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.
... there are some who, believing that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds, and that to-morrow is necessarily better than to-day, may think that if culture is a good thing we shall infallibly be found to have more of it that we had a generation since; and that if we can be shown not to have more of it, it can be shown not to be worth seeking.
On the whole, I should say that the person who likes to lie should never, in any circumstances, be allowed to. Leave the lying to the people who hate it. You will not find them indulging often.
if you are perfectly willing to shock an individual verbally, the next thing you will be doing is to shock him practically.
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.
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.
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.
All violations of essential privacy are brutalizing.
Social distinctions concern themselves ultimately with whom you may and may not marry.
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.
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.
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.
You can bear anything if it is not your fault.
Most men have always wanted as much as they could get; and possession has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism.
... 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.
Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.
When did the word 'temperament' come into fashion with us? Perhaps it came in when we discovered that artists were human beings.
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.
Many of us do not believe in capital punishment, because thus society takes from a man what society cannot give.
Individual freedom and individual equality cannot co-exist. I dare say no one since Thomas Jefferson has really believed it.
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.
Culture' means a long receptivity to things of the mind and the spirit.
democracy always makes for materialism, because the only kind of equality that you can guarantee to a whole people is, broadly speaking, physical.
I know exaggerators of both kinds: people whose lies are only picturesque adjectives, and people whose picturesque adjectives are only lies.
The aristocracy most widely developed in America is that of wealth.
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