"Nothing is of so much importance and of so much use to a young man entering life as to be well criticized by women."

That's a quote from Benjamin Disraeli, "man of fashion, satiric novelist, twice Prime Minister, and the dominant figure of the Conservative Party in Britain from 1846 until his death, in 1881." Adam Gopnik has a good piece about him in The New Yorker. Don't you love quotes like that? Startling, chewable, likeable even without the ring of truth.