Vulgarity Quotes

She represents the beauty of the common people in all its vulgarity and provocativeness. ~ Alaa Al Aswany

There is a real vulgarity in the way women dress at the moment. They show off too much and try too hard. They don't understand where the line is between sexy and vulgar. I know where that line is. ~ Roberto Cavalli

The most extravagant sinners of Jesus's day receive His most compassionate welcome. Grace is a divine vulgarity that stands caution on its head. It refuses to play it safe and lay it up. Grace is recklessly generous, uncomfortably promiscuous. ~ Preston Sprinkle

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

America does not want vulgarity and sexual exploitation to be our values and we do not want the world to think those are our standards. We want to be a better nation and a better people, with better standards. ~ Charles W. Pickering

... Pfiffikus, whose vulgarity made Rosa Hubermann look like a wordsmith and a saint. ~ Markus Zusak

I believe, there is scarcely a young lady in the united kingdoms, who would not rather put up with the misfortune of being sought by a clever, agreeable man, than have him driven away by the vulgarity of her nearest relations. ~ Jane Austen

The worst vulgarity is to avoid vulgarity solely on the grounds that it is vulgar. ~ Tanith Lee

Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Was my guide a person who would expect what is vulgary called a "tip"? Or was his position so high that even to offer it would be an insult? ~ William Hurrell Mallock

The Englishman's approach to vulgarity is so clumsy that it makes it seem dirtier than it really is, but the Frenchman lifts it with a light, dexterous touch onto a plane of inimitable humour. To go to bed with Balzac is to know what one has missed all one's life. ~ Jean Lucey Pratt

...and it really was extremely sudden, the way it struck him that, good heavens, he understood nothing, nothing at all about anything, for Christ's sake, nothing at all about the world, which was a most terrifying realization, he said, especially the way it came to him in all its banality, vulgarity, at a sickeningly ridiculous level, but this was the point, he said, the way that he, at age 44, had become aware of how utterly stupid he seemed to himself, how empty, how utterly blockheaded he had been in his understanding of the world these last 44 years, for, as he realized by the river, he had not only misunderstood it, but had not understood anything about anything, the worst part being that for 44 years he thought he had understood it, while in reality he had failed to do so; and this in fact was the worst thing of all that night of his birthday when he sat alone by the river, the worst because the fact that he now realized that he had not understood it did not mean that he did understand it now, because being aware of his lack of knowledge was not in itself some new form of knowledge for which an older one could be traded in, but one that presented itself as a terrifying puzzle the moment he thought about the world, as he most furiously did that evening, all but torturing himself in an effort to understand it and failing, because the puzzle seemed ever more complex and he had begun to feel that this world-puzzle that he was so desperate to understand, that he was torturin ~ Laszlo Krasznahorkai

Every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus - you have to react, you follow every impulse. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

What, she's taken the hairs off her honeypot?" he said, horrified into uncharacteristic vulgarity. ~ Diana Gabaldon

Yes, yes," he shut off her attempted objection. "You would have destroyed my writing and my career. Realism is imperative to my nature, and the bourgeois spirit hates realism. The bourgeoisie is cowardly. It is afraid of life. And all your effort was to make me afraid of life. You would have formalized me. You would have compressed me into a two-by-four pigeonhole of life, where all life's values are unreal and false and vulgar." He felt her stir protestingly. "Vulgarity
a heart of vulgarity, I'll admit
is the basis of bourgeois refinement and culture. As I say, you wanted to formalize me to make me over into one of your own class, with your class ideas, class values and class prejudices. ~ Jack London

How sad it is when a luxurious imagination is obliged in self defense to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity, and riot in things attainable that it may not have leisure to go mad after things that are not. ~ John Keats

And then I remember this morning and I wonder if it really happened or if I dreamed it. It was nice. And weird. And tender. I'm not used to tender. It's a fossil, that word. Conditions changed and it died out. Like the woolly mammoth. It just couldn't live in the same world as dick box. Ho dog. Or wiener cousins. ~ Jennifer Donnelly

Page after page, advert after advert. Lipsticks, undies, tinned food, patent medicines, slimming cures, face-creams. A sort of cross-section of the money world. A panorama of ignorance, greed, vulgarity, snobbishness, whoredom and disease. ~ George Orwell

Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of life. ~ Cyril Connolly

What is an aristocrat? A woman who is never sullied by vulgarity, although she may be surrounded by it. ~ Muriel Barbery

To beauty, all is forgiven, even vulgarity. Intelligence no longer seems an adequate compensation for things ... ~ Muriel Barbery

All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is a crime ~ Oscar Wilde

Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief. ~ Cynthia Ozick

They came to study the dreadful vulgarity of this imaginary Mass Man they pretend to hate. But they're fascinated with the snake-pit. ~ Ray Bradbury

I lost the love of all the homosexuals in the world by saying that Princess Diana was trash and got what she deserved. She could have been Queen of England - and she was swanning about Paris with Arabs. What disgraceful behavior. Going about saying she wanted to be the queen of hearts. The vulgarity of it is so overpowering. ~ Quentin Crisp

The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him. ~ John Ruskin

For every one pupil who needs to be guarded against a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head. ~ C.S. Lewis

Vulgarity begins when imagination succumbs to the explicit. ~ Doris Day

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. ~ Oscar Wilde

As to the pure all things are pure, so the common mind sees far more vulgarity in others than the mind developed in genuine refinement. ~ George MacDonald

Unfortunately, there are designers and marketing people who intentionally look down on the consumer with the notion that vulgarity has a definite appeal to the masses, and therefore they supply the market with a continuos flow of crude and vulgar design. I consider this action criminal since it is producing visual pollution that is degrading our environment just like all other types of pollution. ~ Massimo Vignelli

A thing is not vulgar merely because it is common. ~ William Hazlitt

The keynote of American civilization is a sort of warm-hearted vulgarity. The Americans have none of the irony of the English, none of their cool poise, none of their manner. But they do have friendliness. Where an Englishman would give you his card, an American would very likely give you his shirt. ~ Raymond Chandler

If we can't arrange our own happiness, it's a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us. ~ Tom Stoppard

If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big color photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe. ~ Werner Herzog

Intemperance is the only vulgarity. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

In any other fabric of space-time, my brother would have picked up Dee's venereal disease-infested koala punt and run it straight down the line of vulgarity, all the way to the touchdown of tastelessness. ~ Elle Lothlorien

Now I ask you: could any muck-raker in a rage make up a list of titles more completely expressive of vulgarity, commercialism and general "bunk" than the above real ones? I ~ Upton Sinclair

Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity. ~ Coco Chanel

Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be vulgarity - like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day. ~ C.S. Lewis

How sad is it when a luxurious imagination is obliged in self defense to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity, and riot in things attainable that it may not have leisure to go mad after things which are not. ~ John Keats

But then no artist expects grace from the vulgar mind, or style from the suburban intellect. Vulgarity and stupidity are two very vivid facts in modern life. One regrets them, naturally. But there they are. ~ Oscar Wilde

Mendacity and vulgarity can only permanently affect those who resort to their use. (Ch 17) ~ James Fenimore Cooper

In the first manifesto that we launched on the 8th of March, 1910, from the stage of the Chiarella Theater in Turin,1 we expressed our deep-rooted disgust with, our proud contempt for, and our happy rebellion against vulgarity, mediocrity, the fanatical and snobbish worship of all that is old, attitudes which are suffocating Art in our Country. ~ Umberto Boccioni

Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity and afraid of being overtaken ~ William Hazlitt

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

Flattery leads to vulgarity; the flatterer is despised. ~ Nachman Of Breslov

Our growing conviction that no thoroughly honorable business-man who is this side of dotage ever advertises for a lady stenographer who is a blonde, is good-looking, is quite alone in the city, or will transmit her photograph. All such advertisements upon their face bear the marks of vulgarity, nor do we regard it safe for any lady to answer such unseemly utterances. ~ Erik Larson

If vulgarity is a game that begins by excluding women, but ultimately excludes men from themselves, modesty is the game both can play. It begins as a woman's game – one, interestingly, where she appears to lose, to be 'missing out' – but really she invites a man to relate to her in a way that is both uniquely human and ultimately more erotic. So modesty may
superficially seem just to be a woman's game because it is one she must begin, but in playing it she invites men to relate to her in a different way, a way that ultimately means that the men win, too, because they are no longer cut off from adult masculinity. ~ Wendy Shalit

It is the fine souls who serve us, and not what is called fine society. Fine society is only a self-protection against the vulgarities of the street and the tavern. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I loved county fairs in the South. It was hard to believe that anything could be so consistently cheap and showy and vulgar year after year. each year I thought that at least one class act would force its way into a booth or sideshow, but I was always mistaken. The lure of the fair was the perfect harmony of its joyous decadence, its burned-out dishonored vulgarity, its riot of colors and smells, its jangling, tawdry music, and its wicked glimpse into the outlaw life of hucksters, tattoo parlors, monstrous freaks, and strippers. ~ Pat Conroy

Bacon , Locke , Descartes , Hume , and all the others knew they were giving rights to vulgarity. But in so doing in addition to caring for man's well-being they were providing rights for themselves. ~ Allan Bloom

Today, when death and old age are increasingly concealed behind euphemisms and comforting baby talk, and life is threatened with being smothered in the mass consumption of hypnotic mechanized vulgarity, the need to confront man with the reality of his situation is greater than ever. For the dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its senselessness; to accept it freely, without fear, without illusions - and to laugh at it. ~ Martin Esslin

Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something. ~ E. M. Forster

To use the term 'clerk' as an insult is simply a banal vulgarity; Pessoa and Svevo, however would have welcomed it as a just attribute of the poet. The latter does not resemble Achilles or Diomedes, ranting on their war-chariots, but is more like Ulysses, who knows that he is no one. He manifests himself in this revelation of impersonality that conceals him in the prolixity of things, as travelling erases the traveller in the confused murmur of the street. ~ Claudio Magris

Most of what passes for legitimate entertainment is inferior or foolish and only caters to or exploits people's weaknesses. Avoid being one of the mob who indulges in such pastimes. Your life is too short and you have important things to do. Be discriminating about what images and ideas you permit into your mind. If you yourself don't choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will, and their motives may not be the highest. It is the easiest thing in the world to slide imperceptibly into vulgarity. But there's no need for that to happen if you determine not to waste your time and attention on mindless pap. ~ Epictetus

I never pump up my vulgarity. I wait for it to arrive in its own terms. ~ Charles Bukowski

Vulgarity is innocent; urbanity is not. ~ Mason Cooley

Without even thinking about it, I sent Callum an image of a dog hiking his leg at a fire hydrant. And then one of a rebel flag from the Revolutionary War.
Callum didn't respond in my head, but I knew he'd gotten the message, because he met me at the front door, and the first thing he said, with a single arch of his eyebrow, was, "Don't tread on you?"
"More like 'don't metaphorically pee on my brainwaves,' but it's the same sentiment, really."
"Vulgarity does not become you, Bryn."
"Are you going to lecture, or are we going to run?"
He sighed, but I didn't need a bond with the pack to see that he was thinking that I had always, always been a difficult child. And then, just in case that point wasn't clear, he verbalized it. "You have always, always been a difficult child."
I smiled sweetly. "I try. ~ Jennifer Lynn Barnes

As I swim through the summer tide of vulgarity, I find that's what I'm looking for: Movies that at least feel affection for their characters. Raunchy is OK. Cruel is not. ~ Roger Ebert

Luxury lies not in the richness of things, but in the absence of vulgarity ~ Coco Chanel

It is human agitation, with all the vulgarity of needs small and great, with its flagrant disgust for the police who repress it, it is the agitation of all menthat alone determines revolutionary mental forms, in opposition to bourgeois mental forms. ~ Georges Bataille

When I write, I keep the family audience in mind. I ensure there's no vulgarity, as families are coming into the theatres, and there's no blood and gore because of the kids. There is a set of people who doesn't like my cinema, but there's a bigger group that likes the kind of movies I make. ~ Rohit Shetty

The patriarchal authoritarian sexual order that resulted from the revolutionary processes of latter-day matriarchy (economic independence of the chief's family from the maternal gens, a growing exchange of goods between the tribes, development of the means of production, etc.) becomes the primary basis of authoritarian ideology by depriving the women, children, and adolescents of their sexual freedom, making a commodity of sex and placing sexual interests in the service of economic subjugation. From now on, sexuality is indeed distorted; it becomes diabolical and demonic and has to be curbed. In terms of patriarchal demands, the innocent sensuousness of matriarchy appears as the lascivious unchaining of dark powers. The Dionysian becomes "sinful yearning," which patriarchal culture can conceive of only as something chaotic and "dirty." Surrounded by and imbued with human sexual structures that have become distorted and lascivious, patriarchal man is shackled for the first time in an ideology in which sexual and dirty, sexual and vulgar or demonic, became inseparable associations. ~ Wilhelm Reich

Sometimes to return is a vulgarity. ~ John Fowles

I deplore with you the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those who write for them ... This has in a great degree been produced by the violence and malignity of party spirit. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Plot is a primitive vulgarity in literature, said Balph Eubank contemptuously. ~ Ayn Rand

I cannot understand why the poets of our day wax indignant at the vulgarity of their age and complain of having come into the world too early or too late. I believe that every man of intellect can create his own beautiful fable of life. ~ Gabriele D'Annunzio

A lot of warm vulgarity is incomparably preferable to a little bit of pinched niceness ~ Caitlin Thomas

The art of cartooning is vulgarity. The only reason for cartooning to exist is to be on the edge. If you only take apart what they allow you to take apart, you're Disney. Cartooning is a low-class, for-the-public art, just like graffiti art and rap music. Vulgar but believable, that's the line I kept walking. ~ Ralph Bakshi

By vulgarity I mean that vice of civilization which makes man ashamed of himself and his next of kin, and pretend to be somebody else. ~ Solomon Schechter

I think Australians like a bit of vulgarity. ~ Julian Clary

A well-cut dress is my personal style. I definitely like it classic; less is more. The thing I despise most is vulgarity. ~ Diane Kruger

Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for "vulgarity"; they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. Liberal education supplies us with experience in things beautiful. ~ Leo Strauss

It was a long struggle against invisible foes, or to put it more accurately, against invisible foes that might not have been there at all, but it was a victorious struggle, in the course of which they understood that the victory would only be unconditional if they annihilated or, if he might put it in such old fashioned terms, said Korin, exiled, exiled anything that might have stood against them, or rather, fully absorbed it into the repulsive vulgarity of the world they now ruled, ruled if not exactly commanded, and thereby besmirched whatever was good and transcendent, not by saying a haughty 'no' to good and transcendent things, no, for they understood that the important thing was to say 'yes' from the meanest of motives, to give them their outright support, to display them, to nurture them; it was this that dawned on them and showed them what to do, that their best option was not to crush their enemies, to mock them or wipe them off the face of the earth, but, on the contrary, to embrace them, to take responsibility for them and so to empty them of their content, and in this way to establish a world in which it was precisely these things that would be the most liable to spread the infection so that the only power that had any chance of resisting them, by whose radiant light it might still have been possible to see the degree to which they had taken over people's lives... how could he make himself clearer at this point, Korin hesitated... ~ Laszlo Krasznahorkai

One man's vulgarity is another man's lyric. ~ John Marshall Harlan II

Vulgarity is simply the conduct of other people. ~ Oscar Wilde

( ... ) [H]e removed his shoe and discovered a flattened black mass of chewing gum embedded deep in the zig-zag tread of the sole. Upper lip arched in disgust, he was still picking, cutting and scraping away with a pocket knife as the train began to move. Beneath the patina of grime, the gum was still slightly pink, like flesh, and the smell of peppermint was faint but distinct. How appalling, the intimate contact with the contents of a stranger's mouth, the bottomless vulgarity of people who chewed gum and who let it fall from their lips where they stood. ~ Ian McEwan

Some entertainers have tried to make art of coarseness, but in their public crudeness they have merely revealed their own vast senses of personal inferiority. When they heap mud upon themselves and allow their tongues to wag with vulgarity, they expose their belief that they are not worth loving and in fact are unlovable. When we as an audience indulge then in their profanity, we are like the audience at the Roman Colosseum being thrilled as the raging lions kill the unarmed Christians. We not only participate in the humiliation of the entertainers, but we are brought low by sharing in the obscenity. We need to have the courage to say obesity is not funny and vulgarity is not amusing. Insolent children and submissive parents are not the characters we want to admire and emulate. Flippancy and sarcasm are not qualities which we need to include in our daily conversations. ~ Maya Angelou

This is a bawdy tale. Herein you will find gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity, as well as non-traditional gramar, split infinitives, and the odd wank. ~ Christopher Moore

A gift
its kind, its value and appearance; the silence or the pomp that attends it; the style in which it reaches you
may decide the dignity or vulgarity of the giver. ~ Johann Kaspar Lavater

He whom common, gross, or stale objects allure, and when obtained, content, is a vulgar being, incapable of greatness in thought or action. ~ Johann Kaspar Lavater

Vulgarity is like a fine wine: it should only be uncorked on a special occasion, and then only shared with the right group of people. ~ James Rozoff

Callahan spat out the word "fucking" in a kind of desperate snarl, as men do when vulgarity has become for them a kind of linguistic court of last resort. ~ Stephen King

I like people who can make you laugh without using vulgarity, or bad words. ~ Michael Jackson

They had furtive eyes and weak chins. There was no wickedness in them, but only pettiness and vulgarity. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Science only means knowledge; and for [Greek] ancients it did only mean knowledge. Thus the favorite science of the Greeks was Astronomy, because it was as abstract as Algebra ... We may say that the great Greek ideal was to have no use for useful things. The Slave was he who learned useful things; the Freeman was he who learned useless things. This still remains the ideal of many noble men of science, in the sense they do desire truth as the great Greeks desired it; and their attitude is an external protest against vulgarity of utilitarianism. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

We all need a splash of bad taste. No taste is what I am against. ~ Diana Vreeland

This point seems counter-intuitive, given the amount of conspicuous vulgarity, vice, and immorality in America. Indeed some Islamic fundamentalists argue that their regimes are morally superior to the United States because they seek to foster virtue among the citizens. ~ Dinesh D'Souza

I darted like a minnow through passers-by, in a most ungraceful fashion, constantly giving way to generals. officers of the Horse Guards and the Hussars, and fine ladies; at those moments I felt a spasmodic pain in my heart and hot flushes down my spine at the thought of the wretched inadequacy of my costume and the mean vulgarity of my small figure darting about. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

That is why I think, in defiance of Plato, that there is at once error and vulgarity in saying that poetry is a lie, except in the sense that Cocteau wrote one day: I am a lie who always tells the truth. The only poetry which lies purely and simply is academic, pseudo-classical, conceptually repetitive poetry, and it is not poetry. ~ Jacques Maritain

Norbit operates on the principle that vulgarity is automatically funny. Crassness doesn't need a joke attached because it is (in and of itself) the height of hilarity. ~ James Berardinelli

I abide by a rule concerning reviews: I will never ask, neither in writing nor in person, that a word be put in about my book ... One feels cleaner this way. When someone asks that his book be reviewed he risks running up against a vulgarity offensive to authorial sensibilities. ~ Anton Chekhov

A conservative, I take it, is a man who despises vulgarity; but the argument which is concerned exclusively with calculations of success, and is based on blindness to the nobility of the effort, is vulgar. ~ Leo Strauss

He was rather a low sort of pony. The fact is, he had been originally jobbed out by the day, and he never quite got over his old habits. He was clever in melodrama too, but too broad
too broad. When the mother died, he took the port-wine business.'
'The port-wine business!' cried Nicholas.
'Drinking port-wine with the clown,' said the manager; 'but he was greedy, and one night bit off the bowl of the glass, and choked himself, so his vulgarity was the death of him at last. ~ Charles Dickens

We have not made cricket and football [soccer] professional because of any astonishing avarice or new vulgarity. We have made them professional because we would have them perfect. We have dedicated men to them as to some god of inhuman excellence. We care more for football than for the fun of playing football. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

Vulgarism in language is the distinguishing characteristic of bad company, and a bad education. A man of fashion avoids nothing with more care than that. Proverbial expressions, and trite sayings, are the flowers of the rhetoric of vulgar man. ~ Lord Chesterfield

In San Francisco, vulgarity, "bad taste," ostentation are regarded as a kind of alien blight, an invasion or encroachment from outside. In Los Angeles, there is so much money and power connected with ostentation that is no longer ludicrous: it commands a kind of respect. For if the mighty behave like this, then quiet good taste means that you can't afford the conspicuous expenditures, and you become a little ashamed of your modesty and propriety. ~ Pauline Kael

In 1963 ... The Vatican condemned Dr. No as a 'dangerous mixture of violence, vulgarity, sadism and sex.' Ka-ching! ~ Manohla Dargis