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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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Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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The imagination can be happy in places where the whole man is not.
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All violations of essential privacy are brutalizing.
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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.
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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 aristocracy most widely developed in America is that of wealth.
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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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men demand everything and are not satisfied until sex blinds them into thinking they have got it.
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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Originality usually amounts only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar.
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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The insidiousness of science lies in its claim to be not a subject, but a method. You could ignore a subject no subject is all-inclusive. But a method can plausibly be applied to anything within the field of consciousness.
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 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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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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... 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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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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[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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Culture' means a long receptivity to things of the mind and the spirit.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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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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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