Quotes About Veneer

Never mind what's going on underneath. As long as we're all 'civil.

Success is a very fragile veneer. I get wary of people who embrace celebrity. It ruins people.

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

There is certainly a longstanding idea within western culture that civilization is only a thin veneer. As soon as something happens, say a war or a natural disaster or an epidemic like we're going through right now, the worst comes out in each of us.

Style equals pretense.

Suffering had had an effect with which she was familiar. The refusal of self-pity and despair had turned it from lead to fire, burning up the subterfuges and dishonesties below the surface of the inherited veneer of manners and thought that most men and women think are their true selves, and the veneer with them.

D]espite the patina of civility coating most of modern society, underneath it is a thick layer of savagery.

Civilization was a thin, dangerously fragile veneer, and when that veneer cracked, man became one with the beasts again, falling back into the slime of the primeval abyss he prided himself on having climbed up from.

What was sport but a thin veneer over the factional fighting it had replaced—ritualized violence, bloody entertainment?

Hope is tomorrow's veneer over today's disappointment.

Civilization is but a thin veneer stretched across the passions of the human heart. And civilization doesn't just happen; we have to make it happen.

What matters is discovering myself under the veneer, under the layers that are wrapped around me. There are two 'yous'; there's 'you', the real you, and then there's the image.

He despised violence. He believed he was smarter than that, better than that. A civilized man. After seeing Martin Pink in the flesh again—he knew just how thin the veneer of civilization was.

The Donner Party is key because it's a study of group dynamics or rather, how group dynamics don't work. Few of us understand how quickly the veneer of civilization can be torn away from people.

On a low coffee table, with circular and semicircular stains bitten into the dark veneer, lay a few wilted numbers of Time and Life. I flipped to the middle of the nearest magazine. The face of Eisenhower beamed up at me, bald and blank as the face of a fetus in a bottle.

It seemed to me the discipline of education was effective only during peace time when there was law and order. Character cannot be improved by education. It reveals itself when there are no police to maintain order. Education is a veneer, a plating.

The movies have always shown how elemental passions boil beneath the thin veneer of civilization.

Perceptive observers saw civilization thinned to a mere veneer, with barbarism surging just beneath the surface, straining for release.

We veneer civilization by doing unkind things in a kind way

I like extreme situations: people pushed out of their comfort zones; the civil veneer stripped off.

player had put in her armor. Her well-crafted social veneer

The gentleman is solid mahogany; the fashionable man is only veneer.

We make the point that for societies that purport to be democratic, consent, based upon a constantly reinforced common sensical understanding of the legitimacy of the rulers, is not only the most desirable form of governance, but is necessary to maintain the veneer (whether thick or thin) of democracy itself.

Common decency and civil behaviour are just a thin veneer over the animal at the core of mankind that gets out whenever it has the chance.