Wellesley Quotes

Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women.
[Commencement Address, Wellesley College, 1996] ~ Nora Ephron

Hair matters. This is a life lesson Wellesley and Yale Law School failed to instil. Your hair will send significant messages to those around you. ~ Hillary Clinton

At Newsweek only girls with college degrees
and we were called "girls" then
were hired to sort and deliver the mail, humbly pushing our carts from door to door in our ladylike frocks and proper high-heeled shoes. If we could manage that, we graduated to "clippers," another female ghetto. Dressed in drab khaki smocks so that ink wouldn't smudge our clothes, we sat at the clip desk, marked up newspapers, tore out releveant articles with razor-edged "rip sticks," and routed the clips to the appropriate departments. "Being a clipper was a horrible job," said writer and director Nora Ephron, who got a job at Newsweek after she graduated from Wellesley in 1962, "and to make matters worse, I was good at it. ~ Lynn Povich

The senior thesis of Hillary D. Rodham, Wellesley College class of 1969, has been speculated about, spun, analyzed, debated, criticized and defended. But rarely has it been read, because for the eight years of Bill Clinton's presidency it was locked away. ~ Bill Dedman

Educate men without religion and you make of them but clever devils. ~ Arthur Wellesley

Nora Ephron explained in a 1996 commencement address at her alma mater, Wellesley College, about her own graduating class of 1962: "We weren't meant to have futures, we were meant to marry them. We weren't meant to have politics, or careers that mattered, or opinions or lives; we were meant to marry them. If you wanted to be an architect, you married an architect." Both ~ Rebecca Traister

It had been a damned nice thing - the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life. (Waterloo 18 June 1815)

'I hope to God,' he said one day,'that I have fought my last battle.It is a bad thing to be always fighting.While in the thick of it,I am much too occupied to feel anything;but it is wretched just after.It is quite impossible to think of glory.Both mind and feeling are exhausted.I am wretched even at the moment of victory,and I always say that next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained.Not only do you lose those dear friends with whom you have been living,but you are forced to leave the wounded behind you.To be sure one tries to do the best for them,but how little that is!At such moments every feeling in your breast is deadened.I am now just beginning to retain my natural spirits,but I never wish for any more fighting. ~ Arthur Wellesley

My anthology continues to sell & the critics get more & more angry. When I excluded Wilfred Owen, whom I consider unworthy of the poets' corner of a country newspaper, I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that some body has put his worst & most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Museum
however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the same. He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick (look at the selection in Faber's Anthology
he calls poets 'bards,' a girl a 'maid,' & talks about 'Titanic wars'). There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him ... (from a letter of December 26, 1936, in Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, p. 124). ~ W.B.Yeats

Stupid patriarchal culture with stupid ideas of beauty - stupid me for going along with it. ~ Marni Bates

It is not the business of generals to shoot one another. ~ Arthur Wellesley

I don't know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me. ~ Arthur Wellesley

Hillary Clinton lived at Wellesley and Yale. Her circle of friends was that Ivy League bunch, and they were all being trained for lives in government. They were all being trained for lives of government: CIA, State Department. ~ Rush Limbaugh

Too late to point out that he would be better off with someone smart and sweet and - okay - awkward than with Chelsea. Someone who could make him laugh. Someone like, oh, I dunno, me! ~ Marni Bates

The whole art of war consists of guessing at what is on the other side of the hill. ~ Arthur Wellesley

An extraordinary dream by lord charles wellesley. (Charlotte Bronte)
'In this slumber i thought i was walking on the banks of a river ... Which murmered over small pebbles at the bottom, gleaming like crystals through the silver stream' 'and the green buds of the wild rose trees around were unopened' 'and a mild warmth were shed from the sun ... Then at its height in the blue sky ~ Charlotte Bronte

I did go to Wellesley, a women's college. And I am of a kind of strange generation which is transitional in terms of women who wanted to go out and get jobs. ~ Madeleine Albright

Yesterday, a beautiful day ... I was talking to [an older] woman who said that she wouldn't want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn't want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees because she's afraid. Fear is always with us but we just don't have time for it. Not now. HILLARY RODHAM, Wellesley commencement speech, 1969 ~ Rebecca Traister

The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. ~ Arthur Wellesley

We are, all of us, exploring a world none of us understands ... searching for a more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating mode of living ... for the integrity, the courage to be whole, living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences ... Fear is always with us, but we just don't have time for it.
-Commencement Speech, Wellesley 1969 ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton

Being born in a stable does not make one a horse. ~ Arthur Wellesley

The reputation Hillary Clinton had at Wellesley and Yale was, "My God, this woman single-handedly could end up running the world! This is the smartest woman!" ~ Rush Limbaugh

After the Battle of Waterloo, Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington - who managed to defeat Napoleon by the skin of his teeth - surveyed the blood-soaked cornfields of Belgium and wrote in a letter, "Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won. ~ Chris Pourteau

I was on my own at Wellesley, surrounded by a lot of young women who were motivated and intellectually curious. I started to read because I was required to do so for class, but I soon found myself enjoying the seclusion of the library. I came to see reading as an important way to learn about people, including myself. ~ Elisabeth Shue

Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won. ~ Arthur Wellesley

Wellesley's president, Nannerl Overholser Keohane, approved a broad rule with a specific application: The senior thesis of every Wellesley alumna is available in the college archives for anyone to read - except for those written by either a 'president or first lady of the United States.' ~ Bill Dedman

That's always the worst: the not knowing. Because then you're stuck with a hundred questions no one can answer. ~ Marni Bates

The Lord's prayer contains the sum total of religion and morals. ~ Arthur Wellesley

By 1996 Nora Ephron was telling a graduating class at Wellesley, Don't underestimate how much antagonism there is toward women and how many people wish we could turn the clock back. ... Understand: every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you. ~ Rebecca Traister

We are striving to change things, lass. But changes don't occur overnight." - Mr. Wellesley ~ Aya Ling

Everyone would wonder, 'What's he doing with her?' And then you'd say, 'Hmm, good question,' and you'd dump me. That wouldn't be nice. ~ Marni Bates

When my journal appears, many statues must come down. ~ Arthur Wellesley

Habit is ten times nature. ~ Arthur Wellesley

Develop and protect a moral sensibility and demonstrate the character to apply it. Dream big. Work hard. Think for yourself. Love everything you love, everyone you love, with all your might. And do so, please, with a sense of urgency, for every tick of the clock subtracts from fewer and fewer. ~ David McCullough Jr.

And so, as they climb the ladder of achievement, I'd simply say, remember what Barbara Bush told those girls at Wellesley: "What happens in your house is more important than what happens in the White House." ~ George H. W. Bush

I have lectured at Town Hall N.Y., The Library of Congress, Harvard, Yale, Amherst, Wellesley, Columbia, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Louisiana State University, Colorado, Stanford, and scores of other places. ~ Paul Engle

We have a game we play when we're waiting for tables in restaurants, where you have to write the five things that describe yourself on a piece of paper. When I was [in my twenties], I would have put: ambitious, Wellesley graduate, daughter, Democrat, single. Ten years later not one of those five things turned up on my list. I was: journalist, feminist, New Yorker, divorced, funny. Today not one of those five things turns up in my list: writer, director, mother, sister, happy. ~ Nora Ephron