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Chinks in America's egalitarian armor are not hard to find. Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.

Florence King

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Florence King
Age: 80 †
Born: 1936
Born: January 5
Died: 2016
Died: January 6
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Washington
District of Columbia
Florence Virginia King
Hard
Figs
Armor
Leafs
Leaf
Democracy
Chinks
America
Egalitarianism
Women
Egalitarian
Find
Elitism

More quotes by Florence King

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Judge not, lest ye be judged judgmental.
Florence King
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Each time a mediocre singer performs, he is saying, in effect, This is good enough for you. The audience, thrust into that familiar American mood of knowing something is wrong but not knowing what it is, unconsciously absorbs the insult and projects it back onto the mediocre performer in the form of inattention, rudeness and noise.
Florence King
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Southerners have a genius for psychological alchemy...If something intolerable simply cannot be changed, driven away or shot they will not only tolerate it but take pride in it as well.
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My object is to live in a place that does not call itself 'the community with a heart.' I want one of those godforsaken towns where all the young people leave and the rest sit on the porch with a rifle across their knees.
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We worship education but hate learning. We worship success but hate the successful. We worship fame but hate the famous.
Florence King
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The copyeditor I drew was a brachycephalic, web-footed cretin who should have been in an institution learning how to make brooms.
Florence King
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The proliferation of support groups suggests to me that too many Americans are growing up in homes that do not contain a grandmoth.
Florence King
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In other countries, congenital introverts simply remain introverts all their lives, neither advancing nor retreating, but America's commitment to extroversion as a national art form can abrade some naturally aloof personalities until they flower into deadly nightshade.
Florence King
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Nothing is more likely to start me screaming like a madwoman than New York in February with its piles of blackened snow full of yellow holes drilled by dogs.
Florence King
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Any discussion of the problems of being funny in America will not make sense unless we substitute the word wit for humor. Humor inspires sympathetic good-natured laughter and is favored by the healing-power gang. Wit goes for the jugular, not the jocular, and it's the opposite of football instead of building character, it tears it down.
Florence King
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Familiarity doesn't breed contempt, it is contempt.
Florence King
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There's something unrefined about a reading woman, they always reek of the lamp. How can she grow up to be a lady if she's always got her nose in a book? Granny Rudin
Florence King
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When women talk about privacy they mean abortion rights, and the millions of words feminists have written about a room of one'sown refer to psychological space, rarely to physical solitude. For most women being alone is tantamount to being deserted.
Florence King
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To me, elitism means a love of excellence and superiority, but America has declared war on both and developed a sick love of the lowest common denominator to make sure no-one becomes too fine for our touted democracy. We are almost at the point of regarding every virtue as elitist.
Florence King
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I've always said that next to Imperial China, the South is the best place in the world to be an old lady.
Florence King
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During the feminist seventies men were caught between a rock and a hard-on in the fathering eighties they are caught between good hugs and bad hugs.
Florence King
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Gradually my whole concept of time changed until I thought of a month as having twenty-five days of humanness and five others when I might just as well have been an animal in a steel trap.
Florence King
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Real feminism is spinsterhood. It's time America admitted that old maids give all women a good name.
Florence King
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There is nothing wrong with women's studies that studying the right women can't cure, but feminist literary scholars have a penchant for dragging the rivers of deserved obscurity for third-rate neurotics.
Florence King
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Very is the most useless word in the English language and can always come out. More than useless, it is treacherous because it invariably weakens what it is intended to strengthen. For example, would you rather hear the mincing shallowness of I love you very much or the heart-slamming intensity of I love you?
Florence King