Politics & Power Quote by Tallulah Bankhead

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.