"Crass" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Huanacocha, completely thrown off his balance by what he had just learned—"if I understand you aright, my good Xaxaguana, all this means that the lives of my friends and myself have been put into the utmost jeopardy by my crass folly of last night, I knew—yes, I knew, when it was too late, that I had been a fool," he ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... misdeeds which no nation of high ideals could allow to pass unchallenged. I do believe most firmly that President Wilson gave the criminal such chances of reform as no court of law in the world would grant. But, at last, his patience was exhausted. Whether the enslavers of Germany thought, in that crass ignorance of other men's minds they have so often displayed, that America meant to keep out of the war at all costs, or were merely careless of consequences so long as the immediate end was attained, is now immaterial. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... factory; feminine virtue can be made the object of commerce, and yet woman is not allowed to defend directly the interests of her sex, owing to one of those aberrations of the moral sense that spring from the crass egoism and ...
— The Woman and the Right to Vote • Rafael Palma
... many Russian portraits in the Paris Exposition, 1900, two, the work of this pupil of Michel de Zichys, stood out in splendid contrast with the crass realism or the weak idealism of the greater number. One was a half-length portrait of the laughing Mme. Paquin; full of life and movement were the pose of the figure, the fall of the draperies, and the tilt of the expressive fan. The other was the ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... movements or rank scent of a beast of prey. Now this hourly life-and-death excitement is a keen delight to most wild creatures, but must be peculiarly distracting to the comfort-loving temperament of others. The latter are alone suited to endure the crass habits and dull routine of domesticated life. Suppose that an animal which has been captured and half-tamed, received ill-usage from his captors, either as punishment or through mere brutality, and that he rushed indignantly ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... but I stopped him, and once more the invitation to a nip proved irresistible. My curiosity was keen to learn his attitude toward his own work and that of his master, and I attempted to draw him out with a crass compliment. He denied me gently. 'The best things I do, or rather did, young feller, are jest a little poorer than his worst. Between ourselves, he painted some pretty bum things. Some I suppose he did, like me, by lamplight. Some ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... may have lurked in her hearers was soon got the better of. For, crass realists though these young colonials were, and bluntly as they faced facts, they were none the less just as hungry for romance as the most insatiable novel-reader. Romance in any guise was hailed by them, and swallowed ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... heard worse from me than what I am saying to-night, God help me! 'T isn't the men I care about, nor their doings. But whin the young girls would crass the street, les' they should come near me, and the dacent mothers 'ud throw their aprons over their childres' heads, les' they should see me, ah! that was the bitter pill. And many and many a night, whin ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... and, though they did not look directly at one another, they seemed to be holding a silent conference. Another of the trio, in whose veins ran God alone knows what Semitic, Babylonish and Latin strains, gave a warning signal. Oh, nothing so crass as a wink or a nod. I almost doubted that I had intercepted it, and yet I knew he had communicated a warning to his fellows. More a shade of expression that had crossed his eyes, or a glint in them of sudden light—or whatever it ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... that he must be considerably more stupid than the common run of mankind, in fact, that he is wholly devoid of human understanding—a confession which he evidently expects every reasonable man to repeat after him to those who assert that crass ignorance of fundamental facts is an aid to the highest kind ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... moor, or by the burn side, there was peace and brightness; but wherever he met with man he found something to sadden him. Did they rest in a monastery, there was often irregularity, seldom devotion, always crass ignorance. The manse was often a scene of such dissolute life that Malcolm shunned to bring his sister into the sight of it; the peel tower was the dwelling of savagery; the farm homestead either rude ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Burns brightlier in a not inord'nate frame. Of old when Heroes fought and Giants swarmed, Men were huge mounds of matter scarce inform'd; Wearied by leavening so vast a mass, The spirit slept and all the mind was crass. The smaller carcase of these later days Is soon inform'd; the Soul unwearied plays And like a Pharos darts abroad her mental rays. But can we think that Providence will stay Man's footsteps here upon the upward way? Mankind in understanding ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... really done out of pride and self-love. By constantly feigning noble sentiments before others man comes, finally, to deceive himself, believing himself a being whose happiness consists in the renunciation of self and all that is earthly, and in the thought of his moral excellence.—The crass assumptions in Mandeville's reasoning are evident at a glance. After analyzing virtue into the suppression of desire, after labeling the impulse after moral approbation vanity, lawful self-love egoism, and rational acquisitiveness avarice, it was easy for him to ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... never been a thrifty man; and he found among the rattletrap furnishings of his neglected home one living chattel quite as worthless—a weird, lean goblin of a boy, his sole descendant, fatherless and motherless, playing lonely little games in corners, making crass drawings with a charred stick on the walls, and viewing the blossoming orchards of spring with a crazy delight in color. I fear there was not much affection between this ill-matched couple. For long years I saw in my grandfather only a coarse, violent old man, niggardly and censorious. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... yez wouldn't cross the wathers, did yez (a dig with his heels). I'm the bye that'll show yez, that, whin Patsey McQuirk's aboard (another dig), and say's crass, ye'll crass, so yez will (dig). Ye moight jist ez well done it first ez last, so yez moight (dig, dig), but ye'll understand it next time, so ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... I saw two things in one glance. Raffles had stepped a few inches backward, and stood poised upon the ball of each foot, his arms half raised, a light in his eyes. And another kind of light was breaking over the crass features of our ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... clear; it came to him like a blow, and for a while he was overcome with shame. The fact was evident—alas! only too evident—his father was incapable of command. James was simply astounded; he tried not to hear the cruel words that buzzed in his ears, but he could not help it—imbecility, crass idiocy, madness. It was worse than madness, the folly of it was almost criminal; he thought now that his father ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... virtues of a curate-and-tea-party novel that people are abashed into high resolutions. It may be because their hearts are crass, but to stir them properly they must have men entering into glory with sonic pomp and circumstance. And that is why these stories of our sea-captains, printed, so to speak, in capitals, and full of bracing moral influence, are more valuable to England than any material ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... leave the young idiots stage-space and more jawing-room For "Private Theatricals." Wax on my hat trickles From "Christmas Candles," that spot all the passages. Heart-cheering youthfulness? Common-sense truthfulness Tell us, at Christmas, youth's crassest of crass ages. From kitchen to attic plates polychromatic, From some "Christmas Number," make lumber. Good Heavens! Ye young Yule-tide stuffers, we know, we old buffers, The true "Christmas Numbers" are—Sixes ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 31, 1892 • Various
... minutes of waiting nearly finished him. As the absurdly formal clock between the book-cases ticked off the leaden-winged seconds, his plan for the rescue of Pacific Southwestern took the form of a crass impertinence, and only the grim determination to see a lost cause decently coffined and buried kept the enthusiast with ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde |
