd never been born the first time?Collection: Time
In my next life I want to be a pessimist. Then other people could spend all their time cheering me up.Collection: Cheer
I am all for people having their heart in the right place; but the right place for a heart is not inside the head.Collection: Love
I blame Rousseau, myself. "Man is born free", indeed. Man is not born free, he is born attached to his mother by a cord and is not capable of looking after himself for at least seven years (seventy in some cases).Collection: Mother
The rule is not to talk about money with people who have much more or much less than you.Collection: Money
Filing is concerned with the past; anything you actually need to see again has to do with the future.Collection: Past
It is a pity that so often the only way to treat girls like people seems to be to treat them like boys.Collection: Girl
A good marriage is like Dr Who's Tardis: small and banal from the outside but spacious and interesting from within.Collection: Marriage
Whereas a lot of men used to ask for conversation when they really wanted sex, nowadays they often feel obliged to ask for sex even when they really want conversation.Collection: Sex
Any committee that is the slightest use is composed of people who are too busy to want to sit on it for a second longer than they have to.Collection: Inspirational
Have you ever taken anything out of the clothes basket because it had become, relatively, the cleaner thing?Collection: Women
Being young is not having any money; being young is not minding not having any money.Collection: Money
There are some circles in America where it seems to be more socially acceptable to carry a hand-gun than a packet of cigarettes.Collection: Funny
When it comes to housework the one thing no book of household management can ever tell you is how to begin. Or maybe I mean why.Collection: Book
It has long been my boast that I can read or eat anything. But unfortunately, although I eat like a Hoover, I read so slowly that I am always on the smart book three years after everyone else has finished.Collection: Smart
American patriotism is generally something that amuses Europeans, I suppose because children look idiotic saluting the flag and because the constitution contains so many cracks through which the lawyers may creep.Collection: Children
As anyone who has ever fallen foul of an airport, a conventional hospital or a bad restaurant knows, misery is made up of little things.Collection: Airports
I just wish, when neither of us has written to my husband's mother, I didn't feel so much worse about it than he does.Collection: Mother
People get a bad impression of it [the English climate] by continually trying to treat it as if it was a bank clerk, who ought to be on time on Tuesday next, instead of philosophically seeing it as a painter, who may do anything so long as you don't try to predict what.Collection: Weather
I cannot for the life of me see why the umpires, the only two people on a cricket field who are not going to get grass stains on their knees, are the only two people allowed to wear dark trousers.Collection: Sports
Things a mother should know: how to comfort a son without exactly saying Daddy was wrong.Collection: Mother
The Life and Soul, the man who will never go home while there is one man, woman or glass of anything not yet drunk.Collection: Party
Americans, indeed, often seem to be so overwhelmed by their children that they'll do anything for them except stay married to the co-producer.Collection: Children
It would be nice to think that a censor could allow a genuine work of artistic seriousness and ban a titillating piece of sadism, but it would take a miracle to make such a distinction stick.Collection: Nice
Hats divide generally into three classes: offensive hats, defensive hats, and shrapnel.Collection: Class
[On Malcolm Muggeridge:] He thinks he was knocked off his horse by God, like St. Paul on the road to Damascus. His critics think he simply fell off it from old age.Collection: Horse
It's a pity more men are not bastards by birth instead of vocation.Collection: Men
The disease is painless; it's the cure that hurts.Collection: Hurt
As ridiculous to approve of property and let a few men have a grossly unfair share of it, as say you are all for marriage, and then let one man have all the wives.Collection: Men
It beats me how Freud could say "What do women want?" as if we all must want the same thing.Collection: Want
There's comfort to an awful old dressing-gown a pretty peignoir is powerless to provide, and aging bra elastic, is, I suspect, as near to liberation as most women ever get.Collection: Awful
I used to think the only use for sport was to give small boys something else to kick besides me.Collection: Sports
I suppose we all share this pipe-dream of being able to reach out a hand and find anything at will; what is amazing is that we think that good filing could somehow make it comes true. On the contrary: putting a letter into a filing system is like releasing your ferret in the Hampton Court maze.Collection: Dream
A good listener is not someone with nothing to say. A good listener is a good talker with a sore throat.Collection: Women
Spring makes everything look filthy.Collection: Spring
The case against censoring anything is absolute: ... nothing that could be censored can be so bad in its effects, in the long run, as censorship itself.Collection: Running
In hell they will bore you, in heaven you will bore them.Collection: Bores You
Children and zip fasteners do not respond to force ... except occasionally.Collection: Witty
As I look around the West End these days, it seems to me that outside every thin girl is a fat man, trying to get in.Collection: Girl
Too great a preoccupation with motives (especially one's own motive) is liable to lead to too little concern for consequences.Collection: Motivation