"I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education"
About this Quote
Tallulah Bankhead’s “liberal education” lands like a wink and a cigarette flick: a refusal to let refinement stay clean. She pairs Shakespeare and the Bible - the twin pillars of “serious” Western culture, one secular-canonical, one sacred-canonical - with shooting dice, the low-stakes, lowbrow art of chance. The joke isn’t just contrast; it’s control. Bankhead is saying she can move fluently between drawing-room prestige and backroom survival, and she’s not apologizing for either.
The intent is partly defensive and partly triumphant. As an actress in a period that loved to treat women’s intellect as novelty and women’s vice as scandal, Bankhead turns the moral ledger into a résumé. The subtext: you want a lady who’s cultured but not complicated. I’m cultured and complicated. “Liberal education” usually signals institutional grooming - the polite, credentialed kind. Bankhead reclaims it as streetwise cosmopolitanism: literacy plus nerve, scripture plus gamble, the ability to quote the height of drama and still read a room where the rules aren’t written down.
Context matters: early-to-mid 20th-century celebrity culture rewarded transgression as long as it could be packaged as charm. Bankhead’s persona thrived on that knife-edge. By putting dice in the same breath as Shakespeare, she punctures the class fantasy that taste equals virtue. She’s also rewriting what “educated” means: not purity, not pedigree, but range. The line works because it flatters the audience’s appetite for glamour while quietly indicting their snobbery.
The intent is partly defensive and partly triumphant. As an actress in a period that loved to treat women’s intellect as novelty and women’s vice as scandal, Bankhead turns the moral ledger into a résumé. The subtext: you want a lady who’s cultured but not complicated. I’m cultured and complicated. “Liberal education” usually signals institutional grooming - the polite, credentialed kind. Bankhead reclaims it as streetwise cosmopolitanism: literacy plus nerve, scripture plus gamble, the ability to quote the height of drama and still read a room where the rules aren’t written down.
Context matters: early-to-mid 20th-century celebrity culture rewarded transgression as long as it could be packaged as charm. Bankhead’s persona thrived on that knife-edge. By putting dice in the same breath as Shakespeare, she punctures the class fantasy that taste equals virtue. She’s also rewriting what “educated” means: not purity, not pedigree, but range. The line works because it flatters the audience’s appetite for glamour while quietly indicting their snobbery.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
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