Daily Inspiration Quote by Clare Boothe Luce

Luce swings for the jugular, then smiles as she does it. The meat-ax line isn’t a confession of cruelty so much as a boast about comedic method: she’s advertising blunt-force satire as a corrective to a certain kind of womanhood she found theatrically useful and culturally dangerous. The “inspired this play” phrasing gives her plausible affection; the pivot to “deserved” instantly turns admiration into indictment. She’s telling you these women weren’t just models, they were targets.

The violence is rhetorical, not literal, but it’s not accidental. A “smack across the head” is domestic and punitive; a “meat ax” drags the image into the butcher shop, cartoonishly excessive. It signals that subtlety would be a lie. Luce’s subtext is that the social performance she’s lampooning - vanity, manipulation, self-mythology, the genteel brutality of salon politics - requires an equally unsentimental instrument. Comedy, here, is discipline.

Then comes the needle: “I flatter myself.” That little flourish is as important as the ax. It frames the author as both judge and aesthete, pleased with her own ruthlessness, implying the real offense isn’t that the characters are monstrous, but that they refuse honest self-knowledge. Luce, a high-society insider with a predator’s feel for status, writes from within the world she skewers. The line doubles as a disclaimer: if you feel attacked, good. Satire has landed.

Context matters: Luce’s era loved “strong women” onstage as long as they were punished, redeemed, or made ridiculous. She chooses ridiculous - but makes the ridicule sharp enough to feel like revenge and clarity at the same time.