Katharine Fullerton Gerould Quotes
-
[Science] has challenged the super-eminence of religion; it has turned all philosophy out of doors except that which clings to its skirts; it has thrown contempt on all learning that does not depend on it; and it has bribed the skeptics by giving us immense material comforts.
→ -
Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life.
→ -
men demand everything and are not satisfied until sex blinds them into thinking they have got it.
→ -
Individual freedom and individual equality cannot co-exist. I dare say no one since Thomas Jefferson has really believed it.
→ -
The past is discredited because it is not modern. Not to be modern is the great sin. So, perhaps, it is. But every one has, in his day, been modern. And surely even modernity is a poor thing beside immortality. Since we must all die, is it not perhaps better to be a dead lion than a living dog?
→ -
The principle of fashion is . . . the principle of the kaleidoscope. A new year can only bring us a new combination of the same elements; and about once in so often we go back and begin again.
→ -
Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.
→ -
Frenchwomen could not dress like Englishwomen without conviction of sin.
→ -
The imagination can be happy in places where the whole man is not.
→ -
... there are some who, believing that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds, and that to-morrow is necessarily better than to-day, may think that if culture is a good thing we shall infallibly be found to have more of it that we had a generation since; and that if we can be shown not to have more of it, it can be shown not to be worth seeking.
→ -
Many of us do not believe in capital punishment, because thus society takes from a man what society cannot give.
→ -
One of the reasons, surely, why women have been credited with less perfect veracity than men is that the burden of conventional falsehood falls chiefly on them.
→ -
You can be slum-born and slum-bred and still achieve something worth while; but it is a stupid inverted snobbishness to be proud of it. If one had a right to be proud of anything, it would be of a continued decent tradition back of one.
→ -
... the more we recruit from immigrants who bring no personal traditions with them, the more America is going to ignore the things of the spirit. No one whose consuming desire is either for food or for motor-cars is going to care about culture, or even know what it is.
→ -
... when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about, you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precious curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by their information?
→ -
democracy always makes for materialism, because the only kind of equality that you can guarantee to a whole people is, broadly speaking, physical.
→ -
What passes for an original opinion is, generally, merely an original phrase. Old lamps for new - yes; but it is always the same oil in the lamp.
→ -
The insidiousness of science lies in its claim to be not a subject, but a method.
→ -
Do you see any majority, anywhere, in this imperfect and irreligious world, admitting that the minority is precious? That any minority is precious?
→ -
There are only three things worthwhile -- fighting, drinking, and making love.
→ -
On the whole, I should say that the person who likes to lie should never, in any circumstances, be allowed to. Leave the lying to the people who hate it. You will not find them indulging often.
→ -
I nearly always find, when I ask a vegetarian if he is a socialist, or a socialist if he is a vegetarian, that the answer is in the affirmative.
→ -
The aristocracy most widely developed in America is that of wealth.
→ -
Funny how people despise platitudes, when they are usually the truest thing going. A thing has to be pretty true before it gets to be a platitude.
→ -
The insidiousness of science lies in its claim to be not a subject, but a method. You could ignore a subject; no subject is all-inclusive. But a method can plausibly be applied to anything within the field of consciousness.
→ -
When did the word 'temperament' come into fashion with us? Perhaps it came in when we discovered that artists were human beings.
→ -
Social distinctions concern themselves ultimately with whom you may and may not marry.
→ -
When the temperamental and unconventional people are not mere plagiarists of dead eccentrics, they lack, in almost every case, thehistoric sense.
→ -
Most men have always wanted as much as they could get; and possession has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism.
→ -
It is not permissible to lie merely to save one's face. But it is sometimes permissible to lie to save another person's face.
→
Related Authors
-
John Davis Long Former Governor of Massachusetts -
Finley Peter Dunne Writer -
Cornel Wilde Actor -
Ben Ames Williams Novelist -
Maxwell Struthers Burt Novelist -
Eliza Farnham Novelist -
Clarence Budington Kelland Film writer -
Ellen Glasgow Novelist