Quotes About Respectability

For years I felt that being respectable meant maintaining a sinister complacency, and the disreputable freedom I sought helped make me a writer.

It is fatal for art if it is forced into official respectability and condemned to sterile mediocrity.

What, in the devil's name, is the use of respectability, with never so many gigs and silver spoons, if thou inwardly art the pitifulness of all men?

I think you'll have to marry me, Miss Fielding." "To save your reputation?" Derek grinned, bending to kiss the flash of pale throat revealed by the robe. "Someone has to make a respectable man of me.

We're sort of like the town whore that's finally become an institution. We're finally becoming respectable.

Hell is not populated mainly by passionate rebels but by nice, bland, indifferent, respectable people who simply never gave a damn.

I never wanted to be Protestant. Jews do, plenty of them. Not me. To be assimilated, to be respectable, to be detached like the Wasps, I understand the desire, but I knew never to try. I see all those distinguished Wasps with the beautiful gray hair and the pinstripe suits who don't have pimples on their ass. They're my lawyers....These guys are quiet. I don't want to be that way. I couldn't begin to be that way. I'm the wild Jew of the pampas. I am the Golem of the U.S.A.

Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu'il a été proprement fait. The secret of a great fortune made without apparent cause is soon forgotten, if the crime is committed in a respectable way.

Too often the price exacted by society for security and respectability is that the Christian movement in its formal expression must be on the side of the strong against the weak.

Was it that bureaucracy, taken to extremes, became oppression? Or that oppression needed the fiction of legality, a craving for the respectability that it could never have?

Respectability: the offspring of a liaison between a bald head and a bank account.

Respectability had its uses. I wondered idly how many spymasters had thought of using elderly ladies? You didn't hear about old women as spies—but then again, that might merely indicate how good they were at it.

God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning.

JIM AND IRENE Westcott were the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins.

In the ordinary church, it is suppressed by respectability, by a desire to appear better than we really are.

Propriety was a rigid master, but one that must be obeyed if one wanted to keep a sterling reputation.

The Commander of the British cruiser Cardiff , who happened to be an old friend, got wind of Olga's presence in town and invited her to his ship. After tea on board, the grand duchess was tactfully presented with a length of navy-blue cloth, enough to make clothing for the four members of her family, and she was relieved that they could be respectable again.

But since racism always hides under a respectable guise - usually the guise of patriotism and religion - a great many people loathed us for knocking holes in these respectable guises. It was realization that racial injustice was for the good of all society, not just for the good of the oppressed.

I sometimes think we were immortal fools to start this country with a revolution. It's helped put a stamp of respectability on violence ever since.

In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.

RAVs (Russians, Arabs, and Villains) who view London as the place to go if you want to buy respectability.

[The English] find ill-health not only interesting but respectable and often experience death in the effort to avoid a fuss.

she exclaimed, the innate respectability of the middle-class housewife rising impulsively to the surface through the acquired dilettantism of the 'light woman.' People who enjoyed 'picking-up' things, who admired poetry, despised sordid calculations of profit and loss, and nourished ideals of honour and love, she placed in a class by themselves, superior to the rest of humanity.

Such sudden respectability for undisciplined self-interest is one of the most surprising developments of the last three decades. It seems to indicate just how confused our society has become.