Stanley Ford Quotes in How to Murder Your Wife (1965)

Stanley Ford: Good evening, Judge Blackstone. I'm afraid this is a mournful occasion.

Judge Blackstone: Not at all, my boy, not at all. Been married 38 years myself. And I don't regret one day of it. The one day I don't regret was... August 2, 1936. She was off visiting her ailing mother at the time.

Harold Lampson: I am speaking to you now not as your lawyer but as your friend. Stan, you are a grown man and grown men simply can't, repeat cannot, go around spreading terror on the New York streets at the height of the noon hour accompanied -will you stop just a minute, Stan?- by naked women.

Stanley Ford: She wasn't naked. She had a diamond in her navel.

Stanley Ford: My God, you're Italian!

Stanley Ford: Push the button, Harold.

Stanley Ford: You get-um dressed, me go talk-um Butler.

Stanley Ford: Here you are in the prime of life. A handsome figure of a man, successful in business, adored by one and all. In fact, it could be said that you had it made, except for the one thing.

Harold Lampson: I'm a lousy lawyer, huh?

Stanley Ford: [scoffs] No, you're married.

Harold Lampson: Yeah, but being married is the normal way to live. Isn't it?

Stanley Ford: Who says so?

Harold Lampson: Edna?

Stanley Ford: Oh Harold, I think you've been brainwashed. You're missing a very important point: marriage is not a basic fact of nature, it's an invention. It's like the infield fly rule; it exists only because the women say so and like idiots we just go following right along.

Harold Lampson: Uh...no, no, no, uh, Stan, I don't know what I would do without Edna. She...she...she plans the meals, sends my shirts to the laundry...

Stanley Ford: [interrupting] Harold, you're making another basic common masculine mistake: you're confusing love and laundry.

Harold Lampson: [rubbing the side of his face] Love and laundry, ay?

Stanley Ford: 'Bash Brannigan, Secret Agent' is syndicated in 463 newspapers. You know why?

Harold Lampson: Sure, I know... Because it's hard-core pornography, softened slightly, ever so slightly, by excessive violence and SADISM!

Stanley Ford: 'Bash Brannigan' is enjoyed by millions because my readers know it's absolutely authentic! I'd never ask Bash to do anything I hadn't already done myself!

Stanley Ford: Gentlemen...

[looks at Harold Lampson, who gives him a wink and a grin; turns back to jury]

Stanley Ford: Gentlemen, I address you not as judge and jury, but as a fellow American male. The crime that you have just seen Harold Lampson commit in his imagination I have been accused of committing in reality. Too long has the American man allowed himself to be bullied, coddled, and mothered, and tyrannized, and in general meant to feel like a feeble-minded idiot by the female of the species. Do you realize the power that you have in your hand here today? If one man - just one man - can stick his wife in the goop from the gloppitta-gloppitta machine, and get away with it! Whoa-ho-ho, boy, we've got it made. We have got it made. All of us.

Charles Firbank: Hear! Hear!

Stanley Ford: Gentlemen, I did it.

[crowd murmurs]

Stanley Ford: I killed her. I murdered my wife.

[judge bangs gavel]

Stanley Ford: Every single charge that the district attorney has leveled against me is true. Indeed, I did slip her a Mickey - brrrup-brrrap!

[smacks rail]

Stanley Ford: I cold-bloodedly then fed her into a tomb of goop from the gloppitta-gloppitta machine! I ask you to acquit me! Acquit me on the grounds of justifiable homicide. And not for my sake... for yours.