Marriage Quote by Earl Warren

What makes this line land is its uneasy blend of courtroom bluntness and middle-aged confession, as if the speaker is both diagnosing a motive and airing a private disgust. Warren frames midlife male desire not as romance but as an audit: a man "wants to see how irresistible he still is". The verb turns infidelity into a test score, vanity dressed up as existential reassurance. He isn’t describing passion; he’s describing insecurity with a comb-over.

Then the sentence swerves from motive to moral astonishment. "Turn their hearts to stone" reaches for biblical melodrama, but it’s deployed like a prosecutor’s aside: how can someone do this and live with themselves? The phrase "more or less commit a murder of their marriage" is legalistic metaphor doing cultural work. Marriage becomes a victim, not a contract. The violence is rhetorical, but the judgment is real: betrayal isn’t a mistake, it’s a crime scene.

The subtext is complicated, and dated in revealing ways. Warren’s sympathy tracks the institution more than the spouse, and the object of desire is "younger women" who appear as a measuring device rather than people. Still, his bafflement reads less like puritanism than alarm at how casually men rationalize damage. Coming from a judge, the context matters: he’s trained to look for intent and consequence, and here he’s staring at a common motive that produces catastrophic outcomes - and admitting that the emotional mechanics of self-justification remain, to him, the most troubling evidence.