Respectability Quotes - Page 3

• She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability.

  Edith Wharton

  Two, Together, Amusement

  Edith Wharton (2013). “Delphi Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)”, p.1608, Delphi Classics

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• The Great Man... is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of 'opinion'; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and 'respectability,' and altogether everything that is the 'virtue of the herd.' If he cannot lead, he goes alone... He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar... When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Men, Solitude, Opinion

  Friedrich Nietzsche, Jason Kingston (2017). “Friedrich Nietzsche: 100 Quotes on Strength, Power, and Honor”

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• Stop moping, sule," galladon said with a grunt."It doesn't suit you-it takes a fine sense of pessimism to brood with any sort of respectability.

  Brandon Sanderson

  Suits You, Pessimism, Said

  Brandon Sanderson (2011). “Elantris”, p.442, Hachette UK

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• To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.

  Oscar Wilde

  Passion, Class, Easy

  Oscar Wilde (2012). “The Wit and Humor of Oscar Wilde”, p.191, Courier Corporation

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• What, in the devil's name, is the use of respectability, with never so many gigs and silver spoons, if thou inwardly art the pitifulness of all men?

  Thomas Carlyle

  Respect, Art, Men

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• The slave labors, but with no cheer - it is not the road to respectability, it will honor him with no citizens' trust, it brings no bread to his family, no grain to his garner, no leisure in after-days, no books or papers to his children. It opens no school-house door, builds no church, rears for him no factory, lays no keel, fills no bank, earns no acres. With sweat and toil and ignorance he consumes his life, to pour the earnings into channels from which he does no drink, into hands that never honor him. But perpetually rob and often torment.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Cheer, Children, Book

  "Modern Agitators: or, Pen Portraits of Living American Reformers". Book by David W. Bartlett, 1856.

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• For that, one has to drop all the masks, one has to risk many things, particularly respectability. That is a bribe by the society. It will give you a Nobel prize and it will give you many honours; it will do everything to make you feel great, if you can fulfil one condition: if you are obedient, obedient like a robot, then all respect is for you. Then the society will make you a great hero, but there will be no grace, no beauty, no freedom, no truth, no being; you have committed a real suicide.

  Rajneesh

  Suicide, Real, Hero

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• Smug respectability, like the poor, we've had with us always. Today, however, ... such obtuseness is an indulgence we can no longer afford. The computer, nuclear energy for better or worse, and sudden, simultaneous influences upon everyone's TV screen have raised the ante and the risk considerably.

  Studs Terkel

  Risk, Energy, Nuclear

  Studs Terkel (2011). “The Studs Terkel Reader: My American Century”, p.304, The New Press

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• In our Ashrams of East and West, places of spiritual retreat, we begin with what we call "The Morning of the Open Heart," in which we tell our needs. . . . We give four or five hours to this catharsis. The reaction of one member, who listened to it for the first time, was: "Good gracious, have we all the disrupted people in the country here?" My reply was: "No, you have a cross section of the church life honestly revealed." In the ordinary church, it is suppressed by respectability, by a desire to a appear better than we really are.

  E. Stanley Jones

  Country, Spiritual, Morning

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• Ambition is a passion, at once strong and insidious, and is very apt to cheat a man out of his happiness and his true respectability of character

  Edward Bates

  Strong, Passion, Ambition

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• The one thing I would never wish it to be thought is that you play serious roles in order to achieve some sort of respectability which you can't if you're playing comedic roles.

  Rowan Atkinson

  Order, Play, Wish

  Source: news.tvguide.co.uk

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• Let those who wish have their respectability- I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the earth for the beautiful, the joyous, and the romantic.

  Richard Halliburton

  Beautiful, Indulge In, Wish

  RICHARD HALLIBURTON (1925). “THE ROYAL ROAD TO ROMANCE”

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• Youth -- nothing else worth having in the world...and I had youth, the transitory, the fugitive, now, completely and abundantly. Yet what was I going to do with it? Certainly not squander its gold on the commonplace quest for riches and respectability, and then secretly lament the price that had to be paid for these futile ideals. Let those who wish have their respectability -- I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the earth for the beautiful, the joyous and the romantic.

  Richard Halliburton

  Beautiful, Indulge In, Wish

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• Twice in his life Eugene Victor Debs took the long leap to the Ultima Thule of prison, passing beyond the realm of the acceptable into the nonacceptable, from respectability into the criminal community of the monster who was an enemy to the people.

  Marguerite Young

  Long, People, Community

  Marguerite Young (1999). “Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs”, Knopf

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• If liberty of speech is to be untrammeled from the grosser forms of constraint, the uniformity of opinion will be secured by a moral terrorism to which the respectability of society will give its thorough approval.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Giving, Liberty, Speech

  Charles Sanders Peirce (1958). “Selected Writings (Values in a Universe of Chance)”, p.110, Courier Corporation

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• I was raised in an Irish-American home in Detroit where assimilation was the uppermost priority. The price of assimilation and respectability was amnesia. Although my great-grandparents were victims of the Great Hunger of the 1840's, even though I was named Thomas Emmet Hayden IV after the radical Irish nationalist exile Thomas Emmet, my inheritance was to be disinherited. My parents knew nothing of this past, or nothing worth passing on.

  Tom Hayden

  Home, Past, Passing On

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• You put a wage behind something, it gives the act a sort of respectability.

  Patrick deWitt

  Money, Giving, Behinds

  Patrick deWitt (2011). “The Sisters Brothers”, p.89, Granta Books

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• Thyself and thy belongings
  Are not thine own so proper, as to waste
  Thyself upon thy virtues, they on thee.
  Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,
  Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues
  Did not go forth of us 't were all alike
  As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touch'd
  But to fine issues; nor Nature never lends
  The smallest scruple of her excellence,
  But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines
  Herself the glory of a creditor -
  Both thanks and use.

  William Shakespeare

  Light, Issues, Heaven

  William Shakespeare (1842). “The Comedies, Histories, Tragedies, and Poems of William Shakspere: Merry wives of Windsor. Twelfth night. As you like it. Measure for measure”, p.383

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• Users of clichés frequently have more sinister intentions beyond laziness and conventional thinking. Relabelling events often entails subtle changes of meaning. War produces many euphemisms, downplaying or giving verbal respectability to savagery and slaughter.

  Patrick Cockburn

  War, Thinking, Giving

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• It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men reverence one another, not yet God.

  Henry David Thoreau

  God, Country, Men

  1849 A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,'Sunday'.

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• We claim no respectability. There's no status I would not surrender for a joke. So we don't have to defend anything.

  Stephen Colbert

  Surrender, Claims, Jokes

  "Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert: America's Anchors". Interview with Maureen Dowd, www.rollingstone.com. November 16, 2006.

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• Sweet, sane, still Nakedness in Nature! — ah if poor, sick, prurient humanity in cities might really know you once more! Is not nakedness then indecent? No, not inherently. It is your thought, your sophistication, your fear, your respectability that is indecent. There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only too irksome to wear, but are themselves indecent. Perhaps indeed he or she to whom the free exhilarating ecstasy of nakedness in Nature has never been eligible (and how many thousands there are!) has not really known what purity is — nor what faith or art or health really is.

  Walt Whitman

  Sweet, Art, Cities

  Walt Whitman (2012). “Specimen Days & Collect”, p.104, Courier Corporation

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• There is no going back to a time when most women will feel compelled to enter or stay in a bad marriage just for economic security or social respectability. So today, the best way to get women once more interested in getting married and having children is for men to accept women's new insistence on equality. This is, I think, why educated women in America, are now more pro - marriage and more disapproving of divorce than other groups of women who have less experience with egalitarian partners or less clout in getting their needs met in relationships.

  Stephanie Coontz

  Children, Divorce, Men

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• Morality is not respectability.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Ethics, Morality, Morality And Ethics

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• Republicans seems to me to be chiefly concerned with holding on to what they have: in society, it's position, or respectability, or what you will; in business, of course, it's profit.

  Marya Mannes

  Party, Political, Holding On

  Marya Mannes (1958). “More in Anger”

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