Millicent Fenwick
Millicent Fenwick
Millicent Vernon Hammond Fenwickwas an American fashion editor, politician and diplomat. A four-term Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from New Jersey, she entered politics late in life and was renowned for her energy and colorful enthusiasm. She was regarded as a moderate and progressive within her party and was outspoken in favor of civil rights and the women's movement. She was considered the inspiration behind Lacey Davenport, a fictional character in Garry Trudeau's comic strip Doonesbury...
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth25 February 1910
CityNew York City, NY
Never feel self-pity, the most destructive emotion there is. How awful to be caught up in the terrible squirrel cage of self.
I have come to believe that the one thing people cannot bear is a sense of injustice. Poverty, cold, even hunger, are more bearable than injustice.
When you're old, everything you do is sort of a miracle.
I would like to see ... an entirely different procedure which is that we vote on the budget and decide how much we are going to spend, first, the way any family does, and then fit our priorities into what we think we have to spend. Instead, what we do, is to do it incrementally, starting at the bottom, adding and adding and adding. ... Until we get the support of all the authorities in this House to decide, first, what we think this country can afford and then decide where the amount is going to be allocated, we will never have common sense in this House.
Economics is not a science, in the sense that a policy can be repeatedly applied under similar conditions and will repeatedly produce similar results.
Party organization matters. When the door of a smoke-filled room is closed, there's hardly ever a woman inside.
Women are on the outside when the door to the smoke-filled room is closed.
When two working people decide to marry, their federal income tax is usually increased. As soon as one spouse earns at least 20 percent of a married couple's total income, the couple pays a 'marriage tax.' ... The United States is the only major industrialized nation in the free world in which the tax cost of the second [married] earner's entry into the work force is higher than that of the first. On one hand, our government's social policy is to help working women earn equal salaries to those of men, but on the other we have a tax structure that penalizes them when they do so.
Like life and people, it is full of paradoxes. Etiquette is based on tradition, and yet it can change. Its ramifications are trivialities, but its roots are in great principles.
A code of behavior is an inevitable part of life in any community, and if we hadn't inherited ours, we should have had to invent one.
One of the keys to our present definition of good taste is that it is better to be kind than to be 'correct.' There is no situation in which it is smart to be nasty.
I have come to believe that one thing people cannot bear is a sense of injustice. Poverty, cold, even hunger are more bearable than injustice.