 Conventional manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien who comes among us. |
| 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. |
| All violations of essential privacy are brutalizing. |
| Originality usually amounts only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar. |
| 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. |
| Social distinctions concern themselves ultimately with whom you may and may not marry. |
| Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones. |
| 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. |
| Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
