Love Quote by Hedy Lamarr

Self-absorption is the joke, and Hedy Lamarr lands it with a performer’s timing: she opens by confessing what polite society pretends not to do, then slips the blade in with a pivot that indicts everyone else, too. The first two sentences are disarmingly candid, almost bratty. That’s the point. By owning vanity outright, she drains it of scandal and turns it into a mirror. Most people do love talking about themselves; we just prefer to call it “sharing.”

Then she complicates the confession with “We need, people like us,” a phrase that does double work. It flatters the in-group (the witty, the self-aware, the socially fluent) while admitting the speaker is part of the problem. Lamarr isn’t setting herself above the crowd; she’s confessing from inside the human condition, but with movie-star clarity about the mechanics of attention. The subtext is less “stop being narcissists” than “notice how the economy of conversation is rigged.” Everyone wants the spotlight, so the rare commodity becomes the person who can sit in the dark and keep it trained on someone else.

Context makes the line bite harder. Lamarr lived in a culture that treated actresses as surfaces: listened to, yes, but not necessarily heard, especially when they had ideas beyond their looks. Coming from a woman whose intellect was long minimized, the plea for “more listeners” reads as both social critique and personal wish: not silence, but recognition. It’s a self-portrait with teeth.