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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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Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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More quotes by 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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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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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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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 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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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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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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men demand everything and are not satisfied until sex blinds them into thinking they have got it.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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Frenchwomen could not dress like Englishwomen without conviction of sin.
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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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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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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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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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 aristocracy most widely developed in America is that of wealth.
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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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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There are inquiries which are a sort of moral burglary.
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