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Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould

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Katharine Fullerton Gerould
Time
Nasty
Advance
Merely
Civilization
Taste
Accepting
Ones
Nicer
Things
Rejecting

More quotes by Katharine Fullerton Gerould

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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.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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Nothing makes people so worthy of compliments as receiving them. One is more delightful for being told one is delightful-just as one is more angry for being told one is angry.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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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.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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... if we have a dollar to spend on some wild excess, we shall spend it on a book, not on asparagus out of season.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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Culture' means a long receptivity to things of the mind and the spirit.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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I know exaggerators of both kinds: people whose lies are only picturesque adjectives, and people whose picturesque adjectives are only lies.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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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.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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Many of us do not believe in capital punishment, because thus society takes from a man what society cannot give.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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Every one knows about the young man who falls in love with the chorus-girl because she can kick his hat off, and his sister's friends can't or won't. But the youth who marries her, expecting that all her departures from convention will be as agile or as delightful to him as that, is still the classic example of folly.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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... it is a great mistake to confuse conventionality with simplicity ... it takes a good deal of intelligence and a great many inhibitions to follow a social code.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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... 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.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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Ignorance of what real learning is, and a consequent suspicion of it materialism, and a consequent intellectual laxity, both of these have done destructive work in the colleges.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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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.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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I have always, privately and humbly, thought it a pity that so good a word [as culture] should go out of the best vocabularies for when you lose an abstract term, you are apt to lose the thing it stands for.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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The aristocracy most widely developed in America is that of wealth.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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Originality usually amounts only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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men demand everything and are not satisfied until sex blinds them into thinking they have got it.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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Educational legislation nowadays is largely in the hands of illiterate people, and the illiterate will take good care that their illiteracy is not made a reproach on them.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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The very notion of tabu is one of the rightest notions in the world. Better any old tabu than none, for a man cannot be said to beon the side of the stars at all, unless he makes refusals.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould