"Marya Mannes" was an United States/American author and critic, known for her caustic but insightful observations of American life. Mannes also wrote under the pen name of, "Sec."

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Money is not an aphrodisiac: the desire it may kindle in the female eye is more for the cash than the carrier.

If American men are obsessed with money, American women are obsessed with weight. The men talk of gain, the women talk of loss, and I do not know which talk is the more boring.

The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future.

It is not enough to show people how to live better: there is a mandate for any group with enormous powers of communication to show people how to be better.

Generosity with strings is not generosity; It is a deal.

The curse of the romantic is a greed for dreams, an intensity of expectation that, in the end, diminishes the reality.

By the age of fifty, you have made yourself what you are, and if it is good, it is better than your youth.

The great omission in American life is solitude. . . that zone of time and space, free from the outside pressures, which is the incinerator of the spirit.

Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist if at the same time she manages to be a good wife, a good mother, good-looking, good-tempered, well-dressed, well-groomed, and unaggressive.

The sign of an intelligent people is their ability to control emotions by the application of reason.

In our society those who are in reality superior in intelligence can be accepted by their fellows only if they pretend they are not.

Borders are scratched across the hearts of men, by strangers with a calm, judicial pen, and when the borders bleed we watch with dread the lines of ink along the map turn red.

All really great lovers are articulate, and verbal seduction is the surest road to actual seduction.