Katharine Fullerton Gerould

Conventional manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien who comes among us.

Originality usually amounts only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar.

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.

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.

All violations of essential privacy are brutalizing.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Social distinctions concern themselves ultimately with whom you may and may not marry.