A Quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste. — © Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste.
For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.
A good taste in art feels the presence or the absence of merit; a just taste discriminates the degree--the poco piu and the poco meno. A good taste rejects faults; a just taste selects excellences. A good taste is often unconscious; a just taste is always conscious. A good taste may be lowered or spoilt; a just taste can only go on refining more and more.
Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste.
[Good taste] is a nineteenth-century concept. And good taste has never really been defined. The effort of projecting 'good taste' is so studied that it offends me. No, I prefer to negate that. We have to put a period to so-called good taste.
Religious canons, civil laws, are cruel; then what should war be?
The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.
Taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.
If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved - bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art, A-R-T.
Really good original ideas are very hard to come up with. Good ideas - easy. Really good, original ideas - it can take months.
Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. And the laws are good because we know what happens to people in societies and neighborhoods which become consumed by them. And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up.
Italian style is a natural attitude. It is about a life of good taste. It doesn't have to be expensive. Simple but with good taste. Luxury is possible to buy. Good taste is not.
But Bill Clinton had the good taste to lie about his sexual peccadillos. He had the honor and the decency to want to cover it up.
taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
The main foundations of every state, new states as well as ancient or composite ones, are good laws and good arms you cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow.
Power always thinks... that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws.
I know some say, let us have good laws, and no matter for the men that execute them: but let them consider, that though good laws do well, good men do better: for good laws may want good men, and be abolished or evaded [invaded in Franklin's print] by ill men; but good men will never want good laws, nor suffer ill ones.
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