Top 100 Quotes About Respectability
#1. A struggle for liberty is in itself respectable and glorious ... When conducted with magnanimity, justice and humanity, it ought to command the admiration of every friend to human nature. But if sullied by crimes and extravagancies, it loses its respectability.
Alexander Hamilton
#2. When you are seeing somebody, then obviously it's a commitment. And if you don't want to commit, then don't be in a relationship. Every relationship deserves a certain credibility and respectability. For me, it's always been like that.
Shahid Kapoor
#3. No wonder the Prophet Muhammad said, "In this world take pity on three kinds of people. The rich man who has lost his fortune, the well-respected man who has lost his respectability, and the wise man who is surrounded by ignorants.
Elif Shafak
#4. These "doyennes of society" were no different at bottom than the leading dames among the gossips of her own village. Within that little "society," their word was law, and the law was respectability.
Mercedes Lackey
#5. It was one thing to go to the end of the world; it was quite another thing to make oneself at home there. Even respectability seemed to lose some of its virtue when one practiced it in a tent.
Hector Hugh Munro
#6. I felt for the first time the premonitory of loneliness.It was all fantastic, and yet, and yet ... He might be a poor lover, but I was a poor man. He had in his hand the infinite riches of respectability
Graham Greene
#7. Twice in his life Eugene Victor Debs took the long leap to the Ultima Thule of prison, passing beyond the realm of the acceptable into the nonacceptable, from respectability into the criminal community of the monster who was an enemy to the people.
Marguerite Young
#8. The insane have achieved political respectability while the sane act too good for it all. The irrational celebrate while the rational act bored and above-it-all.
Maureen Dowd
#9. The Cape Town is considerably increased within the last eight years. Its respectability with regard to strength has kept pace with its other enlargements and rendered it very secure against any attempt which is not made with considerable force.
William Bligh
#10. Symbolism erects a facade of respectability to hide the indecency of dreams.
Mason Cooley
#11. (where the more distant phrasing can lend a veneer of respectability to the otherwise prurient-seeming habit of a naturalist spying on other creatures' intimate lives).
Marie Brennan
#12. Of late years, however, since his children were growing up, he had begun to value respectability, and had had himself made a magistrate; a position for which he was admirably fitted, because of his strong conservatism and his contempt for foreigners.
Upton Sinclair
#13. Satan mostly employs comparatively moral instruments and the language of ethics to give his aims an air of respectability.
Mahatma Gandhi
#14. It is only in virtue that you can discover, that you can live - not in the cultivation of a virtue, which merely brings about respectability, not understanding and freedom.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#15. We create an environment where it is alright to hate, to steal, to cheat, and to lie if we dress it up with symbols of respectability, dignity and love.
Whitney M. Young
#16. The seven deadly sins ... food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man's neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted.
George Bernard Shaw
#17. Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#18. I hated the idleness, the stupidity, the respectability, the petty unselfishness.
E. M. Forster
#19. But as the girl timidly accosted him, he gave a convulsive movement and saved his
respectability by a vigorous side-step. He did not risk it to save a soul. For how was he to
know that there was a soul before him that needed saving?
Stephen Crane
#20. In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#21. In fairness, Latin America's elected civilian leaders have made progress in some areas. They have brought their countries back to international respectability, curbed flagrant human rights violations, and sought to build democratic political institutions.
Stephen Kinzer
#22. Respectability and security are subtle traps on life's journey. Those who are drawn to extremes are often nearer to renewal and self-discovery. Those trapped in the bland middle region of respectability are lost without ever realizing it.
John O'Donohue
#23. Respectability had its uses. I wondered idly how many spymasters had thought of using elderly ladies? You didn't hear about old women as spies - but then again, that might merely indicate how good they were at it.
Diana Gabaldon
#24. Every fairly intelligent person is aware that the price of respectability is a muffled soul bent on the trivial and the mediocre.
Walter Lippmann
#25. Respectability is joining chastity in the museum of dead issues.
Mason Cooley
#26. To claim that theft or adultery or lying are "evil" simply reflects our degraded idea of good- - that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity.
Simone Weil
#27. Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.
Sam Keen
#28. What, in the devil's name, is the use of respectability, with never so many gigs and silver spoons, if thou inwardly art the pitifulness of all men?
Thomas Carlyle
#29. Among the most remarkable features characterizing Zen we find these: spirituality, directness of expression, disregard of form or conventionalism, and frequently an almost wanton delight in going astray from respectability.
D.T. Suzuki
#31. The honor of acting as New Orleans's mascot comes with a profound responsibility to forsake stress, stability, sobriety, monogamy, respectability, and all manner of legitimate employment and lawful behavior.
Frenchy Brouillette
#32. I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps.
D.H. Lawrence
#33. Do you think that a man is renewed by God's Spirit, when except for a few religious phrases, and a little more outside respectability, he is just the old man, the same character at heart he ever was?
Charles Kingsley
#34. Ultimate in respectability: not only received back into the ranks of the people but also
Nien Cheng
#35. Lady Bracknell: Is this Miss Prism a female of repellent aspect, remotely connected with education?
Chasuble: (Somewhat indignantly) She is the most cultivated of ladies, and the very picture of respectability.
Lady Bracknell: It is obviously the same person.
Oscar Wilde
#36. The shades of respectability begin to close about the greying head.
Mason Cooley
#37. Despite my being an old gypsy there is a tendency to respectability inherent in old age.
Albert Einstein
#38. Respectability is the dickey on the bosom of civilization.
Elbert Hubbard
#39. Income is the natural and rational gauge and measure of respectability.
Ambrose Bierce
#40. I like my films to have a certain amount of realism - something that's thought provoking and intelligently written. More than the amount on the pay cheque, I look for a level of respectability as an actor.
Arjun Rampal
#41. I thought she had a good heart, though not much respectability- or maybe it was because of that.
Mary Webb
#42. I know how easy it is for some minds to glide along with the current of popular opinion, where influence, respectability, and all those motives which tend to seduce the human heart are brought to bear.
Benjamin F. Wade
#43. In 1980, a well-meaning fundraiser came to see me and said, "Miss Graham, the most powerful thing you have going for you to raise money is your respectability." I wanted to spit. Respectable! Show me any artist who wants to be respectable.
Martha Graham
#44. To recognize that head injuries were as essential a part of football as they are of boxing would be to erase the fine distinction on which the game's respectability rested.
Charlie Pierce
#45. Young wives are the leading asset of corporate power. They want the suburbs, a house, a settled life, and respectability. They want society to see that they have exchanged themselves for something of value.
Ralph Nader
#46. There's a similarity in both being young people who are not about the politics of respectability.
Stanley Nelson Jr.
#47. It is not pleasant to have a stranger doubt your respectability.
Maud Younger
#48. Respectability is a curse; it is an "evil" that corrodes the mind and heart. It creeps upon one unknowingly and destroys love. To
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#49. Smug respectability, like the poor, we've had with us always. Today, however, ... such obtuseness is an indulgence we can no longer afford. The computer, nuclear energy for better or worse, and sudden, simultaneous influences upon everyone's TV screen have raised the ante and the risk considerably.
Studs Terkel
#50. Stop moping, sule," galladon said with a grunt."It doesn't suit you-it takes a fine sense of pessimism to brood with any sort of respectability.
Brandon Sanderson
#51. He defended respectability with violence and exaggeration.
G.K. Chesterton
#52. You put a wage behind something, it gives the act a sort of respectability.
Patrick DeWitt
#53. Religion is, for the most part, our way of covering ourselves, a means of sewing respectability, morality, and charity into a patchwork garment that can hide our nakedness.
Michael S. Horton
#54. God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning.
Amiri Baraka
#55. We don't want genius in this country unless it is accompanied by respectability.
Wilkie Collins
#56. Whenever a man is known to seek promotion by intrigue, by temporizing, or by resorting to the haunts of vulgarity and vice for support, it may be inferred, with moral certainty, that he is not a man of real respectability, nor is he entitled to public confidence.
Noah Webster
#57. Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.
George Bernard Shaw
#58. Having the courage to live within one's means is respectability.
Benjamin Disraeli
#59. She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability.
Edith Wharton
#60. The queers of the sixties, like those since, have connived with their repression under a veneer of respectability. Good mannered city queens in suits and pinstripes, so busy establishing themselves, were useless at changing anything.
Derek Jarman
#61. Respectability, n. The offspring of a liaison between a bald head and a bank account.
Ambrose Bierce
#62. [W]e would do better to treat terrorists as common criminals, people who have broken the laws recognized by all civil societies. To treat them as soldiers is to increase their power, respectability, and commitment.
Nel Noddings
#63. True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
Alain De Botton
#65. I find that respectability grows wearisome after a time, when one is accustomed to being a disgrace.
Marie Brennan
#66. If wrappings of cloth can impart respectability, the most respectable persons are the Egyptian mummies, all wrapped in layers and layers of gauze
Kamala Suraiyya Das
#67. We talk of wild animals but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.
G.K. Chesterton
#68. He was scrupulous about the use of his title because, his investigations being so utterly unscientific, he hoped to borrow an air of respectability, even scholarly authority, from his education.
Shirley Jackson
#69. More murders have been committed for respectability than one would believe possible! The
Agatha Christie
#70. It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men reverence one another, not yet God.
Henry David Thoreau
#71. We claim no respectability. There's no status I would not surrender for a joke. So we don't have to defend anything.
Stephen Colbert
#72. Respectability, regularity, and routine - the whole cast-iron discipline of a modern industrial society - have atrophied the artistic impulse, and imprisoned love so that it can no longer be generous and free and creative, but must be either stuffy or furtive.
Bertrand Russell
#73. Conservatism and respectability have their values, certainly; but has not the unconventional its values also?
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#74. We earn the respect of our peers by laboring to quell our critics' justified disapproval. We earn self-respectability by schooling the wisdom to ignore unfair condemnation. We learn goodness by witnessing other person's lives and by performing unsolicited acts of kindnesses.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#75. Ambition is a passion, at once strong and insidious, and is very apt to cheat a man out of his happiness and his true respectability of character
Edward Bates
#76. Naked need is the occasion for God's giving, not a need adorned with the clean, elegant robes of respectability and good works.
Miroslav Volf
#77. Let those who wish have their respectability- I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the earth for the beautiful, the joyous, and the romantic.
Richard Halliburton
#78. I don't want learning, or dignity, or respectability. I want this music, and this dawn, and the warmth of your cheek against mine.
Rumi
#80. By elevating the dictum of the market to the role of the sole criterion of rationality and efficiency, economics denies even all "respectability" to the distinction between essential and non-essential consumption, between productive and unproductive labor, between actual and potential surplus.
Paul A. Baran
#81. Organized crime is nothing more than capitalism with the mask of respectability removed. - Dave Mazza
J.D. Chandler
#82. Only Zionists get to proclaim their fear of a brown planet while simultaneously maintaining a patina of liberal respectability.
Max Blumenthal
#83. Towards the end of the seventies pop was gaining the momentum and respectability was very high with groups like Yes and Queen who were making "classical" rock records. They were also bringing in big bucks. So the eighties became the "bottom line" decade.
Tony Visconti
#84. My life was never intended to be one long slow descent into respectability.
Christopher Fowler
#85. At present I feel like a caged animal, bound up by the luxury, comfort and respectability of my position. I can't get the training that I want without neglecting my duty.
Beatrice Webb
#86. It is also, I would guess, a universal that in all societies people value respectability granted to them.
Kenneth L. Pike
#87. The Miss America contest isthe most perfectly rendered theater in our culture, for it so perfectly captures what we yearn for: a low-class ritual, a polished restatement of vulgarity, that wants to open the door to high-class respectability by way of plain middle-class anxiety and ambition.
Gerald Early
#88. They talk o' rich folks bein' stuck up and genteel, but for iron-clad pride o' respectability there's nowt like poor chapel folk. Why, 'tis as cold as the wind on Greenhow Hill
aye, and colder, too, for 'twill never change.
Rudyard Kipling
#89. Far from rejecting outright any hierarchy of success or failure, philosophy instead reconfigures the judging process, lending legitimacy to theidea that themainstream value system may unfairly consign some people to disgrace and others to respectability.
Alain De Botton
#90. If liberty of speech is to be untrammeled from the grosser forms of constraint, the uniformity of opinion will be secured by a moral terrorism to which the respectability of society will give its thorough approval.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#91. A lynch mob is [unlimited] Majority Rule stripped of its fancy trappings and its facade of respectability.
Robert Ringer
#92. Here in America, marriage still has a mystical, intangible power: It is a passport to adulthood and respectability and to a certain extent citizenship. Any relationship less than "married" is considered temporary and not worthy of honor.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#93. My father was a civil servant, so having a regular job, being respectable is a big deal for me. Respectable in the sense that I support my family. That's what I mean by respectability.
Hanif Kureishi
#94. Republicans seems to me to be chiefly concerned with holding on to what they have: in society, it's position, or respectability, or what you will; in business, of course, it's profit.
Marya Mannes
#95. May I beg you carefully to judge every preacher, not by his gifts, not by his elocutionary powers, not by his status in society, not by the respectability of his congregation, not by the prettiness of his church, but by this - does he preach the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation?43
Steven J. Lawson
#97. Now that I'm over sixty I'm veering toward respectability.
Shelley Winters
#98. From the moment we were first dumped in Jamestown and had our teeth checked before getting sold off and later considered three-fifths of a human being, an abundance of 'likability' hasn't been something blacks have had to stockpile. Instead, it's been a centuries-long battle for respectability.
John Ridley
#100. To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.
Oscar Wilde
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