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rummaging in the storehouses of religious or literary history for myth-matter for ideational uses is of the nature of spiritual vulgarity.
Sep 11, 2025
... vulgarity has no nation.
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.
The unselective knowledge drive resembles the indiscriminate sexual drive--signs of vulgarity!
What is an aristocrat? A woman who is never sullied by vulgarity, although she may be surrounded by it.
I think Australians like a bit of vulgarity
Vulgarity is setting store by the things which are seen.
Sir, I have seen your film and it is vulgar! Madame, my film rises below vulgarity.
A thing is not vulgar merely because it is common.
The worst vulgarity is to avoid vulgarity solely on the grounds that it is vulgar.
Fashion constantly begins and ends in the two things it abhors most, singularity and vulgarity.
Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be vulgarity - like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.
It’s only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness.
There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined.
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.
The pillars of Hercules of the United States are vulgarity and stupidity.
I don't like the vulgarity of Oscars weekend, but it's also sweet. It's prom weekend for anyone who didn't experience the real prom: the nerds, gay, arty outsiders. Hollywood is high school with money.
From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.
Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity and afraid of being overtaken
Donald Trump did his usual softball interview on "Fox News" where the interviewer agreed with Trump that using that Yiddish vulgarity is going to be OK for him.
Vulgarity of manners defiles fine garments more than mud.
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.
Egotism exists everywhere, but it has a different flavor in England, where the tabloid culture goes much deeper. It's just the indulgence of vulgarity, the wallowing in vulgarity. As with everything English, there's a sort of irony to it. They write a great deal about these trivial people who have a certain eminence, always with a bit of, "Isn't it ridiculous that we are writing about this person?"
The manner of a vulgar man has freedom without ease, and the manner of a gentleman has ease without freedom.
Not for Moorcock the painful, infrequent excretion of dry little novels like so many rabbit pellets; his is the grand, messy fluxitself, in all its heroic vulgarity, its unquenchable optimism, its enthusiasm for the inexhaustible variousness of things.
I'm just upset that we've been distracted by so much noise and vulgarity when we could be trying to talk about how our country can get stronger.
The nature and extent of profanity and vulgarity in our society is a measure of its deterioration.
I think American is very democratic in allowing different hues of language and parts of speech to commingle. William Logan once wrote that I had something of a fetish for what he called "Haute Couture Vulgarity."
The most striking thing about the rich is the gracious democracy of their manners -- and the crude vulgarity of their way of life.
Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.
Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity. I do not think... of art as a situation of comfort.
The best everyday example of relativity, the finest symptom of human intelligence, is humor. (...) Design without humor is not human. The word 'beautiful' does not mean anything. Only coherence counts. An object, design or not, is primarily an object that meets the parameters of human intelligence, which reconciles opposites. The lack of humor is the definition of vulgarity.
Vulgarity is a necessary part of a complete author's equipment; and the clown is sometimes the best part of the circus.
I would not have said anything about Mr. Trump, never - I would never have said anything if he didn't call himself a Christian. It'd be none of my business whatsoever to make any comments about his language, his vulgarities, his slander of people, but I was deeply troubled ... that here's a man who holds up a Bible one day, and calls a lady "bimbo" the next.
The world that seemed so various and new, well, it does contract. One's burning desire to investigate human behavior, and to make, or imply, statements about it, does fall off. And so one does find that early works are full of energy and also full of vulgarity, crudity, and incompetence, and later works are more carefully finished, and in that sense better literary products. But . . . there's often a freshness that is missing in later works--for every gain there's a loss. I think it evens out in that way.
Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.
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.
... Corellian curses being a synergistic blend of vulgarity, obscenity, and outright blasphemy that were the only things really worth saying when one was in the middle of being blown to monatomic dust.
Luck often raises vulgarity to a high position, to create mirth for the beholders.
We all need a splash of bad taste. No taste is what I am against.
A little bad taste is like a nice dash of paprika.
A little bad taste is like a nice splash of paprika. We all need a splash of bad taste-it's hearty, it's healthy, it's physical. I think we could use more of it. No taste is what I'm against.
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.
Indecency, vulgarity, obscenity - these are strictly confined to man; he invented them. Among the higher animals there is no trace of them. They hide nothing. They are not ashamed.
I feel with some passion that what we truly are is private, and almost infinitely complex, and ambiguous, and both external and internal, and double- or triple- or multiply natured, and largely mysterious even to ourselves; and furthermore that what we are is only part of us, because identity, unlike "identity", must include what we do. And I think that to find oneself and every aspect of this complexity reduced in the public mind to one property that apparently subsumes all the rest ("gay", "black", "Muslim", whatever) is to be the victim of a piece of extraordinary intellectual vulgarity.
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.
Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity's reckless potential; it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity.
The fastidious taste will find offence in the occasional vulgarisms, or what we now call slang, which not a few of our writers seem to have affected.
To beauty, all is forgiven, even vulgarity. Intelligence no longer seems an adequate compensation for things.
One is born with good taste. It's very hard to acquire. You can acquire the patina of taste. But what Elsie Mendl had was something else that's particularly American––an appreciation of vulgarity. Vulgarity is a very important ingredient in life. I'm a great believer in vulgarity––if it's got vitality. A little bad taste is like a nice splash of paprika. We all need a splash of bad taste––it's hearty, it's healthy, it's physical. I think we could use more of it. No taste is what I'm against.