Vulgar Quotes - Page 16

• The proportion of genius to the vulgar is like one to a million.

  Johann Kaspar Lavater

  Genius, Proportion, Millions

  "Aphorisms on man. Translated from the original manuscript of the Rev. John Caspar Lavater, citizen of Zuric. ; [One line from Juvenal]" by Johann Kaspar Lavater, 1790.

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• This noble word [women], spirit-stirring as it passes over English ears, is in America banished, and 'ladies' and 'females' substituted: the one to English taste mawkish and vulgar; the other indistinctive and gross.

  Harriet Martineau

  America, Female, Noble

  Harriet Martineau (1837). “Society in America”, p.145

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• Nothing is more vulgar than a careful avoidance of beginning a letter with the first person singular.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Letters, Firsts, Careful

  Dorothy L. Sayers (2013). “The Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries: Whose Body?, Clouds of Witness, and Unnatural Death”, p.162, Open Road Media

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• One of the first principles of decorative art is that in all manufactures ornament must hold a place subordinate to that of utility; and when, by its exuberance, ornament interferes with utility, it is misplaced and vulgar.

  George Mason

  Art, Principles, Ornaments

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• A hotel is a hotel all the world over, a place essentially vulgar, commonplace, venal, the travesty of a human home.

  Margaret Oliphant

  Travel, Home, World

  Mrs. Oliphant (Margaret) (1894). “A House in Bloomsbury”

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• The hedges are spruting like chicks from the eggs when they are newly hatched or as the vulgar says clacked.

  Marjorie Fleming

  Eggs, Chicks

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• The culture of the United States has flooded the world. It's the inevitable result of a powerful culture, art. We've got an instinctive touch when it comes to the popular mind because we've had no aristocracy. It is a democratic country. And we know without knowing it, without bothering to understand it, how to reach ordinary people, sometimes with the most vulgar, worthless junk on the face of the earth, but we know how to do it [laughter].

  Arthur Miller

  Country, Art, Laughter

  Source: quod.lib.umich.edu

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• I certainly do not lament the decadence of knight errantry, nor wish to exchange the protection of the laws for that of the doughtiest champion who ever set lance in rest; but I do, in truth, believe that this knightly sensitiveness of honorable feeling is the best antidote to the petty soul-degrading transactions of every-day life, and that the total want of it is one reason why this free-born race care so very little for the vulgar virtue called probity.

  Frances Trollope

  Believe, Knights, Race

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• The more gifted by nature is a man, the more is deplorable the abuse that he does by using them to shameful ends. A swindler (or crook) of higher condition is more blameworthy than a vulgar scoundrel; an intelligent eveil-doer, having benefited from a higher education, represent a more saddening phenomenon ("phénomène", Fr.) than an unfortune illiterate fellow having commited an offence.

  African Spir

  Men, Intelligent, Abuse

  "Paroles d'un sage: Choix de pensées d'African Spir" ("Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir") by Hélène Claparède-Spir, (p. 48), 1937.

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• Prejudices of all kinds have their strongest holds in the minds of the vulgar and the ignorant.

  Lydia M. Child

  Ignorant, Mind, Prejudice

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• Gross and vulgar minds will always pay a higher respect to wealth than to talent; for wealth, although it be a far less efficient source of power than talent, happens to be far more intelligible.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Mind, Pay, Talent

  Charles Caleb Colton (1836). “Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.311

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• Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity. It becomes cheap as it becomes vulgar, and will no longer raise expectation or animate enterprise.

  Samuel Johnson

  Expectations, Gold, Scarcity

  Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Carter, Samuel Richardson, Catherine Talbot (1825). “The Rambler: A Periodical Paper, Published in 1750, 1751, 1752”, p.235

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• And what the people but a herd confus'd,
  A miscellaneous rabble, who extol
  Things vulgar, and, well weigh'd, scarce worth the praise?
  They praise, and they admire, they know not what;
  And know not whom, but as one leads the other;
  And what delight to be by such extoll'd,
  To live upon their tongues, and be their talk,
  Of whom to be disprais'd were no small praise?

  John Milton

  People, Tongue, Delight

  John Milton (1831). “Milton's Poetical Works”, p.40

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• I believe that bad taste is vulgar. It's like cursing. I think the world can be saved through design, because what is the most distasteful thing someone can do? Kill someone. So, good taste is the opposite of that.

  Kanye West

  Believe, Thinking, Opposites

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• They [the Templars] had read Avicenna, and they were not ignorant, like the Europeans. How could you live alongside a tolerant, mystical, libertine culture for two centuries without succumbing to its allure, particularly when you compared it to Western culture, which was crude, vulgar, barbaric, and Germanic?

  Umberto Eco

  Two, Ignorant, Western Culture

  Umberto Eco (2007). “Foucault's Pendulum”, p.99, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Hot soup at table is very vulgar; it either leads to an unseemly mode of taking it, or keeps people waiting too long whilst it cools. Soup should be brought to table only moderately warm.

  Charlie Day

  Food, Long, People

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• It is a vulgar error to suppose that America was ever discovered. It was merely detected.

  Oscar Wilde

  Errors, America

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Joseph Bristow, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: The picture of Dorian Gray : the 1890 and 1891 texts”, p.433, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• The coming peril is the intellectual, educational, psychological and artistic overproduction, which, equally with economic overproduction, threatens the well-being of contemporary civilisation. People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Educational, People, Leaving

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• If I had any doubts at all about the justice of my dislike for Shakespeare, that doubt vanished completely. What a crude, immoral,vulgar, and senseless work Hamlet is. The whole thing is based on pagan vengeance; the only aim is to gather together as many effects as possible; there is no rhyme or reason about it.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Justice, Doubt, Together

  Leo Tolstoy, Leo Tolstoy (graf), Reginald Frank Christian (1978). “Tolstoy's Letters: 1880-1910”, Burns & Oates

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• If these Essays were worthy of being judged, it might fall out, in my opinion, that they would not find much favour, either with common and vulgar minds, or with uncommon and eminent ones: the former would not find enough in them, the latter would find too much; they might manage to live somewhere in the middle region.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Fall, Mind, Favour

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• There is a vulgar persuasion, that the ignorance of women, by favoring their subordination, ensures their utility. 'Tis the same argument employed by the ruling few against the subject many in aristocracies; by the rich against the poor in democracies; by the learned professions against the people in all countries.

  Frances Wright

  Country, Ignorance, People

  Frances Wright (1829). “Course of popular lectures as delivered by Frances Wright: with three addresses on various public occasions, and a reply to the charges against the French reformers of 1789. Second edition”, p.55

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• Great statesmen seem to direct and rule by a sort of power to put themselves in the place of the nation over which they are set, and may thus be said to possess the souls of poets at the same time they display the coarser sense and the more vulgar sagacity of practical men of business.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Men, Soul, Vision

  Woodrow Wilson, Howard Seavoy Leach (1970). “The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson: Authorized Ed”

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• Primitivism has become the vulgar cliché of much modern art and speculation.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Art, Modern, Speculation

  Marshall McLuhan (2011). “The Gutenberg Galaxy”, p.125, University of Toronto Press

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• Courage is the most common and vulgar of the virtues.

  Herman Melville

  Courage, Common, Virtue

  Herman Melville (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Herman Melville (Illustrated)”, p.1690, Delphi Classics

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• The worship of Mammon may be vulgar or immoral, but it persists while other religions falter and disappear.

  Mason Cooley

  Money, Religion, May

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