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Daily Inspiration Quote by Oliver Reed

"Then you get into it, especially if you start talking about football, fighting and Muhammad Ali. Then the ladies get very bored and start delivering ultimatums"

About this Quote

Reed frames masculinity as a kind of pub-performance that turns sour the moment it forgets it has an audience. The line starts with an easy, conspiratorial rhythm: you know how it goes, you get into it. Then he stacks the totems: football, fighting, Muhammad Ali. Not just “sports,” but the loud, mythmaking version of them, where men trade memories and opinions like currency and dare each other to top the last story. Ali’s name is the tell: this isn’t about the game itself, it’s about hero-worship, swagger, and the permission to talk in absolutes.

The women in the room aren’t individualized; they’re “the ladies,” a collective barometer for when the conversation has tipped from shared social space into a closed circuit. “Very bored” lands as a deliberately underplayed insult - not outrage, not moral condemnation, just the flat dead-zone of being talked past. That boredom becomes leverage: “delivering ultimatums” turns domestic pushback into melodrama, a comic escalation that also reveals Reed’s bias. He’s half-mocking the men’s tunnel vision, half-resenting the consequences.

Context matters because Reed’s public persona - hard-drinking, charmingly unruly, a headline machine - made him fluent in the rituals he’s describing. The intent isn’t to confess guilt so much as to turn a familiar gender stalemate into an anecdote with a punchline, letting him keep the roguish grin while admitting the cost of talking like the world is a locker room.

Quote Details

TopicWitty One-Liners
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Reed, Oliver. (2026, January 18). Then you get into it, especially if you start talking about football, fighting and Muhammad Ali. Then the ladies get very bored and start delivering ultimatums. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/then-you-get-into-it-especially-if-you-start-18116/

Chicago Style
Reed, Oliver. "Then you get into it, especially if you start talking about football, fighting and Muhammad Ali. Then the ladies get very bored and start delivering ultimatums." FixQuotes. January 18, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/then-you-get-into-it-especially-if-you-start-18116/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Then you get into it, especially if you start talking about football, fighting and Muhammad Ali. Then the ladies get very bored and start delivering ultimatums." FixQuotes, 18 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/then-you-get-into-it-especially-if-you-start-18116/. Accessed 13 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Oliver Reed (February 13, 1938 - May 2, 1999) was a Actor from England.

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