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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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Katharine Fullerton Gerould
May
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More quotes by Katharine Fullerton Gerould

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The great mistake of the reformers is to believe that life begins and ends with health, and that happiness begins and ends with a full stomach and the power to enjoy physical pleasures, even of the finer kind.
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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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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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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Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.
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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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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if you are perfectly willing to shock an individual verbally, the next thing you will be doing is to shock him practically.
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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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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The aristocracy most widely developed in America is that of wealth.
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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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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[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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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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men demand everything and are not satisfied until sex blinds them into thinking they have got it.
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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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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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