Gertrude Stein - People Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

View all Gertrude Stein Quotes
The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Gertrude Stein
Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.

Gertrude Stein
French people do like good fighting, they like it better than anything.

Gertrude Stein
All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation... You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death.

Gertrude Stein
I simply contend that the middle-class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family life, of honorable business methods.

Gertrude Stein
There are of course people who are more important than others in that they have more importance in the world but this is not essential and it ceases to be. I have no sense of difference in this respect because every human being comprises the combination form.

Gertrude Stein
The funny part of it all is that relatively few people seem to go crazy, relatively few even a little crazy or even a little weird, relatively few, and those few because they have nothing to do that is to say they have nothing to do or they do not do anything that has anything to do with the war only with food and cold and little things like that.

Gertrude Stein
Propaganda is not French, it is not civilized to want other people to believe what you believe because the essence of being civilised is to possess yourself as you are, and if you possess yourself as you are you of course cannot possess any one else, it is not your business.

Gertrude Stein
Suddenly it was all different, what I did had a value that made people ready to pay, up to that time everything I did had a value because nobody was ready to pay. It is funny about money. And it is funny about identity. You are you because your little dog knows you, but when your public knows you and does not want to pay for you and when your public knows you and does want to pay for you, you are not the same you.

Gertrude Stein
Animals in different countries have different expressions just as the people in different countries differ in expression.

Gertrude Stein
It bothers a lot of people, but like you said, it's nobody's business, it came from the Judeo-Christian ethos, especially Saint Paul the bastard, but he was complaining about youngsters who were not really that way, they did it for money, everybody suspects us or knows but nobody says anything about it.

Gertrude Stein
I know what Germans are. They are a funny people. They are always choosing someone to lead them in a direction which they do not want to go.

Gertrude Stein
One never discusses anything with anybody who can understand one discusses things with people who cannot understand.

Gertrude Stein
It is funny that men who are supposed to be scientific cannot get themselves to realize the basic principle of physics, that action and reaction are equal and opposite, that when you persecute people you always rouse them to be strong and stronger.

Gertrude Stein
There are the two sides to a Frenchman, logic and fashion and that is the reason why French people are exciting and peaceful. Logic and fashion.

Gertrude Stein
I had always been so much taken with the way all English people I knew always were going to see their lawyer. Even if they have no income and do not earn anything they always have a lawyer.

Gertrude Stein
'Native' always means people who belong somewhere else, because they had once belonged somewhere. That shows us the white race does not really belong anywhere, because they think of everybody else as native.

Gertrude Stein