The World According to George
(all quotes are from the novel)

George on girls...
"Girls are usually pretty fresh!  They ought to go to a man’s college about a year: they’d get taught a few things about freshness!"
"Most girls of sixteen are bum dancers.  Anyhow, I wouldn’t dance with one unless I had to."
"Girls usually think they know it all as soon as they’ve learned to dance and dress and flirt a little.  They never know anything about things like architecture, for instance."
"Well, you could break that engagement, I guess, if you wanted to!  Girls always can get out of things when they want to."



George on various professions...
"That’s a fine career for a man, isn’t it!  Lawyers, bankers, politicians!  What do they get out of life, I’d like to know!  What do they ever know about real things?  Where do they ever get?"
"I never have been able to see any occasion for a man’s going into trade, or being a lawyer, or any of those things if his position and family were such that he didn’t need to."
"I don’t believe in the whole world scrubbing dishes and selling potatoes and trying law cases."
"Politics is a dirty business for a gentleman."



George on tall men...
“One thing I don’t see though: what’s the use of a man being six-feet-three?  Men that size can’t handle themselves as well as a man about five-feet-eleven and a half can.  Those long, gangling men, they’re nearly always too kind of wormy to be any good in athletics, and they’re so awkward they keep falling over chairs...."



George on automobiles...
"Those things are never going to amount to anything.  People aren’t going to spend their lives lying on their backs in the road and letting grease drip in their faces.  Horseless carriages are pretty much a failure."
"I said all automobiles were a nuisance.  They’ll never amount to anything but a nuisance.  They had no business to be invented."



George on society as a whole...
"I think the world’s like this: there’s a few people that their birth and position, and so on, puts them at the top, and they ought to treat each other entirely as equals."



George on literature...
"I have finished both Henry Esmond and The Virginians.  I like Thackeray because he is not trashy, and because he writes principally of nice people.  My theory of literature is an author who does not indulge in trashiness -- writes about people you could introduce into your own home.  I agree with my Uncle Sydney, as I once heard him say he did not care to read a book or go to a play about people he would not care to meet at his own dinner table."

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