Quotes About Society

Yes: the public is wonderfully tolerant.  It forgives everything except genius. 

The Philistine element in life is not the failure to understand art. Charming people, such as fishermen, shepherds, ploughboys, peasants and the like, know nothing about art, and are the very salt of the earth. He is the Philistine who upholds and aids the heavy, cumbrous, blind, mechanical forces of society, and who does not recognise dynamic force when he meets it either in a man or a movement.

LADY HUNSTANTON Lord Illingworth, you don't think that uneducated people should be allowed to have votes? LORD ILLINGWORTH I think they are the only people who should.

People are either hunting for husbands, or hiding from them.

Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.

The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes

That is the worst of women. They always want one to be good. And if we are good, when they meet us, they don't love us at all. They like to find us quite irretrievably bad, and to leave us quite unattractively good.

Ya sabes que nosotros, los pobres artistas, tenemos que aparecer en sociedad de cuando en cuando para recordar al público que no somos salvajes.

Why should there be one law for men, and another for women?

The only possible society is oneself. To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

The youth of the present day are quite monstrous. They have absolutely no respect for dyed hair.

Oh, I love London Society!  I think it has immensely improved.  It is entirely composed now of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics.  Just what Society should be. lord caversham.  Hum!  Which is Goring?  Beautiful idiot, or the other thing? mabel chiltern. 

We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices.

The world has cried out against us both, but it has always worshipped you.

Lord Henry looked serious for some moments, 'It is perfectly monstrous,' he said at last, 'the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutley and entirely true.

Each class would have preached the importance of those virtues, for whose exercise there was no necessity in their own lives.

There are only two ways, as you know, of becoming civilized. One is by being cultured, the other is by being corrupt.

Humph! tell your Aunt Agatha, Harry, not to bother me any more with her charity appeals. I am sick of them. Why, the good woman thinks that I have nothing to do but to write cheques for her silly fads." "All right, Uncle George, I'll tell her, but it won't have any effect. Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic.

Do you smoke? Jack.  Well, yes, I must admit I smoke. Lady Bracknell.  I am glad to hear it.  A man should always have an occupation of some kind.  There are far too many idle men in London as it is. 

The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play.

Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime'.

Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.

One is sure to be disappointed if one tries to get romance out of modern life.

People nowadays are so absolutely superficial that they don't understand the philosophy of the superficial.