Please note: These quotes do not necessarily reflect the views of the Alternatives to Marriage Project. We list them only as entertainment.

"Marriage is an institution. I'm not ready for an institution."
- Mae West

"Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences."
- Isadora Duncan

"Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience."
- Oscar Wilde

"I never married because there was no need. I have three pets at home which answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog that growls every morning, a parrot that swears all afternoon, and a cat that comes home late at night."
- Marie Corelli - 1855-1924

"I've sometimes thought of marrying, and then I've thought again."
- Noel Coward, 1956

"A man is incomplete until he is married. After that, he is finished."
- Zsa Zsa Gabor

"... others think that Zsa Zsa Gabor hit the nail on the head: 'I don't know anything about sex. I've always been married.'"
-From an article published in an issue of The New Criterion.

"We must refuse to submit to those institutions which are by definition sexist - marriage, the nuclear family, religions built on the myth of feminine evil."
- Andrea Dworkin

"One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
- Oscar Wilde

"Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get out."
-Montaigne

"Marriage is a lottery in which men stake their liberty and women their happiness."
-Madame Virgine de Rieux, 16th century French writer

-"Let no one ever say that marriages are made in Heaven; the gods would not commit so great an injustice!"
- Queen Marguerite of Valois (wife of Henry IV of France)

"In olden times sacrifices were made at the altar -- a practice which is still continued."
- Helen Rowland, author of Reflections of a Bachelor Girl

"Wife and servant are the same,
but only differ in the name."
-Lady Chudleigh, 1703

"The proper basis for a marriage is a mutual misunderstanding."
- Oscar Wilde

Why don't melons get married?
They cantaloupe.

"Marriage is based on the theory that when a man discovers a brand of beer exactly to his taste, he should at once throw up his job and go to work in the brewery."
- George Jean Nathan

"Sleep around all you want, but don't get married."
- Attorney Debra Koenig advising a group of seventh grade girls on "Take Our Daughters to Work" day

"Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love."
- Ellen Key, a Swedish social feminist around 1900

"I am" is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that "I do" is the longest sentence?
- unknown

"I think a single woman's biggest problem is coping with the people who are trying to marry her off!"
- Helen Gurley Brown

"I would rather be a beggar and single than a queen and married."
- Queen Elizabeth I

"Morality consists of suspecting other people of not being legally married."
- George Bernard Shaw

"I became a nun, because although I recognized it as having many ramifications... foreign to my temperament, still, given my completely negative feelings about marriage, it was the least disproportionate and most fitting thing I could do."
- Juana Ines de la Cruz, 17th century nun

"If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married."
- Katharine Hepburn

"When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal and exhausting condition until death do them part."
- George Bernard Shaw

"He marries best who puts it off until it is too late."
- H.L. Mencken

"It may be that if the job description of wife were spelled out in full no sensible woman would apply."
- Rebecca Mead in "Conditional Surrender," The New Yorker, April 2, 2001

"[The] idealization of marriage is typical of those who are excluded from it: priests, gays, adolescents. It shows an extraordinary willful blindness."

- Michael Warner in The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (1999). This book is reviewed in the March 2000 edition of our Update.

"Call no man unhappy until he is married."
- Socrates

"St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake."
-- Bertrand Russell

"It is...astonishing that...marriage is still legally allowed. If nearly half of anything ended so disastrously, the government would surely ban it immediately. If half the tacos served in restaurants caused dysentery, if half the people learning karate broke their palms, if only 6% of people who went on roller coasters damaged their middle ears, the public would be clamoring for action."
- Lionel Tiger

"If marriage isn't a prison, why do they call it wedlock?"

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