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 stars" at all, unless he makes refusals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not strange that some of our revoltes preach trial marriage: for the only safe way to marry them at all would be on trial. U...ntil you had definitely experienced all the human situations with them, you would have no means of knowing how, in any given situation, they would behave. They might conform about evening-dress, and throw plates between courses; they might be charming to your friends, and ask the waiter to sit down and finish dinner with you. Or they might in all things, little and big, be irreproachable. The point is that you would never know.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... there are some who, believing that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds, and that to-morrow is necessarily bette...r than to-day, may think that if culture is a good thing we shall infallibly be found to have more of it that we had a generation since; and that if we can be shown not to have more of it, it can be shown not to be worth seeking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When ... did the word "temperament" come into fashion with us?... whatever it stands for, it long since became a great social asse...t for women, and a great social excuse for men. Perhaps it came in when we discovered that artists were human beings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 frie...nds can't or won't. But the youth who marries her, expecting that all her departures from convention will be as agile or as delightful to him as that, is still the classic example of folly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At no time in history ... have the people who are not fit for society had such a glorious opportunity to pretend that society is n...ot fit for them. Knowledge of the slums is at present a passport to society--so much the parlor philanthropists have achieved--and all they have to do is to prove that they know their subject. It is an odd qualification to have pitched on; but gentlemen and ladies are always credulous, especially if you tell them that they are not doing their duty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... for twenty years ... to speak of culture has meant that one did not have it. The only people who have talked about it have bee...n the people who have thought you could get it at Chautauquas.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written abo...ut, you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precious curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by their information?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have looked warily at anthropologists ever since the day when I went to hear a great Greek scholar lecture on the Iliad, and lis...tened for an hour to talk about bull-roarers and leopard-societies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When the temperamental and unconventional people are not mere plagiarists of dead eccentrics, they lack, in almost every case, the... historic sense.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »