Skip to main content

Daily Inspiration Quote by Helen Gurley Brown

"Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere"

About this Quote

A single line that manages to flirt, sneer, and sell you something all at once. Helen Gurley Brown’s “Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere” is less a moral claim than a rebrand: “bad” isn’t evil, it’s mobile. The punch is in the misdirection. She borrows the architecture of a warning-your-grandmother-would-approve-of (virtue rewarded, vice punished) and flips the payoff into a travel brochure. Heaven becomes a narrow destination; “everywhere” is the real prize.

Brown’s intent is culturally tactical. As the editor who helped turn Cosmopolitan into a megaphone for the aspirational single woman, she understood that liberation often needs a catchy caption. The quote gives permission without sounding like a manifesto: it packages sexual and social agency as adventurousness, not ideology. That matters in mid-20th-century America, where women were still expected to treat desire like a stain and ambition like bad manners.

The subtext is an argument about who gets to move through the world unchaperoned. “Good girls” are rewarded with purity, but it’s a reward that reads like confinement: be approved of, be contained. “Bad girls,” by contrast, are uncontainable - they take up space, cross borders, pick experiences. The line also winks at the hypocrisy of “goodness” as a social performance, implying that the real sin is being seen wanting more.

It works because it’s mischievous and memorizable, a moral fable rewritten as a dare. Brown turns shame into itinerary.

Quote Details

TopicWitty One-Liners
Source
Later attribution: Bad Girls Go Everywhere (Jennifer Scanlon, 2009) modern compilationISBN: 9780199711888 · ID: 8MJWyEAGyIEC
Text match: 95.00%   Provider: Google Books
Evidence:
The Life of Helen Gurley Brown Jennifer Scanlon. GOOD GIRLS GO TO HEAVEN - BAD GIRLS GO EVERYWHERE reader feel as though she were being addressed as an individual . She con- vincingly assured each reader , or at least each woman who ...
Cite

Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Brown, Helen Gurley. (2026, February 19). Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/good-girls-go-to-heaven-bad-girls-go-everywhere-170126/

Chicago Style
Brown, Helen Gurley. "Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere." FixQuotes. February 19, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/good-girls-go-to-heaven-bad-girls-go-everywhere-170126/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere." FixQuotes, 19 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/good-girls-go-to-heaven-bad-girls-go-everywhere-170126/. Accessed 26 Feb. 2026.

More Quotes by Helen Add to List
Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere
Click to enlarge Portrait | Landscape

About the Author

Helen Gurley Brown

Helen Gurley Brown (February 18, 1922 - August 13, 2012) was a Editor from USA.

9 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes