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. Katharine Fullerton Gerould More Quotes by Katharine Fullerton Gerould More Quotes From Katharine Fullerton Gerould 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. Katharine Fullerton Gerould educational hands people Originality usually amounts only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar. Katharine Fullerton Gerould amount unfamiliar originality 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. Katharine Fullerton Gerould ignorance real college 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. Katharine Fullerton Gerould perfect men fall ... there are some who, believing that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds, and that to-morrow is necessarily better than to-day, may think that if culture is a good thing we shall infallibly be found to have more of it that we had a generation since; and that if we can be shown not to have more of it, it can be shown not to be worth seeking. Katharine Fullerton Gerould progress believe thinking Each man's private conscience ought to be a nice little self-registering thermometer: he ought to carry his moral code incorruptibly and explicitly within himself, and not care what the world thinks. The mass of human beings, however, are not made that way; and many people have been saved from crime or sin by the simple dislike of doing things they would not like to confess. Katharine Fullerton Gerould nice simple men The very notion of tabu is one of the rightest notions in the world. Better any old tabu than none, for a man cannot be said to be"on the side of the stars" at all, unless he makes refusals. Katharine Fullerton Gerould stars men world Successful socialism depends on the perfectibility of man. Unless all, or nearly all, men are high-minded and clear-sighted, it isbound to be a rotten failure in any but a physical sense. Even through it is altruism, socialism means materialism. You can guarantee the things of the body to every one, but you cannot guarantee the things of the spirit to every one; you can guarantee only that the opportunity to seek them shall not be denied to any one who chooses to seek them. Katharine Fullerton Gerould successful men mean ... when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about, you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precious curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by their information? Katharine Fullerton Gerould believe book sex ... if we have a dollar to spend on some wild excess, we shall spend it on a book, not on asparagus out of season. Katharine Fullerton Gerould asparagus dollars book You can be slum-born and slum-bred and still achieve something worth while; but it is a stupid inverted snobbishness to be proud of it. If one had a right to be proud of anything, it would be of a continued decent tradition back of one. Katharine Fullerton Gerould proud pride stupid It is not strange that some of our revoltes preach trial marriage: for the only safe way to marry them at all would be on trial. Until you had definitely experienced all the human situations with them, you would have no means of knowing how, in any given situation, they would behave. They might conform about evening-dress, and throw plates between courses; they might be charming to your friends, and ask the waiter to sit down and finish dinner with you. Or they might in all things, little and big, be irreproachable. The point is that you would never know. Katharine Fullerton Gerould marriage knowing mean Every one knows about the young man who falls in love with the chorus-girl because she can kick his hat off, and his sister's friends can't or won't. But the youth who marries her, expecting that all her departures from convention will be as agile or as delightful to him as that, is still the classic example of folly. Katharine Fullerton Gerould falling-in-love marriage girl The imagination can be happy in places where the whole man is not. Katharine Fullerton Gerould whole imagination men The insidiousness of science lies in its claim to be not a subject, but a method. Katharine Fullerton Gerould method claims lying The only glory most of us have to hope for is the glory of being normal. Katharine Fullerton Gerould normal glory ... it is a great mistake to confuse conventionality with simplicity ... it takes a good deal of intelligence and a great many inhibitions to follow a social code. Katharine Fullerton Gerould great-men simplicity mistake The principle of fashion is . . . the principle of the kaleidoscope. A new year can only bring us a new combination of the same elements; and about once in so often we go back and begin again. Katharine Fullerton Gerould new-year fashion years I have always, privately and humbly, thought it a pity that so good a word [as culture] should go out of the best vocabularies; for when you lose an abstract term, you are apt to lose the thing it stands for. Katharine Fullerton Gerould pity vocabulary culture We put [young children] into kindergarten where their reasoning powers are ruined; or, if we can afford it, we buy Montessori outfits that were invented for semi-imbeciles in Italian slums; or we send them to outdoor schools and give them prizes for sleeping. Katharine Fullerton Gerould sleep children school
