Three things have been difficult to tame: the oceans, fools and women. We may soon be able to tame the oceans fools and women will take a little longer.

Attributed to Spiro T. Agnew, the remark is a sardonic, deliberately provocative “three things” aphorism that groups vast natural forces (“the oceans”) with two human categories (“fools” and “women”) and then claims technological progress will master nature sooner than it will master people. Its structure depends on a sexist premise—treating women as a class to be “tamed”—and on contempt for “fools,” using both as rhetorical foils to flatter the speaker’s audience as rational and in control. Read historically, it reflects a strain of mid‑20th‑century political humor that sought laughs through insult and domination rather than insight.