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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 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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Culture' means a long receptivity to things of the mind and the spirit.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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... it is a great mistake to confuse conventionality with simplicity ... it takes a good deal of intelligence and a great many inhibitions to follow a social code.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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Frenchwomen could not dress like Englishwomen without conviction of sin.
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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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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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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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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[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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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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... 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
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All violations of essential privacy are brutalizing.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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Some of the men and women who will not say in so many words the thing which is not, will deliberately give a false impression. They are not the servants of truth they are the parasites of truth.
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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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 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