Top 40 Katharine Fullerton Gerould Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “All violations of essential privacy are brutalizing.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

2. “Individual freedom and individual equality cannot co-exist. I dare say no one since Thomas Jefferson has really believed it.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

3. “You can bear anything if it is not your fault.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

4. “Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

5. “Funny how people despise platitudes, when they are usually the truest thing going. A thing has to be pretty true before it gets to be a platitude...”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

6. “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.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

7. “The only glory most of us have to hope for is the glory of being normal.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

8. “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

9. “I nearly always find, when I ask a vegetarian if he is a socialist, or a socialist if he is a vegetarian, that the answer is in the affirmative.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

10. “Originality usually amounts only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

11. “Frenchwomen could not dress like Englishwomen without conviction of sin.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

12. “When the temperamental and unconventional people are not mere plagiarists of dead eccentrics, they lack, in almost every case, thehistoric sense.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

13. “When did the word ‘temperament’ come into fashion with us? Perhaps it came in when we discovered that artists were human beings.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

14. “The indiscreet questioner – and by indiscreet questions I mean questions which it is not conceivably a man’s duty either to the community or to any individual to answer – is a marauder, and there is every excuse for treating him as such.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

15. “The aristocracy most widely developed in America is that of wealth.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

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

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

17. “On the whole, I should say that the person who likes to lie should never, in any circumstances, be allowed to. Leave the lying to the people who hate it. You will not find them indulging often.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

18. “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

19. “Some of the men and women who will not say in so many words the thing which is not, will deliberately give a false impression. They are not the servants of truth; they are the parasites of truth.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

20. “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

21. “I know exaggerators of both kinds: people whose lies are only picturesque adjectives, and people whose picturesque adjectives are only lies.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

22. “There are inquiries which are a sort of moral burglary.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

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

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

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

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

25. “No fashion has ever been created expressly for the lean purse or for the fat woman: the dressmaker’s ideal is the thin millionaires.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

26. “Most men have always wanted as much as they could get; and possession has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

27. “The imagination can be happy in places where the whole man is not.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

28. “The insidiousness of science lies in its claim to be not a subject, but a method. You could ignore a subject; no subject is all-inclusive. But a method can plausibly be applied to anything within the field of consciousness.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

29. “Nothing makes people so worthy of compliments as receiving them. One is more delightful for being told one is delightful-just as one is more angry for being told one is angry.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

30. “There are only three things worthwhile – fighting, drinking, and making love.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

31. “For never doubt that those souls who live least by the flesh feel themselves most defiled by its defilement.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

32. “Society, by insisting on conventions, has merely insisted on certain convenient signs by which we may know that a man is considering, in daily life, the comfort of other people.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

33. “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

34. “The great mistake of the reformers is to believe that life begins and ends with health, and that happiness begins and ends with a full stomach and the power to enjoy physical pleasures, even of the finer kind.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

35. “The insidiousness of science lies in its claim to be not a subject, but a method.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

36. “The past is discredited because it is not modern. Not to be modern is the great sin. So, perhaps, it is. But every one has, in his day, been modern. And surely even modernity is a poor thing beside immortality. Since we must all die, is it not perhaps better to be a dead lion than a living dog?”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

37. “Do you see any majority, anywhere, in this imperfect and irreligious world, admitting that the minority is precious? That any minority is precious?”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

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

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

39. “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

40. “What passes for an original opinion is, generally, merely an original phrase. Old lamps for new – yes; but it is always the same oil in the lamp.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

41. “I have looked warily at anthropologists ever since the day when I went to hear a great Greek scholar lecture on the Iliad, and listened for an hour to talk about bull-roarers and leopard-societies.”

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould