Vulgarity Quotes - Page 5

• The first discipline modernity's originators imposed upon themselves was that of self-restraint, learning to live with vulgarity. Their high expectations for effectiveness were made possible by low expectations of what was to be.

  Allan Bloom

  Self, Effectiveness, Expectations

  "Giants and Dwarfs". Book by Allan Bloom. Chapter: "Commerce and Culture," p. 285, 1990.

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• Bacon, Locke, Descartes, Hume, and all the others knew they were giving rights to vulgarity. But in so doing in addition to caring for man's well-being they were providing rights for themselves.

  Allan Bloom

  Caring, Men, Rights

  "Giants and Dwarfs". Book by Allan Bloom. Chapter: "Commerce and Culture," p. 289, 1990.

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• Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity. I do not think... of art as a situation of comfort.

  Willem de Kooning

  Art, Thinking, Peaceful

  Willem De Kooning (1979). “Willem de Kooning: Pittsburgh International Series, October 26, 1979-January 6, 1980, Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute”

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• The Sage of Toronto... spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms created by a "global village" instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle's present vulgarity.

  Guy Debord

  Gossip, Boredom, Sage

  "Comments on the Society of the Spectacle". Book by Guy Debord, 1988.

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• In the first manifesto that we launched on the 8th of March, 1910, from the stage of the Chiarella Theater in Turin,1 we expressed our deep-rooted disgust with, our proud contempt for, and our happy rebellion against vulgarity, mediocrity, the fanatical and snobbish worship of all that is old, attitudes which are suffocating Art in our Country.

  Umberto Boccioni

  Country, Art, Attitude

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• Keats, it must be remembered, was a sensualist. His poems ... reveal him as a man not altogether free from the vulgarities of sensualism, as well as one who was able to transmute it into perfect literature.

  Robert Wilson Lynd

  Men, Perfect, Literature

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• The most beautiful conception of immortality of which I know, and certainly one that by contrast shows the utter vulgarity of Christian ideas, is set forth in Pindar's second Olympian: after three or six lives in which a man has lived with strict justice and perfect integrity, he passes beyond the tower of Cronus to the fair realm that cannot be reached by land or sea, where gentle breezes from a placid ocean blow forever on the fields of asphodel. For a description, see Pindar. If the beauty of great poetry can commend a religion, here you have it.

  Revilo P. Oliver

  Beautiful, Christian, Integrity

  "Afterthoughts on Afterlife". "Instauration" Magazine, August 1980.

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• Norbit operates on the principle that vulgarity is automatically funny. Crassness doesn't need a joke attached because it is (in and of itself) the height of hilarity.

  James Berardinelli

  Vulgarity Is, Principles, Needs

  "Norbit (United States, 2007)". Movie Review, www.reelviews.net.

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• Sir, I have seen your film and it is vulgar! Madame, my film rises below vulgarity.

  Mel Brooks

  Hollywood, Film, Vulgar

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• The unselective knowledge drive resembles the indiscriminate sexual drive--signs of vulgarity!

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Truth, Knowledge

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1979). “Philosophy and truth: selections from Nietzsche's notebooks of the early 1870's”, Humanities Pr

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• Fashionability is a kind of elevated vulgarity.

  George Darley

  Fashion, Kind

  george darley (1862). “the works of beaumont and fletcher.”, p.30

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• It is the fine souls who serve us, and not what is called fine society. Fine society is only a self-protection against the vulgarities of the street and the tavern.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Self, Soul, Society

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations”, p.413

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• In verity we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency?

  Mary McCarthy

  Class, Humanity, Suffering

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• Ours is not so much an age of vulgarity as of vulgarization; everything is tampered with or touched up, or adulterated or watered down, in an effort to make it palatable, in an effort to make it pay.

  Louis Kronenberger

  Civilization, Effort, Age

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• Rock 'n' Roll is a combination of good ideas dried up by fads, terrible junk, hideous failings in taste and judgment, gullibility and manipulation, moments of unbelievable clarity and invention, pleasure, fun, vulgarity, excess, novelty and utter enervation.

  Greil Marcus

  Fun, Rocks, Ideas

  Greil Marcus (2014). “Mystery Train”, p.104, Faber & Faber

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• Political action involves mental vulgarity, not merely because it entails the occurrence and support of those who are mentally vulgar, but because of the simplification of human life implied in even the best of it purposes.

  Michael Joseph Oakeshott

  Support, Political, Purpose

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• I don't like the vulgarity of Oscars weekend, but it's also sweet. It's prom weekend for anyone who didn't experience the real prom: the nerds, gay, arty outsiders. Hollywood is high school with money.

  Kevin Sessums

  Sweet, Real, School

  Source: www.thedailybeast.com

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• Egotism exists everywhere, but it has a different flavor in England, where the tabloid culture goes much deeper. It's just the indulgence of vulgarity, the wallowing in vulgarity. As with everything English, there's a sort of irony to it. They write a great deal about these trivial people who have a certain eminence, always with a bit of, "Isn't it ridiculous that we are writing about this person?"

  Martin Amis

  Writing, People, Different

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

  Oscar Wilde

  Writing, Views, Genius

  Oscar Wilde (2007). “The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde”, p.1012, Wordsworth Editions

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• In truth, the legitimate contention is, not of one age or school of literary art against another, but of all successive schools alike, against the stupidity which is dead to the substance, and the vulgarity which is dead to form.

  Walter Pater

  Art, School, Stupidity

  Walter Pater (2011). “The Works of Walter Pater”, p.261, Cambridge University Press

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• ... vulgarity has no nation.

  Arthur Miller

  Nations

  Arthur Miller (2015). “The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.530, Penguin

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• The immense profundity of thought in vulgar locutions, like holes dug by generations of ants.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Ants, Generations, Holes

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• The reproach that superficial people formulate against Manet, that whereas once he painted ugliness, now he paints vulgarity, falls harmlessly to the ground, when we recognize the fact that he paints the truth.

  Stephane Mallarme

  Fall, People, Facts

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• A well-cut dress is my personal style. I definitely like it classic; less is more. The thing I despise most is vulgarity.

  Diane Kruger

  Cutting, Style, Dresses

  "Meet Diane Kruger, Our Style Icon". Interview with Josh Patner, www.glamour.com. January 31, 2011.

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• That is why I think, in defiance of Plato, that there is at once error and vulgarity in saying that poetry is a lie, except in the sense that Cocteau wrote one day: I am a lie who always tells the truth. The only poetry which lies purely and simply is academic, pseudo-classical, conceptually repetitive poetry, and it is not poetry.

  Jacques Maritain

  Plato, Lying, Thinking

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