Vulgarity Quotes - Page 6

• I deplore with you the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those who write for them. ... This has in a great degree been produced by the violence and malignity of party spirit.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Party, Writing, Degrees

  Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Memoirs, Correspondence and Private Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Late President of the United States”, p.240

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• Donald Trump did his usual softball interview on "Fox News" where the interviewer agreed with Trump that using that Yiddish vulgarity is going to be OK for him.

  Lawrence O'Donnell

  Softball, Vulgarity Is, Usual

  Source: www.msnbc.com

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• In my own work, humor is necessary, for the reasons stated above, but also because forbidding your characters silliness, absurdity, irony, and vulgarity forbids them aspects of the human experience every bit as universal as sorrow.

  Anthony Marra

  Character, Sorrow, Irony

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I think American is very democratic in allowing different hues of language and parts of speech to commingle. William Logan once wrote that I had something of a fetish for what he called "Haute Couture Vulgarity."

  Lucie Brock-Broido

  Thinking, Different, Language

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity's reckless potential; it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity.

  Don DeLillo

  Humanity, Historical, Lovely

  Don DeLillo (2011). “End Zone”, p.20, Pan Macmillan

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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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• The most striking thing about the rich is the gracious democracy of their manners -- and the crude vulgarity of their way of life.

  Edward Abbey

  Democracy, Way, Rich

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.15, RosettaBooks

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• For every one pupil who needs to be guarded against a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.

  C. S. Lewis

  Cutting, Tasks, Three

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.240, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• If you think one thing is sacred but you cannot stand the other, if you love the Creator but hate the creation, that is vulgarity.

  Jaggi Vasudev

  Spiritual, Hate, Thinking

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• So what is design all about? It [exists to] decrease the amount of vulgarity in the world ... to make the world a better place to be. It doesn’t have to be one style. We’re not talking about style, we’re talking about quality. Style is tangible, quality is intangible. I am talking about giving to everything that surrounds us a level of quality.

  Massimo Vignelli

  Talking, Giving, Design

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• Despite the vision and farseeing wisdom of our wartime heads of state, the physicists have felt the peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting, and in the end, in large measure, for achieving the realization of atomic weapons. Nor can we forget that these weapons as they were in fact used dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war. In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer

  Philosophy, War, Responsibility

  Physics in the ContemporaryWorld (1947)

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• A good Cuban cigar closes the doors to the vulgarities of the world.

  Franz Liszt

  Doors, Cuban Cigars, World

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• The keynote of American civilization is a sort of warm-hearted vulgarity. The Americans have none of the irony of the English, none of their cool poise, none of their manner. But they do have friendliness. Where an Englishman would give you his card, an American would very likely give you his shirt.

  Raymond Chandler

  War, Civilization, America

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• By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or memorable phrase of the mind itself. He believed it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care (saving them for later use, that is), seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.

  James Joyce

  Spiritual, Memorable, Men

  "Stephen Hero". Book by James Joyce, 1944.

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• A conservative, I take it, is a man who despises vulgarity; but the argument which is concerned exclusively with calculations of success, and is based on blindness to the nobility of the effort, is vulgar.

  Leo Strauss

  Men, Effort, Conservative

  Leo Strauss (2012). “Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought”, p.414, SUNY Press

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• The best everyday example of relativity, the finest symptom of human intelligence, is humor. (...) Design without humor is not human. The word 'beautiful' does not mean anything. Only coherence counts. An object, design or not, is primarily an object that meets the parameters of human intelligence, which reconciles opposites. The lack of humor is the definition of vulgarity.

  Philippe Starck

  Beautiful, Mean, Opposites

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• Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Kings, Majority, Royalty

  George Bernard Shaw (2015). “George Bernard Shaw: Collected Articles, Lectures, Essays and Letters: Thoughts and Studies from the Renowned Dramaturge and Author of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Pygmalion, Arms and The Man, Saint Joan, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion”, p.304, e-artnow

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• Vulgarism in language is the distinguishing characteristic of bad company, and a bad education. A man of fashion avoids nothing with more care than that. Proverbial expressions, and trite sayings, are the flowers of the rhetoric of vulgar man.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Fashion, Flower, Men

  Lord Chesterfield, David Roberts (2008). “Lord Chesterfield's Letters”, p.162, Oxford University Press

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