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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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Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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More quotes by Katharine Fullerton Gerould

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[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.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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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.
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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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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Culture' means a long receptivity to things of the mind and the spirit.
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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There are inquiries which are a sort of moral burglary.
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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Some of the men and women who will not say in so many words the thing which is not, will deliberately give a false impression. They are not the servants of truth they are the parasites of truth.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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Individual freedom and individual equality cannot co-exist. I dare say no one since Thomas Jefferson has really believed it.
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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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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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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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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... 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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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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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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Originality usually amounts only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould