Russell Lynes Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

The true snob never rests; there is always a higher goal to attain, and there are, by the same token, always more and more people to look down upon.

Russell Lynes
Camouflage is a game we all like to play, but our secrets are as surely revealed by what we want to seem to be as by what we want to conceal.

Russell Lynes
A truly appreciative child will break, lose, spoil, or fondle to death any really successful gift within a matter of minutes.

Russell Lynes
It is always well to accept your own shortcomings with candor but to regard those of your friends with polite incredulity.

Russell Lynes
A lady is a woman who makes a man behave like a gentleman.

Russell Lynes
For all its flexibility, television is more a mirror of taste than a shaper of it.

Russell Lynes
The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.

Russell Lynes
A lady is nothing very specific. One man's lady is another man's woman; sometimes, one man's lady is another man's wife. Definitions overlap but they almost never coincide.

Russell Lynes
Clutter is what happens to things when they become useless but friendly.

Russell Lynes
What we are headed for is a sort of social structure in which the highbrows are the elite, the middlebrows are the bourgeoisie and the lowbrows are hoi polloi.

Russell Lynes
In my estimation, the only thing that is more to be guarded against than bad taste is good taste.

Russell Lynes
There is a distinction to be drawn between true collectors and accumulators. Collectors are discriminating; accumulators act at random. The Collyer brothers, who died among the tons of newspapers and trash with which they filled every cubic foot of their house so that they could scarcely move, were a classic example of accumulators, but there are many of us whose houses are filled with all manner of things that we "can't bear to throw away.

Russell Lynes