You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think

Quotations of this sort are often difficult to verify and this one has been attributed to Mae West (with little or no justification) and others. In this case, various contemporaries have verified the authorship as Parker’s. She coined many witticisms and had occasion to complain that the recognition usually went elsewhere, as in A Pig’s-Eye View of Literature, 1937:

If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.

She coined ‘lead a horticulture…’ after challenged by the American columnist and wit Franklin P Adams to use the word ‘horticulture’ in a sentence. Obviously it’s a play on words on the familiar you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink and is spoken as you can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.