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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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The only glory most of us have to hope for is the glory of being normal.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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Many of us do not believe in capital punishment, because thus society takes from a man what society cannot give.
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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I know exaggerators of both kinds: people whose lies are only picturesque adjectives, and people whose picturesque adjectives are only lies.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould