It might easily be made a physical impossibility for criminals, hereditary paupers, imbeciles, profligates, and others suffering f...rom gross bodily or mental defects, to propagate their failings and their vices. In no long time our prisons, workhouses, and asylums would be empty.... Prostitution would become a forgotten calling. Pauperism would cease. Disease would be almost unknown. By the same methods which breeders adopt, our race could be raised to the highest pitch of perfection and of excellence. The people who shall first have the moral courage to do this, will take the lead among the nations of the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Fashionable World is grown free and easie; our Manners sit more loose upon us: Nothing is so modish as an agreeable Negligence.... In a word, Good Breeding shows it self most, where to an ordinary Eye it appears the least.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Listen, my friend, there are two races of beings. The masses teeming and happy--common clay, if you like--eating, breeding, workin...g, counting their pennies; people who just live; ordinary people; people you can't imagine dead. And then there are the others--the noble ones, the heroes. The ones you can quite well imagine lying shot, pale and tragic; one minute triumphant with a guard of honor, and the next being marched away between two gendarmes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Human visual perception is a far more complex and selective process than that by which a film records. Nevertheless the camera len...s and the eye both register images--because of their sensitivity to light--at great speed and in the face of an immediate event. What the camera does, however, and what the eye in itself can never do is to fix the appearance of that event. It removes its appearance from the flow of appearances and it preserves it, not perhaps forever but for as long as the film exists. The essential character of this preservation is not dependent upon the image being static; unedited film rushes preserve in essentially the same way. The camera saves a set of appearances from the otherwise inevitable supercession of further appearances. It holds them unchanging. And before the invention of the camera nothing could do this, except, in the mind's eye, the faculty of memory.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Real good breeding, as the people have it here, is one of the finest things now going in the world. The careful avoidance of all d...iscussion, the swift hopping from topic to topic, does not agree with me; but the graceful style they do it with is beyond that of minuets!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Good breeding ... differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefu...lly insists on its own rights.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By nature servile, people attempt at first glance to find signs of good breeding in the appearance of those who occupy more exalte...d stations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Not everyone knows how to be silent or to leave in good time. It happens that even people of good breeding fail to notice that the...ir presence provokes in the weary or preoccupied host a feeling akin to hatred, and that this feeling is tensely concealed and covered up with lies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Women of fashion and character--I do not mean absolutely unblemished--are a necessary ingredient in the composition of good compan...y; the attention which they require, and which is always paid them by well-bred men, keeps up politeness, and gives a habit of good-breeding; whereas men, when they live together without the lenitive of women in company, are apt to grow careless, negligent, and rough among one another.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »