#distinction

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

I probably hold the distinction of being one movie star who, by all laws of logic, should never have made it. At each stage of my career, I lacked the experience. ↗

— Audrey Hepburn

#career #distinction #each #experience #hold

I came not to your glorious shores to enjoy a happy rest - I came not to gather triumphs of personal distinction, but as a humble petitioner, in my country's name, as its freely chosen constitutional leader, to entreat your generous aid. ↗

— Lajos Kossuth

#came #chosen #constitutional #country #distinction

I never realized that life could be as difficult for a beautiful woman as it is for a plain one,” he said. “Life can be difficult for everyone,” she replied. “Misery makes no distinction between prince and pauper. ↗

— Patricia Grasso

#life #misery #beauty

I want to make a clear distinction between people who take acting seriously and people who call themselves actors because they've been on reality TV or something. ↗

— Damian Lewis

#because #been #between #call #clear

But when, in the first setting out, he takes it for granted without proof, that distinctions found in the structure of all languages, have no foundation in nature; this surely is too fastidious a way of treating the common sense of mankind. ↗

— Thomas Reid

#common sense #distinctions #fastidious #first #found

But though cognition is not an element of mental action, nor even in any real sense of the word an aspect of it, the distinction of cognition and conation has if properly defined a definite value. ↗

— Samuel Alexander

#any #aspect #cognition #conation #defined

The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age. ↗

— W. H. Auden

#age #apt #class #class distinctions #democratic

There is no neat distinction between operating system software and the software that runs on top of it. ↗

— Jim Allchin

#distinction #neat #operating #operating system #runs

I am quite unsatisfied by the distinctions between the oral and literate. ↗

— David Antin

#between #distinctions #i #i am #literate