#distinction

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

Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something. ↗

— E. M. Forster

#concealing #distinction #his #notable #revealing

To be fair, my analysis failed to spell out Obama's first-term accomplishments, although I did acknowledge his 'enormous skills' and tried to focus readers on the distinction between good and great presidencies. ↗

— Ron Fournier

#acknowledge #although #analysis #between #did

There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so. ↗

— Lucian Freud

#being #between #distinction #does #element

There are good books and there are bad books, period, that's the distinction. ↗

— Norton Juster

#books #distinction #good #period

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

And for well over a hundred years our politicians, statesmen, and people remembered that this was a republic, not a democracy, and knew what they meant when they made that distinction. ↗

— Robert Welch

#distinction #hundred #knew #made #meant

IRS is very poorly equipped to make a distinction between what is a religion and what is not. ↗

— Lawrence Wright

#distinction #equipped #irs #make #poorly

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