#distinction

I think the British have the distinction above all other nations of being able to put new wine into old bottles without bursting them. ↗

— Clement Attlee

#above #being #bottles #british #bursting

Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim. ↗

— Jane Austen

#aim #destroys #distinction #dress #excessive

It was always said that the big distinction between the French and the English is that the English are intelligent and the French are intellectual. ↗

— Kenneth Baker

#between #big #distinction #english #french

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone. ↗

— James Baldwin

#alone #artist #avoid #being #being alone

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion. ↗

— Walter Benjamin

#art form #aversion #between #conventional #criticism

One of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all. ↗

— Abba Eban

#any #between #chief #dialogue #distinction

They say that our sovereign is above his laws to his pleasure, and he may make it and break it as he pleases, without any distinction. The contrary is true, or else he should not have sworn to keep it. ↗

— Jack Cade

#any #break #contrary #distinction #else

The author of McCarthyism was given the distinction of addressing the Republican National Convention. This strikes terror in the hearts of honest men. ↗

— Emanuel Celler

#author #convention #distinction #given #hearts

There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola. ↗

— Leslie Fiedler

#american culture #blue #blue jeans #class #clothes

When distinction of any kind, even intellectual distinction, is somehow resented as a betrayal of the American spirit of equal opportunity for all, the result must be just this terror of individualistic impulses setting us apart, either above or below our neighbours; just this determination to obey without questioning and to subscribe with passion to the conventions and traditions. The dilemma becomes a very real one: How can this sense of democratic equality be made compatible with respect for exceptional personalities or great minds? How can democracy, as we understand it today, with its iron repression of the free spirit, its monotonous standardisation of everything, learn to cherish an intellectual aristocracy without which any nation runs the risk of becoming a civilisation of the commonplace and the second-rate? ↗

— Harold Edmund Stearns

#civilization #conventions #distinction #equality #individualism