Quotes from Katharine Fullerton Gerould

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.

Most men have always wanted as much as they could get; and possession has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism.

When the temperamental and unconventional people are not mere plagiarists of dead eccentrics, they lack, in almost every case, thehistoric sense.

The only glory most of us have to hope for is the glory of being normal.

The imagination can be happy in places where the whole man is not.

Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life.

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

Society, by insisting on conventions, has merely insisted on certain convenient signs by which we may know that a man is considering, in daily life, the comfort of other people.

Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.

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.

There are only three things worthwhile -- fighting, drinking, and making love.

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.

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.

Some of the men and women who will not say in so many words the thing which is not, will deliberately give a false impression. They are not the servants of truth; they are the parasites of truth.

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.

democracy always makes for materialism, because the only kind of equality that you can guarantee to a whole people is, broadly speaking, physical.

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

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.