“All violations of essential privacy are brutalizing.”
“Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.”
“Conventional manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien who comes among us.”
“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.”
“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.”
“It is a poor cause which has to be lied for regularly.”
“Most men have always wanted as much as they could get; and possession has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism.”
“No fashion has ever been created expressly for the lean purse or for the fat woman: the dressmaker's ideal is the thin millionaires.”
“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.”
“Originality usually amounts only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar.”
“Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life.”
“Social distinctions concern themselves ultimately with whom you may and may not marry.”
“The insidiousness of science lies in its claim to be not a subject, but a method.”
“The real drawback to the simple life is that it is not simple. If you are living it, you positively can do nothing else. There is not time.”
“There is no morality by instinct. There is no social salvation in the end without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application of logic to human experience.”
