Life & Wisdom Quote by Minna Antrim

Antrim’s line is a small, gleaming piece of social cruelty: a gendered aphorism that flatters itself as “realism” while quietly advertising the speaker’s superiority. The trick is in the geometry. “Oblique compliment” suggests a sidelong, tactful fiction - a praise that never has to risk the blunt edge of accountability. “Straight truth,” by contrast, carries the masculine-coded virtues of candor and hardness, but Antrim rigs the contest by adding the clause “if the latter were unflattering.” Of course people prefer not to be injured; she frames that ordinary human preference as distinctly feminine, then turns it into a knowing wink about women’s vanity.

The intent isn’t merely to describe behavior; it’s to police it. The quote rewards the person who can deliver the “oblique compliment” (the accomplished social operator) and mocks the person who would demand or deliver “straight truth” (the naive moralist). Subtext: civilization runs on elegant lies, and women are both the prime consumers and the excuse for them. That’s not neutral observation; it’s a justification for a culture where men can keep their honesty sheathed and call it chivalry.

Context matters: early 20th-century drawing-room wit prized the epigram as a weapon, and women writers often navigated a market that paid for sharpness as much as insight. Antrim’s cynicism lands because it’s compact, quotable, and a little nasty - the kind of line that lets readers feel worldly while passing along a stereotype with a smile.