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Most men have always wanted as much as they could get and possession has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould

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Katharine Fullerton Gerould
Fine
Wanted
Much
Blunted
Always
Altruism
Men
Edge
Edges
Possession
Stupid

More quotes by Katharine Fullerton Gerould

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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.
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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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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Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life.
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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No fashion has ever been created expressly for the lean purse or for the fat woman: the dressmaker's ideal is the thin millionaires.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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The real drawback to the simple life is that it is not simple. If you are living it, you positively can do nothing else. There is not time.
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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I have looked warily at anthropologists ever since the day when I went to hear a great Greek scholar lecture on the Iliad, and listened for an hour to talk about bull-roarers and leopard-societies.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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When the temperamental and unconventional people are not mere plagiarists of dead eccentrics, they lack, in almost every case, thehistoric sense.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following genius--a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is a good thing to do.
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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Society, by insisting on conventions, has merely insisted on certain convenient signs by which we may know that a man is considering, in daily life, the comfort of other people.
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
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All violations of essential privacy are brutalizing.
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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There are inquiries which are a sort of moral burglary.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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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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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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The imagination can be happy in places where the whole man is not.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould