Life & Wisdom Quote by Iris Murdoch

Murdoch’s line lands like a polite compliment with a knife hidden inside it. Pairing “being a woman” with “being Irish” isn’t a cute identity mash-up; it’s a diagnosis of how power flatters what it intends to sideline. “Everyone says you’re important and nice” mimics the language of ceremonial praise: the kind used to keep people warm while keeping them out of the room where decisions get made. The sting is in the pivot: “but you take second place all the same.” The word “take” is doing double duty, suggesting both a position assigned to you and a posture you’re trained to accept.

The Irish comparison carries Murdoch’s twentieth-century context: a Britain that could romanticize Ireland’s charm, culture, even its “spirit,” while maintaining political dominance and economic hierarchies. It’s colonialism’s favorite trick: aestheticize the other, then manage them. Murdoch threads that same mechanism through gender. Women are praised as essential, morally elevating, “the backbone” - and then excluded from authority, authorship, and seriousness. Compliments become a kind of social anesthesia.

As a novelist-philosopher, Murdoch is also poking at the politics of “niceness.” Niceness is rewarded, but it’s also a leash: be agreeable, be grateful, don’t demand more than admiration. The sentence works because it exposes how oppression often arrives dressed as esteem. It’s not overt hostility Murdoch targets; it’s the smoother, more damaging arrangement where the dominant culture gets to feel generous while staying in control.