Vulgar Quotes - Page 17

• The undressed is vulgar; the nude is pure, and the well-dressed tainted.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Fashion, Vulgarity Is, Clothes

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• English Law: where there are two alternatives: one intelligent, one stupid; one attractive, one vulgar; one noble, one ape-like; one serious and sincere, one undignified and false; one far-sighted, one short; EVERYBODY will INVARIABLY choose the latter.

  Cyril Connolly

  Stupid, Intelligent, Law

  David Pryce-Jones, Cyril Connolly (1983). “Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir”, HarperCollins

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• At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility with a comb-over. It is Nielsen ratings and Barnum's axiom and the real bottom line. It is big, big business.

  David Foster Wallace

  Real, Mean, Humility

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• From vulgar bounds with brave disorder part, And snatch a grace beyond the reach of art.

  Alexander Pope

  Art, Bravery, Grace

  'An Essay on Criticism' (1711) l. 152.

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• Mir Bahadur Ali is, as we have seen, incapable of evading the most vulgar of art's temptations: that of being a genius.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Art, Temptation, Genius

  Jorge Luis Borges, John Sturrock (1993). “Ficciones”

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• Censure is willingly indulged, because it always implies some superiority: men please themselves with imagining that they have made a deeper search, or wider survey than others, and detected faults and follies which escape vulgar observation.

  Samuel Johnson

  Men, Advice, Faults

  Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Carter, Samuel Richardson, Catherine Talbot (1825). “The Rambler: A Periodical Paper, Published in 1750, 1751, 1752”, p.3

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• Television is not vulgar because people are vulgar; it is vulgar because people are similar in their prurient interests and sharply differentiated in their civilized concerns.

  George Gilder

  People, Television, Interest

  George F. Gilder (1990). “Life After Television”

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• When I was young I had an elderly friend who used often to ask me to stay with him in the country. He was a religious man and he read prayers to the assembled household every morning. But he had crossed out in pencil all the passages that praised God. He said that there was nothing so vulgar as to praise people to their faces and, himself a gentleman, he could not believe that God was so ungentlemanly as to like it.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Country, Religious, Morning

  W. Somerset Maugham (1954). “Mr. Maugham Himself”

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• I had become too accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one. This vulgar method, which is now the norm and the standard in much non-Left journalism as well, is designed to have the effect of making any noisy moron into a master analyst.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Real, Style, Opponents

  Christopher Hitchens (2010). “Hitch 22: A Memoir”, p.270, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• A man is crazy who writes a secret in any other way than one which will conceal it from the vulgar.

  Roger Bacon

  Crazy, Writing, Men

  Quoted in Kahn, The Codebreakers (1996).

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• Modern man has yielded to the harsh, the crude, the vulgar, the profane, the immoral.

  Robert L. Millet

  Men, Modern, Harsh

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• There is no other city as vulgar and obscene as Osaka. We should celebrate the image and welcome the development of casinos and red-light districts to attract people.

  Toru Hashimoto

  Light, Cities, People

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• It is the mark of a mean, vulgar and ignoble spirit to dwell on the thought of food before meal times or worse to dwell on it afterwards, to discuss it and wallow in the remembered pleasures of every mouthful. Those whose minds dwell before dinner on the spit, and after on the dishes, are fit only to be scullions.

  Saint Francis de Sales

  Time, Mean, Mind

  "Introduction to the Devout Life". Book by Saint Francis de Sales, Pt. 3, ch. 39, 1609.

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• There is a greatness in being generous, and there is only simple justice in satisfying creditors. Generosity is the part of the soul raised above the vulgar.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Simple, Greatness, Generosity

  Oliver Goldsmith (1856). “The Works of Oliver Goldsmith: Comprising His Poems, Comedies, Essays, and Vicar of Wakefield”, p.182

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• The dominant propaganda systems have appropriated the term "globalization" to refer to the specific version of international economic integration that they favor, which privileges the rights of investors and lenders, those of people being incidental. In accord with this usage, those who favor a different form of international integration, which privileges the rights of human beings, become "anti-globalist."

  Noam Chomsky

  Rights, People, Favors

  Interview with Sniježana Matejčić, June 2005.

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• I don't really get the same kinda romance that I would get from, like, jazz. And even to a lesser extent to rock 'n roll. Rock 'n roll has a romance to it - how can I put it? A very vulgar romance, but still a romance; whereas hip hop has more facade.

  Lupe Fiasco

  Rocks, Hip Hop, Romance

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• There is no fate more distressing for an artist than to have to show himself off before fools, to see his work exposed to the criticism of the vulgar and ignorant.

  Moliere

  Fate, Artist, Ignorant

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• Gentlemen cherish worth; the vulgar cherish dirt. Gentlemen trust in justice; the vulgar trust in favor.

  Confucius

  Justice, Gentleman, Favors

  Confucius (1909). “The Sayings of Confucius”

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• The movie cheerfully offends all civilized notions of taste, decorum, manners and hygiene... The movie is vulgar? Vulgarity is when we don't laugh. When we laugh, it's merely human nature.

  Roger Ebert

  Vulgarity Is, Hygiene, Laughing

  Roger Ebert's review of "American Wedding", www.rogerebert.com. August 1, 2003.

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• Consistency is a jewel, but too much jewelry is vulgar.

  Evan Esar

  Jewels, Consistency, Too Much

  Evan Esar (1978). “The Comic Encyclopedia: A Library of the Literature and History of Humor Containing Thousands of Gags, Sayings, and Stories”, Doubleday Books

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• I have often been amused by our vulgar tendency to take complex issues, with solutions at neither extreme of a continuum of possibilities, and break them into dichotomies, assigning one group to one pole and the other to an opposite end, with no acknowledgment of subtleties and intermediate positions and nearly always with moral opprobrium attached to opponents.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Opposites, Issues, Opponents

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History”, p.378, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Cowards shrink from toil and peril, Vulgar souls attempt and fail; Men of mettle, nothing daunted, Persevere till they prevail.

  Dean Koontz

  Perseverance, Men, Soul

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• Everyone experiences bouts of jealousy; but the dignified person conceals it, while the vulgar one acts upon it

  Ibn Taymiyyah

  Persons

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• Of all noxious animals, the most noxious is a tourist. And of all tourists the most vulgar, ill-bred, offensive and loathsome is the British tourist.

  Francis Kilvert

  Animal, Tourists, Offensive

  W. Plomer (ed.) 'Selections from the Diary of the Rev. Francis Kilvert' (1938-40) 5 April 1870

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• I think the whole aspect of social networking is vulgar and repulsive in a lot of ways.

  Trent Reznor

  Thinking, Networking, Way

  "Trent Reznor and David Fincher". Interview with Ryan Dombal, pitchfork.com. September 27, 2010.

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