Funny how people despise platitudes, when they are usually the truest thing going. A thing has to be pretty true before it gets to be a platitude..

Nothing makes people so worthy of compliments as receiving them. One is more delightful for being told one is delightful-just as one is more angry f….

I have looked warily at anthropologists ever since the day when I went to hear a great Greek scholar lecture on the Iliad, and listened for an hour t….

... if a person is to be unconventional, he must be amusing or he is intolerable: for, in the nature of the case, he guarantees you nothing but amuse….

I nearly always find, when I ask a vegetarian if he is a socialist, or a socialist if he is a vegetarian, that the answer is in the affirmative..

Every one knows about the young man who falls in love with the chorus-girl because she can kick his hat off, and his sister's friends can't or won't.….

Many of us do not believe in capital punishment, because thus society takes from a man what society cannot give..

... if we have a dollar to spend on some wild excess, we shall spend it on a book, not on asparagus out of season..

For never doubt that those souls who live least by the flesh feel themselves most defiled by its defilement..

Individual freedom and individual equality cannot co-exist. I dare say no one since Thomas Jefferson has really believed it..

The very notion of tabu is one of the rightest notions in the world. Better any old tabu than none, for a man cannot be said to be"on the side of the….

You can be slum-born and slum-bred and still achieve something worth while; but it is a stupid inverted snobbishness to be proud of it. If one had a ….

I have always, privately and humbly, thought it a pity that so good a word [as culture] should go out of the best vocabularies; for when you lose an ….

What passes for an original opinion is, generally, merely an original phrase. Old lamps for new - yes; but it is always the same oil in the lamp..

All violations of essential privacy are brutalizing..

The insidiousness of science lies in its claim to be not a subject, but a method..

You can bear anything if it is not your fault..

if you are perfectly willing to shock an individual verbally, the next thing you will be doing is to shock him practically..

Frenchwomen could not dress like Englishwomen without conviction of sin..

Culture' means a long receptivity to things of the mind and the spirit..

We put [young children] into kindergarten where their reasoning powers are ruined; or, if we can afford it, we buy Montessori outfits that were inven….