"Commercialism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... confessed their hostess, "but I fear Kenneth has imbibed the skepticism of the age since these years of military associations; he suggests that England's motive is really not for our advantage so much as her own. I dislike to have my illusions dispelled in that respect; yet I wonder if it is all commercialism on their part." ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... dramatists and players able, if rightly used, to make our theatre worthy of our country and also that the misuse of them is appalling. For very many years the history of the English stage has been chiefly a record of waste, of gross commercialism and of honest efforts ruined by adherence to mischievous traditions: the Scottish and Irish stage have been mere reflections of ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... conquest of France in 1870, by which more than thirty states had been welded into a compact unity of military order, commercial tariffs, railroad transportation, and national finance; and an industrial Germany forging ahead in the commercialism of the earth at a pace exceeded by no ...
— The Audacious War • Clarence W. Barron
... been most noticeable in their bearing upon the Negro race. It is conceded that material tendencies are characteristic of the present age. Romance, sentiment, idealism in life and letters, struggle as they may, are swept aside by the vigorous commercialism that has taken possession of the nation at large. Meat has become more than life and raiment more than body. One question is being intensely pressed forward—how to learn a living? and the swing of the pendulum concerning the Negro's education has swept a degree ...
— The Educated Negro and His Mission - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 8 • W. S. Scarborough
... infamy or see those that are dear to him suffer wrong. No nation deserves to exist if it permits itself to lose the stern and virile virtues; and this without regard to whether the loss is due to the growth of a heartless and all-absorbing commercialism, to prolonged indulgence in luxury and soft effortless ease, or to the deification of a ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... lumber, the angels crept once more into their own. The same reasoning applies to the smaller governments in other continents to-day. Local patriotism is but a stripling David in face of the Goliaths of modern commercialism. More and more men will be driven, if not by reason, then by exploitation and suffering, to learn the lesson of what is still mistakenly thought of as imperialism until they find themselves crying out, with the apostle of the Gentiles, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... magical time when the sun and moon will be larger than now and the sky more blue and nearer to the world. The days will be longer than these days and when labor is over and there falls the great flood of light before moonrise, minds now dulled with harsh labor and commercialism will listen to those who love them as they tell stories of ages past, stories that will make them tingle with pleasure and joy. Nor will these story tellers forget the classics. They will hear the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... was the Reply. "Although I have been denied the blessed Privileges of Higher Education, I love to get into an Atmosphere of four-ply Intellectuality and meet those Souls who are above the sordid Considerations of workaday Commercialism." ...
— People You Know • George Ade
... Maeterlinck is at the moment a brilliant and lamentable example. This exchanges the world of sober conduct, intelligible and straightforward thinking for an unfettered dreamland, compounded of fairy beauty, flashes of mystical and intuitive understanding intermixed with claptrap magic, a high-flown commercialism and an etherealized sensuality. ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... aldermen were by no means unschooled in the current sharp practices of commercialism. A strong cabal of them hatched up a scheme by which they would take Vanderbilt's bribe money, and then ambush him for still greater spoils. They knew that even if they gave him the franchise, its validity would not stand the test of the courts. The Legislature claimed the exclusive ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... no quarter to the antagonist of his hero. His Wotan, whom he calls Jupiter, is the almighty fiend into whom the Englishman's God had degenerated during two centuries of ignorant Bible worship and shameless commercialism. He is Alberic, Fafnir Loki and the ambitious side of Wotan all rolled into one melodramatic demon who is finally torn from his throne and hurled shrieking into the abyss by a spirit representing that conception of Eternal Law which has been replaced ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... called the editorial page. To be most influential, it must be a consistent expression in all departments, giving the newspaper a totality of power in such aim. This is the right ideal of journalism whenever it is considered as more than a form of commercialism. No newspaper attains its ideal in completeness. If it steadfastly works toward attainment, it gives proof of its right to be. The advancing newspaper, going on from good to better in the substance ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... trees from unspeakable gas and sewer pipes. A ten-foot brick wall, with its top set with broken bottles, would defend his quinces and apricots from the incursion of the street Arabs, and wind and sky were as free as ever. Yes, he would hold his own against these vandals of commercialism, while one brick of Arcadia House remained upon another. So, let us fancy, quoth Mynheer van Duyne away back in anno Domini 1803, and when he died in 1850 or thereabouts, the estate, having but ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... the filthy commercialism of this age! Here I am, at the climax of my big play, a revolutionary play, I tell you, teeming with new and vital ideas, for a people on the down-slide, and a landlady, a puny, insignificant ant of a female, interrupts me to demand ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... supply the people with works of art, the public taste is corrupted; little or no attempt is made to educate the masses, but merely to give them anything that will entertain them after a day of fatiguing labor,—anything that will sell. The demoralizing effect of commercialism upon artists themselves is too well known to require more than a reminder; hasty work for the sake of money supplants careful work for the sake of beauty; whole arts, like that of oriental rug weaving, ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... Mr. Perkins, who was eating Mrs. Smithers's crisp, hot rolls with a very unpoetic appetite. "To me, the world grows worse every day. It is only a few noble souls devoted to the Ideal and holding their heads steadfastly above the mire of commercialism that keep our so-called civilisation from becoming an absolute hotbed of greed—yes, a hotbed of greed," he repeated, the words ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... on the contrary, was bent upon no mission of self- improvement. Long fishing-poles projecting from the back of the buggy, protested against the commercialism of the age; their yellow hue streaked the somber background of a money-getting world, while the very joints of the poles mocked at ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... wealth of the world were doubled to-morrow and the present system of capitalistic monopoly and commercial competition were allowed to continue, the social misery would, in a very short time, reappear in a form even still more accentuated, were that possible. Individualism, commercialism, capitalism—call it what we ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... directness," "transparent honesty and complete fearlessness," are the qualities that impress this able editor as he reads the letters of the man who, in his opinion, "was less tainted with the sordid commercialism and ever-increasing snobbery of that century [the nineteenth] than almost any man one could name as having lived through so large a part of it." We agree heartily; but, of course, there is more to be said—for instance, that Trelawny ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... women should be able to obtain alcohol as they do by means of devices which may often prevent their habits from being discovered at all until irreparable mischief has been done. Here the cunning and the greed of commercialism have set to work to fool the public and poison it by a systematic practice which is injurious to all sections of the community, but especially to women, and which cannot be too widely reprobated and exposed. All honour is due to the British Medical ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... marvellous material before its beauty came to its real flower and blossom of absolutely right expression and artistic effect. But, said Mr. Morris in conclusion, to have great work we must be worthy of it. Commercialism, with its vile god cheapness, its callous indifference to the worker, its innate vulgarity of temper, is our enemy. To gain anything good we must sacrifice something of our luxury—must think more of others, more of the State, the commonweal: 'We cannot have riches ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... factory, and to be worked day and night, with an utter disregard to all considerations of physical or moral health. There is no page in the history of our nation so infamous as that which tells the details of the unbridled greed of these pioneers of modern commercialism, feeding on the misery and degradation of English children. This Act of 1802, enforcing some small sanitary reforms, prohibited night work, and limited the working-day of apprenticed children to twelve hours. In 1819, another Act was passed for the benefit of ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... think that these ideals of service from which every taint of self-seeking and commercialism have been eliminated—do you think that these are mere figments of the impractical imagination? Go ask Perry Holden out in Iowa. Go ask Luther Burbank out in California. Go to any agricultural college in this broad land and ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... state, or his employers, had sent him to Congress; and Portia, left motherless in her middle childhood, had grown up in an atmosphere of statecraft, or what passes for such, in an era of frank commercialism. Inheriting her mother's rare beauty of face and form, and uniting with it a sympathetic gift in grasp of detail, political and other, she soon became her father's confidante and loyal partizan, taking the place, as a daughter ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... upheld the Corn Laws and used the word "commercial" as an epithet. Very naturally they made their tenants believe that if free trade were allowed, the farmers would be worse than bankrupt, and commercialism rampant. Cobden stood for the manufacturing public and the cities. The landlords tried to disparage Cobden by declaring that smoky, dirty Birmingham was his ideal. Cobden's task was to make England see that the less men tampered with the natural laws of trade the better, and that no special class ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... the miserable and the despised, and in a masterly arraignment of commercialism, protests against social conditions, against the grinding of the faces of the poor and weak, and the self-pollution of the rich and strong, in their mad lust for place and power. It is to be doubted strongly if the ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... artisan of to-day would be more than human did he not respond to the demand of the West for "Old Satsuma" and other specimens of the artistic treasures in pottery and porcelain of Japan. The spirit of commercialism is, as I have said before, fatal to art. If the artist is forced to work quickly and cheaply he quite evidently cannot bring his individuality into play. He must transform his studio into a workshop, and ponder only, or chiefly, ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... York, this particular house was the home of a proud Knickerbocker family. Its rooms and halls and staircases rang with the laughter of richly-attired men and women—the society of New York in ante-bellum days. But in the modern relentless march uptown of commercialism, all that remained of its one-time glory had been swept away. The house fell into decay and ruin, and while waiting for it to be pulled down entirely, to make room for an up-to-date skyscraper, the ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... conventionality of the commercial stage; while the Community Chorus movement is an evidence of a desire to escape a narrow professionalism in music. A similar situation has arisen in the field of domestic architecture, in the form of an unorganized, but wide-spread reaction against the cheap and ugly commercialism which has dominated house construction and decoration of the more unpretentious class. This became articulate a few years ago in the large number of books and magazines devoted to house-planning, construction, decoration, furnishing, and garden-craft. ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... perversion was the result. So have our muck-rakers, who, very characteristically, exhibit the disorder in a more complex and a much more serious form, since to a distortion of facts they have often enough added hypocrisy and commercialism. It is part of the price ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... roofed with opaque glass. The floor was inlaid in a mosaic of uneven tiles which appeared to be of different shades of black. The walls, from roof to floor, were hung with shimmering green silk of the shade of a parrot's wing. There were no show-cases or other evidences of commercialism, but about the room were set couches of black japanned wood, upon which rested flat mattresses covered in the same green as the walls. On these silk cushions in black and vermilion were piled. The only other furniture consisted of low tables in black lacquer, one beside every couch. On each of these ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... exclaimed the Governor-General. "No pleasures to distract her, an atmosphere of plodding commercialism, an abundance of health-giving nourishment! Perhaps the mere change of climate will have the desired effect. We will make the experiment. She is doomed if she remains here, and America seems to be our only hope. I suppose our beloved ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... sustained in the midst of trials which have seemed heavy enough to crush; and, most wonderful of all, in spite of all vices and crimes, all darkness and ignorance, all bondage to ignoble ideals and slavery to commercialism and pleasure, the race of man has never been content with things as they have been. As the moon draws the tides by unseen attractions, so by unseen attractions the souls of men have been made dissatisfied, and drawn toward truth and beauty, love and holiness; and this desire for some better country ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... custom-made Bohemia charm her. The spaghetti wound its tendrils about her heart; the free red wine drowned her belief in the existence of commercialism in the world; she was dared and enchanted by the rugose wit that can be ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... commercial or pecuniary rewards of success, it would seem almost redundant to state that he has continued to manifest an intense interest in the cement plant. Ordinarily, his interest as an inventor wanes in proportion to the approach to mere commercialism—in other words, the keenness of his pleasure is in overcoming difficulties rather than the mere piling up of a bank account. He is entirely sensible of the advantages arising from a good balance at the banker's, but that has not been the goal of his ambition. ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... of the Holland, which reached its culminating point of national greatness in the middle of the 17th century, was far from being wholly occupied with voyages of adventure and conquest on far distant seas, or engrossed in sordid commercialism at home. The rapid acquisition of wealth by successful trade is dangerous to the moral health and stability alike of individuals and of societies; and the vices which follow in its train had, as we have already pointed ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... assuredly out of the question under such conditions; scientific curiosity and commercialism, parents of fair talk and fair dealing among men, retire discomfited when there are immortal souls to be saved. And soon enough they came, those Ages of Faith, of moral dyspepsia and perverse aspirations, when truth-seeking, useless under ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... incredible prices. The same in the furrier's. Rich furs of all varieties hang there bathed in a downpour of artificial light. The general effect is of a background of magnificence cheapened and made grotesque by commercialism, a background in tawdry disharmony with the clear light and sunshine on the ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... is also made, and though nations differ in artistic capacity, they all have some artistic capacity so long as they know what they like and express only their own liking in their art, so long as they are not infected with artistic snobbism or commercialism. This we know now, and we have developed a new and remarkable power of seeing and enjoying all the genuine art of the past. This power is part of the historical sense which is itself modern. In the past, until the nineteenth century, very few people ...
— Progress and History • Various
... GOLD before prices reached bottom. But now it spread like wild-fire, it became universal. Above was visible conflict and destruction; below something was happening far more deadly and incurable to the flimsy fabric of finance and commercialism in which men had so blindly put their trust. As the airships fought above, the visible gold supply of the world vanished below. An epidemic of private cornering and universal distrust swept the world. In a few weeks, money, except for depreciated ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... the cause. The official and commanding part of the Liberal Party was at the best stolidly indifferent to Social Reform; at the worst, viciously angry with the idea and those who propagated it. The commercialism of the great Middle Class had covered the face of England with places like St. Helens, which the capitalists called "great centres of national enterprise," and Cobbett called "Hell-Holes." In these places life was lived under conditions of squalid and hideous misery, and ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... "the feudal system isn't dead, and I believe that what is best in it need never disappear altogether. Of course, it had its drawbacks, but I think it was better than the commercialism that is replacing it. It recognized obligations on both sides, and there is a danger of forgetting them; the new people often fail to realize them at all. Marple—I'm using him as an example—bought the land for what he ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... a loss. After that he located at Sheep Camp, organized the professional packers, and jumped the freight ten cents a pound in a single day. In token of their gratitude, the packers patronized his faro and roulette layouts and were mulcted cheerfully of their earnings. But his commercialism was of too lusty a growth to be long endured; so they rushed him one night, burned his shanty, divided the bank, and headed him up the ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... have never sneered in my life. Sneering doesn't become either the human face or the human soul. I am expressing my righteous contempt for Commercialism. I don't and won't trade in affection. You call me a brute because you couldn't buy a claim on me by fetching my slippers and finding my spectacles. You were a fool: I think a woman fetching a man's slippers is a disgusting sight: did I ever fetch ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... creosol and stuffed with lime? Or did not the Brigadiers rather, when they felt their last hour was upon them, retire like the elephants of the jungle to some distant spot and shuffle off the mortal coil in the midst of Salisbury Plain or (for so I still picture it despite the ravages of a rude commercialism) the vast ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... to present us with a morality conforming to the Gospel teachings, which it claims have become a dead letter. But if twenty centuries of Christianity have not transformed human nature, neither has science. Materialism and commercialism have failed just as the Church, with her spirit of exclusion and domination, has failed. The fact that all these have worked separately and in hostility to one another is perhaps the reason, for mutual understanding and respect, once established between them, might ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... work" only means the right to be always a wage-slave, a drudge, ruled over and exploited by the middle class of the future. The right to well-being is the Social Revolution, the right to work means nothing but the Treadmill of Commercialism. It is high time for the worker to assert his right to the common inheritance, and to enter into ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... 'mud-philosophies' and exalting the spirit as against matter. Never was a man more opposed to the idea of a godless world, in which man is his own chief end, and his sensual pleasures the main aims of his existence. His insight into the consequences of our commercialism and luxury and absorption in the outward never fails. Man is God's son, but the effort to realise that sonship in the joy and trust of a devout heart and in the humble round of daily life sometimes seems to him cant or superstition. The humble life of godliness made an unspeakable ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... Old Prussia was giving place to New Germany. The atmosphere of war had changed to an atmosphere of peace. The standards of education and comfort were rising fast. The old German idealism was being pushed aside by materialism and commercialism, and the thoughts of the nation were turning from problems of philosophy and art to problems of practical science and experiment. Thought was to be followed by action. Mankind, after conversing with the ancients for centuries, now began to converse with one ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... flame—a magazine to refresh the elect. Placed superbly beyond the need of catering to advertisers, it would adhere to rigorous standards of the true, the beautiful. It would tell the truth as no other magazine founded on gross commercialism would dare to do. It said so in well-arranged words. The commercial magazines full well knew the hideous truth, but stifled it for hire. The New Dawn ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... with a birch rod. It might even be insisted that girls with high-class badges should be attended by footmen, grooms, or even military escorts. In short, there is hardly any limit to the follies with which our Commercialism would infect any system that it would tolerate at all. But something like a change of heart is still possible; and since all the evils of snobbery and segregation are rampant in our schools at present we may as well make the best as the ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... willing," ran the platform, "to surrender our civilization or to convert the Republic into an empire, we favor an immediate declaration of the Nation's purpose to give to the Filipinos, first, a stable form of government; second, independence; third, protection from outside interference.... The greedy commercialism which dictated the Philippine policy of the Republican administration attempts to justify it with the plea that it will pay, but even this sordid and unworthy plea fails when brought to the test of facts. The war of 'criminal aggression' against the Filipinos entailing an annual expense of ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... moved to laughter, for over sport and playfulness, too, Greek religion throws her sanction. At the dishonesties of commerce (clearly regarded as a form of theft) Hermes winks his laughing eyes (line 516). This is not an early Socialistic protest against "Commercialism." The early traders, like the Vikings, were alternately pirates and hucksters, as opportunity served. Every occupation must have its heavenly patron, its departmental deity, and Hermes protects thieves and raiders, ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... had been rooted for centuries agreed with them. There had even been a certain disapproval of the financial successes of Philip Gaddesden's father. It was true that the Gaddesden rents had gone down. But the country, however commercialised itself, looked with jealousy on any intrusion of "commercialism" into the guarded ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... buzz of commercialism is to be heard on the east shores, where fertile valleys and sightly plateaus checkered with farms and gardens stretch away to the foot hills of the Cascade Mountains, comprising five of the most densely populated counties in the state. Here, too, are four of Washington's five ...
— The Beauties of the State of Washington - A Book for Tourists • Harry F. Giles
... going to be carried away by any of these high-flyers. She's getting to be a very sensible person. Jack is disgusted by what he calls 'the rank commercialism of the place.' I told him about that horse-thief Davis. He was the man who was going to the party to-night with the ladies. He's in love with Bim. Jack says that the men here are mostly of that type. They seem to have gone crazy in the scramble for riches. ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... representative of Great Britain at the Rheims meeting of 1909, supplied the tuition, also free of cost. The instructor naturally marked out for this purpose, says Mr. Cockburn, was Mr. Cecil Grace, a fine pilot, a great sportsman, and a man quite untouched by the spirit of commercialism, but only a few weeks earlier he had been lost while flying over the Channel from France to England. So Mr. Cockburn undertook the task, and for about six weeks took up his residence at Eastchurch. ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... instead of in paradise, that I found myself in the arid desert of commercialism. I found nothing but stupidity, except for business. I found none clean, noble, and alive, though I found many who were alive—with rottenness. What I did find was monstrous selfishness and heartlessness, and a gross, gluttonous, ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... relief of the site and the long vistas of the streets do not lend themselves to the picturesque; yet this quality may be claimed for the high and broken skyline, varied colour, massiveness, bustle and impressive commercialism of the business district. Chicago is generally credited with being the original home of the steel-frame "sky-scraper,"[5] though there are now higher buildings elsewhere in America. The unstable soil of sand, clay and boulders ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... production of "Parsifal" and "Salome," but there were humiliating ones, like the prostitution of a great establishment for the performance of "Die Fledermaus" and "Der Zigeunerbaron" to deck out the Herr Direktor's benefits. The blight of commercialism had fallen on the institution. On February 11, 1908, Mr. Conried resigned, and announcement was officially made of a reorganization of his company, and the engagement of Giulio Gatti-Casazza and Andreas Dippel as managers of the opera ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... huge populations of the modern cities; of scientific inventions and resources; of all the things before which the agricultural society of the Southern Confederacy went down. But even those who cannot see that commercialism may end in the triumph of slavery can see that the Northern victory has to a great extent ended in the triumph of commercialism. And the point at the moment is that this did definitely mean, even at the time, the triumph of one American type over another American type; just as ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... man, the brotherhood, the freedom, the exaltation, the whisperings of sorrow unto sorrow, the messages of God which these immortal and yet unmeasured compositions embody,"* then will America give to music the place it deserves. Music will be one of the redeemers of the people from crass commercialism. ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... Britain the Feudal caste has ceased to be exclusively military, and has become blended with the commercial class. The British aristocracy now consists largely or chiefly of retired grocers and brewers. Commercialism here has become more confessedly dominant than in Germany, and whereas there the commercial class may support the military in its ambitions, here the commercial class uses the military as a matter of course and for its own ends. We have ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... deceive itself into believing that a great stretch of mere water rendered the country immune from taking its honest part in its own war. "Oh, my God," he had said in his heart, as all clear-sighted Americans had been saying, "has commercialism eaten into our very vitals? Has the good red blood of the early pioneers turned to water? Are we without the nerve any longer to read the writing on the wall?" And the only times that his national pride had been able to raise its ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... sent to Andrew Carnegie, with suggestions concerning the best way in which he can escape disgrace. The lazzaroni of America are as bad as the same tribe in Italy, only they play for bigger stakes. The altruistic graft is as greedy as the grab of commercialism, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... wayward noise of youth. Nine out of every ten of their patrons are young, and four out of every five of the girls are pretty. Music is continuous and lively, and they possess an intimacy found only in Parisian cafes. Do I imply that they are free from sordidness and commercialism? They are not. Far from it. There is no night life in London entirely free from these two disintegrating factors. But their simulacrum of gaiety is far from obvious. When the fifteen-minute warning for evacuation is given a good-natured cheer goes up, and a peal of laughter which ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... have value are those that are rooted in mutual freedom, where there is no domination and no slavery, no tie except affection, no economic or conventional necessity to preserve the external show when the inner life is dead. One of the most horrible things about commercialism is the way in which it poisons the relations of men and women. The evils of prostitution are generally recognized, but, great as they are, the effect of economic conditions on marriage seems to me even worse. There is not infrequently, in marriage, a suggestion of purchase, of acquiring ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... was a condition of affairs clamouring for remedies, but there was an immense amount of indifference and prejudice to be overcome before any remedies were possible. Perhaps some day some industrious and lucid historian will disentangle all the muddle of impulses and antagonisms, the commercialism, utilitarianism, obstinate conservatism, humanitarian enthusiasm, out of which our present educational organisation arose. I have long since come to believe it necessary that all new social institutions should be born ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... is hard to find in this age of commercialism which has all but quenched the spark of true patriotism in the hearts of the people. I have sought for the ideal leader in all the States and was on the point of giving up the quest in despair when I suddenly came upon him. Once I determined that the man had been found, I set about ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... the blood-red ears and veined hands of butchers' wives who love to adorn themselves inexpensively with real and heavy jewels. Only the sapphire, among all these stones, has kept its fires undefiled by any taint of commercialism. Its sparks, crackling in its limpid, cold depths have in some way protected its shy and proud nobility from pollution. Unfortunately, its fresh fire does not sparkle in artificial light: the blue retreats and seems to fall asleep, only ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... is sometimes expressed that the geologist should hold himself aloof from the business or applied phases of his profession, because of the danger of being tainted with commercialism. This argument would apply to the engineer as well as to the geologist. To carry such a procedure through to its logical conclusion would mean substantially the withdrawal of scientific aid from industry,—which, to the writer, is hardly a debatable question. Circumstances are trending ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... Venus if they had one available. Tim was duly sympathetic to her desire to get away from her daily grind for as long a time as possible, but he also had a garage to run, and he was by no means incapable of pointing out the practical side of crass commercialism. ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... method. Even compared to Scotland, England developed a disproportionate amount of pauperism. Some {562} authorities have asserted that by giving the poor a legal right to aid she encouraged the demand for it. [Sidenote: 1572] Probably, however, she simply furnished the extreme example of the commercialism that made money but did ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... public. But Duerer still had one advantage over his fellow-sufferers of to-day—that of being his own publisher. Doubtless portraits were as popular then as nowadays; but if the public taste had not been prostituted by a seductive commercialism to the degree that at present obtains, on the other hand, at Nuremberg at least, the fashion seems to have been very little developed; and most of Duerer's important portraits seem to have been the result of his sojourns ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... than kingdoms and material splendor. Thus in the crown of our success, if we would make it truly great, we must place the sublimer elements of our being. As the ivy softens the roughness of the mountain side and the unsightly ruin, so will the aesthetic mellow and subdue the intense commercialism with which we are surrounded. Without this quality our success becomes like the fabled apples on the brink of the Dead Sea—fair without, but ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... Commercialism"—that was his theme; and it would have to be a play. Its hero would be a young musician, a mere boy, a master of the demon-voices of the violin; he would be rapt in his vision, and around him a group of people who would be embodiments of the world and all its forces of ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... design means, of course, that the material form of the book shall correspond to its spiritual substance, shall be no finer and no meaner, and shall produce a like, even if a slighter, esthetic impression. At the outset we have to surrender to commercialism more than half our territory. All agree that our kings should be clothed in purple and our commoners in broadcloth; but how about the intellectual riffraff that makes up the majority of our books? ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... "Adieu," he said; "commercialism approaches in the person of an Englishman. He comes either to buy or to sell. You have nothing in common with him. Fly away to the Piazza, but come back tomorrow. If you do not, I shall miss ...
— The Turquoise Cup, and, The Desert • Arthur Cosslett Smith
... kindly toleration. His temperament led him to a placid life, where there were few temptations, and that life with its quiet walks, its occasional drives, its simple recreations, has stood for a whole century as our English ideal. It is what, amid the strain of the severest commercialism in our great cities, we look forward to for our declining years as a haven on this side ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... with chemicals. The purpose of this life is not very clear, but doubtless a vague feeling exists in the minds of most of us that people who are willing to pursue such an unattractive career must be worthy of admiration, for despite all the triumphs of commercialism, humanity still loves idealism, even idealism which seems objectless ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... the power, and they should keep who can" has ruled in human concerns from the dawn of history until to-day. It is strong enough in our midst even now. Out industrial system is founded upon it, and is essentially unchristian. Commercialism is saturated with it; all men suffer from it, but often they know not how to get free from it. Ruskin has a grimly amusing paragraph on the parallel between an earlier civilisation and that of to-day, ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... even try to dam up the sweet fountain itself because we are affrighted by these neglected streams; but almost worse than the restrictive measures is our apparent belief that the city itself has no obligation in the matter, an assumption upon which the modern city turns over to commercialism practically all the provisions ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... wrongly, but according to their lights, they strove to teach the Indian population all the best part of the European progress of the times in which they lived, shielding them sedulously from all contact with commercialism, and standing between them and the Spanish settlers, who would have treated them as slaves. These were their crimes. For their ambitions, who shall search the human heart, or say what their superiors in Europe may, or perhaps may not, have had in view? When ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... the rest and quiet that delights me, as the feeling that I am walled about for the moment and protected; jerked out of the whirlpool, as it were, and given a breathing spell. On these afternoons the old church becomes a church once more—not a gate to bar out the rush of commercialism. See where she stands—quite out to the very curb, her warning finger pointing upward. 'Thus far shalt thou come, and no farther,' she cries out to the Four Per Cents. 'Hug up close to me, you old fellows asleep in your graves; get under my lea. Let us fight it out together, the living and ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... had heard Valle-Melan, with eyes that burned out from under shaggy grizzled eyebrows, denounce in bitter stinging irony what he called the Europeanization of Spain. What they called progress, he had said, was merely an aping of the stupid commercialism of modern Europe. Better no education for the masses than education that would turn healthy peasants into crafty putty-skinned merchants; better a Spain swooning in her age-old apathy than a Spain awakened to the brutal soulless trade-war of modern life.... I was ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... who are pushed along almost entirely by one motive—greed. I'm even less interested in Jane and Johnny than in the rest of their family, who are the usual British mixture of humbug, sentimentality, commercialism, and genuine feeling. They represent Potterism, and Potterism is a wonderful thing. The twins are far too clear-headed to be Potterites in that sense. You really can, on almost any occasion, say how they will act. So they are rather dull, as a study, though ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... entertainment all over the world. The wheel of Anschuetz had been widespread too; yet it was considered only as a half-scientific apparatus. With Edison's kinetoscope the moving pictures had become a means for popular amusement and entertainment, and the appetite of commercialism was whetted. At once efforts to improve on the Edison machine were starting everywhere, and the adjustment to the needs of the wide public was in ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... treasures of the Mission, was there several years ago; but when, in 1904, I inquired of the then pastor where it was, I was curtly informed that he neither knew nor cared. All the outbuildings have been demolished and removed in order to make way for the modern spirit of commercialism which in the last decade has struck the town. It is now an ordinary church, with little but its history to redeem it from the look of smug modernity which is the curse of ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... bid men be just, 835-m. Napthali, the eloquent and agile, has for device Virgo in the domicile of Mercury, 462-u. National Gods' history describes the Sun's career through the seasons, 591-m. Nationalizing of creeds and peoples a tendency of Masonry, 625-l. Nations, commercialism and territorial aggrandizement of, 69. Nations, luxury, extravagance, ostentation, the peril of, 348-m. Nations, sanctity of the Name held by the ancient, 204-l. Natural Forces in action and opposition result in movement and Harmony, 859-l. Natural law, a constant mode of action, seems ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... applies the well-known tricks and assures her that the child reminds her so much of her own little dead niece that she ought to come to her New York house. It is a pity how the community forces sensationalism, commercialism, and finally humbug and fraud on a naive little country girl who ought to be left alone with her pet lamb in her mother's kitchen. Her gift is extremely interesting to the psychologist, and if it is not misused by those who try to pump spiritualistic superstitions ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... constructive ideas—that is to say, to Socialistic ideas. In the history of thought in Victorian Great Britain, one sees a constant conflict of this administrative disposition with the individualistic commercialism of the aggressively trading and manufacturing class, the class that in America reigns unchallenged to this day. In the latter country Individualism reigns unchallenged, it is assumed; in the former it has fought an uphill fight against the traditions of Church ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... factories every year possessed thoroughly vitalized faculties, they might do much to lighten this incubus of dull factory work which presses so heavily upon so large a number of our fellow-citizens. Has our commercialism been so strong that our schools have become insensibly commercialized, whereas we supposed that our industrial life was receiving the broadening and illuminating effects of the schools? The training of these children, ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... down to the credit of any other man, and regarded as a proof that he kept in intimate touch with the spirit and deepest sentiments of his time, instead of being reckoned a reproach, and a proof of commercialism. Moreover, he wrote things which were entirely peculiar to himself, unknown hitherto, and which had nothing in common with the purely reflective lyricism of the '40's of the nineteenth century. These serve to complete his significance ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... of heart, the insensitiveness of a certain kind, which during a century or more now has been bred by the institutions of Commercialism; ...
— NEVER AGAIN • Edward Carpenter
... that there were sincere literati writing of the abiding things that do not die with the passing of a season, but the clamour of commercialism drowned their voices. As though they were stocks upon an exchange, he heard the cries: 'Brown's getting five thousand dollars a month writing serials for Hitch's;' 'Smith sold two novels on synopsis for thirty ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... Europe; and in the very act of discovering Europe, the Englishman has at last discovered England. The revelation of the forces still really to be found in England itself, when all is said that can possibly or plausibly be said against English commercialism and selfishness, was the last work of Lord Kitchener. He was the embodiment of an enormous experience which has passed through Imperialism and reached patriotism. He had been the supreme figure of that ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton
... transaction he felt was wicked, absolutely wicked. What right had any ten thousand dollars to drift into any unknown pocket? Known, yes. That was legitimate. It always left an enterprising individual the sporting chance of dipping a hand into it. But the other was an outrage against commercialism. Why, if that sort of thing became the general practice, "how," he asked himself, "was an honest ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... should remember, affect parts, not the whole, of the race. But on the other hand that very absence of brain-mind rule may imply Buddhic influences at work in quiet places; and one cannot tell what unknown graciousnesses may be happening, that our manvantaric livelinesses and commercialism quite forbid. . . . Believe me, if we understood the laws of history, we should waste a deal less time and sanity in ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... changed. Facts are not merely finding a footing-place in history, but they are usurping the domain of Fancy, and have invaded the kingdom of Romance. Their chilling touch is over everything. They are vulgarising mankind. The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... the popular press act and react upon one another, the press setting its sails to catch every wind of public interest and the public upon its part demanding to be supplied with all those departments of news to which at the moment it is specially attracted. Commercialism and competition have barred a large part of the press from its rightful office as leader and molder of opinion and have reduced it to the position of a clamorous applicant for public favor. The press, like everything else, is ruled by majorities, and in order to live it must cater to the weaknesses ...
— Morals in Trade and Commerce • Frank B. Anderson
... like Europe, but Europe is becoming like America. This is not a case of the imitation that is a form of flattery; it is a case of similar causes producing similar results. The disease—or shall we say, to use a neutral term—the diathesis of commercialism found in America an open field and swept through it like a fire. In Europe, its course was hampered by the structures of an earlier civilisation. But it is spreading none the less surely. And the question arises—In the future, when the European environment is as unfavourable ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... creator's spear when he had finished his main work? And do not the later annals prove that true valour belongs to the Japanese knight alone, whereas foreign countries—China and Europe alike—are sunk in a degrading commercialism? For the inhabitants of "the Land of the Gods" to take any notice of such creatures by adopting a few of their trifling mechanical inventions is ...
— The Invention of a New Religion • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... is not a noble one, but that is not a matter for which I can be held responsible; suffice it to say, that my explanation is the only possible explanation. The Academy is a private commercial enterprise, and conducts its business on the lines which it considers the most advantageous; its commercialism has become flagrant and undeniable. If this is so—how the facts can otherwise be explained I cannot see—it is to be regretted that the Academy got its beautiful site for nothing. But regrets are vain. The only thing ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... dispute the accuracy of his diagnosis, or deny that more than anything else the disease of Western civilisation is a general lack of directing ideals other than those which are included in the gospel of commercialism. It may surely be further admitted that even intellectual activity has too much of triviality about it to-day; that if people despise the schoolmen, it is rather owing to their virtues than their defects, because impressionism has taken the place of thought, ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Every way the roads ran out at last into the desecrated fields and ended in rubble heaps and rank wet weeds. I remember myself as a gaunt black figure, going along the slippery, shiny pavement, and the strange sense of detachment I felt from the squalid respectability, the sordid commercialism ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... every single branch of life, except in the greatest art of all. The Middle Ages had inherited a direct succession of harmonious forms, one rising out of another until the perfection was attained. Then came the Black Death, and the no less fatal scourges of Commercialism and Bureaucracy. Men's thoughts apparently became so riveted upon the grave that they must go back to the art of the dead Romans and the formalism of classical examples to keep breath in their bones at all. And even so, they ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... went deeper still. Hitherto the Church had tried in various ways to exhibit the Christian life in some visible polity or order. But the spirit of competition and commercialism had been too strong for her. The "smash" of the war period left the Church too weak to attempt to mould the forms of the nation's life. All that she had strength to do was to proclaim the old message to the individual soul; to ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... dwelt in no Castle of Indolence; he studied, he composed, he corrected his verses: like Sir Walter in Liddesdale, "he was making himsel' a' the time." He did not neglect the movements of the great world in that dawn of discontent with the philosophy of commercialism. But it was not his vocation to plunge into the fray, and ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... service was without price; in fact there was an entire absence of what is called "commercialism" in those days. Loyalty and zeal were the currency. After three and a half years in such service it was hard for me to get down to a ...
— Between the Lines - Secret Service Stories Told Fifty Years After • Henry Bascom Smith
... been firmly established its evolution always follows similar lines. Ritual becomes increasingly elaborate: metaphysical dogma grows too subtle for a layman's comprehension. Commercialism spreads from the market to the sanctuary, whose guardians exploit the all-pervading fear of the unknown to serve their ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... unofficially that the English government advised the rivals to find some basis of union, which practically meant that if the investigations under way were pushed to extremes, both sides might find themselves in awkward plight; but the fight had gone beyond the period of pure commercialism. It was now a matter of deadly personal hate between man and man, which, I am sorry to say, has been carried down by the descendants of the old fighters almost to the present day. Each side hoped to drive the other to bankruptcy; and the last throes of the {401} deadly ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... opera was the outcome of a competition based on the frankest kind of commercialism—one of those "occasionals" from which we have been taught to believe we ought never to expect anything of ideal and lasting merit. "Pagliacci" was, in a way, a fruit of the same competition. Three years before "Cavalleria Rusticana" ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... came flushing back into Patsy's cheeks, turning them the color of thorn bloom, and her eyes deepened to the blue of Killarney, sparkling as when the sun goes a-dancing. She smiled—a fresh, radiant, witching smile upon that clay lump of commercialism—until she saw his appraisement of her treble its ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... passes it is as when we climb a mountain—we gradually rise to where we can see over the foothills and everything appears in its proper place and proportion. Out of the present, its arrogant militarism, its sordid commercialism and worship of gold, is there anything to give us cheer and hope for tomorrow? There never was greater reason for hope for humanity. Underlying all the tumult and disorder of our time is one grand, golden thought, that of the human brotherhood of the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... increase the power of governments and the solidarity of nations. At no time in the past has there been more national feeling in nations than now. Even the loosely held provinces of China are forming a Chinese nation. Despite the fundamental commercialism of the age, national spirit is growing more intense, the present war being the main intensifying cause. It is true that the interests of commerce are in many ways antagonistic to those of war. But, on the other hand, of all the causes ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... the interval. I have gone down in the world, as every scholar and gentleman, every man with brains and high standards of art and culture, is bound to go down sooner or later, in this hideous age of blatant commercialism and Mammon rampant. I don't quarrel with it. I would far rather be one of the downtrodden, persecuted minority. But, just on that account, my wife is all the more worth contemplating, since she offers a highly instructive object-lesson in the advantages which accrue from allying oneself ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... to make us great? That is the question. There comes a time when a man, whose ears are not wholly deafened by the roar of a trafficking commercialism, asks this question of himself in the hope that some answer may be vouchsafed to him. If it come at all, it comes like the "still small voice" after the whirlwind; and the man who asks that question in the expectation ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller |
