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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 only glory most of us have to hope for is the glory of being normal.
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 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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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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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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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 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 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 imagination can be happy in places where the whole man is not.
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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Culture' means a long receptivity to things of the mind and the spirit.
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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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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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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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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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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... 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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There are inquiries which are a sort of moral burglary.
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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Originality usually amounts only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould