“The worst indignity is to be given a bedpan by a stranger who calls you by your first name.”
“I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps.”
“Treating your adversary with respect is giving him an advantage to which he is not entitled.”
“A child who is allowed to be disrespectful to his parents will not have true respect for anyone.”
“If you steal something small you are a petty thief, but if you steal millions you are a gentleman of society.”
“A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.”
“We ought not to treat living creatures like shoes or household belongings, which when worn with use we throw away.”
“I am in earnest -- I will not equivocate -- I will not excuse --I will not retreat a single inch --and I will be heard!”
“When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in his private heart no man much respects himself.”
“If you have some respect for people as they are, you can be more effective in helping them to become better than they are.”
“I don't know what a scoundrel is like, but I know what a respectable man is like, and it's enough to make one's flesh creep.”
“We live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think we thus lose some respect for one another.”
“Well, dearie, men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability. But you can't blame them for that, can you?”
“Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.”
“Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.”
“I think the worst thing this nation could do for humanity would be to leave any uncertainty as to our will, our purpose and our capacity to carry out our purpose.”
“A mere literary man is a dull man; a man who is solely a man of business is a selfish man; but when literature and commerce are united, they make a respectable man.”
“It's so clear that you have to cherish everyone. I think that's what I get from these older black women, that every soul is to be cherished, that every flower Is to bloom.”
“In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.”
“Attention and respect give pleasure, however late, or however useless. But they are not useless, when they are late, it is reasonable to rejoice, as the day declines, to find that it has been spent with the approbation of mankind.”
“The inquiry in England is not whether a man has talents and genius, but whether he is passive and polite and a virtuous ass and obedient to noblemen's opinions in art and science. If he is, he is a good man. If not, he must be starved.”
“Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak. They a”
“Your home is regarded as a model home, your life as a model life. But all this splendor, and you along with it... it's just as though it were built upon a shifting quagmire. A moment may come, a word can be spoken, and both you and all this splendor will collapse.”
“Prestige is the shadow of money and power. Where these are, there it is. Like the national market for soap or automobiles and the enlarged arena of federal power, the national cash-in area for prestige has grown, slowly being consolidated into a truly national system.”