Unfashionable Quotes & Sayings

It's become unfashionable to celebrate political achievement, and Labour achievement even less so. And it's positively uncouth to be proud of something that this Labour government is doing. So, slam me for saying so, but I'm really proud of the NHS. — Lucy Powell

People like the robber barons assumed that the doctrine of the survival of the fittest authenticated them as deserving power. You know, "I'm the richest. Therefore, I'm the best. God's in his heaven, etc." And that reaction of the robber barons was so irritating to people that it made it unfashionable to think of an economy as an ecosystem. But the truth is that it is a lot like an ecosystem. And you get many of the same results. — Charlie Munger

There are infinite possibilities of error, and more cranks take up fashionable untruths than unfashionable truths. — Bertrand Russell

Traditionalism is not fashionable. It is the dog-crawl to fashion's catwalk. — Fennel Hudson

I was unfashionable before anyone knew who I was. — Paul Desmond

People's feelings are as strong as they always were, and skepticism is probably as unfashionable today as in any other age. Accordingly, — Carl Sagan

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. — Anonymous

This particularly unfashionable neighborhood was a shady one despite the absence of trees, and — Viet Thanh Nguyen

These solitary ones who are free in spirit know thatin one thing or another they must constantly put on an appearance that is different from the way they think; although they want nothing but truth and honesty, they are entangled in a web of misunderstandings. And despite their keen desire, they cannot prevent a fog of false opinions, of accommodation, of halfway concessions, of indulgent silence, of erroneous interpretation from settling on everything they do. And so a cloud of melancholy gathers around their brow, for such natures hate the necessity of appearances more than death, and their persistent bitterness about this makes them volatile and menacing. From time to time they take revenge for their violent selfconcealment, for their coerced constraint. They emerge from their caves with horrible expressions on their faces; at such times their words and deeds are explosions, and it is even possible for them to destroy themselves. — Friedrich Nietzsche

She saw how he was staring at it, the bright red hue beneath her bonnet. She could not bear to see the way he was looking at her - right through her - without seeing her. He did not see a woman. He did not see Jane, the woman he had been so passionate with two days before. He saw ... Jane swallowed hard and looked
away, hating the weakness of her spirit. She was more than this, a wilting flower. She was stronger than this. But damn it, this hurt.
It hurt because he was the man responsible for making her burn. For making her feel like a woman. It hurt because it had been a trick. An illusion. And it hurt most of all because he did not see her, the woman she was behind the unfashionable spectacles and garish hair. — Charlotte Featherstone

social mobility isn't just about money and economics, it's about a lifestyle change. The wealthy and the powerful aren't just wealthy and powerful; they follow a different set of norms and mores. When you go from working-class to professional-class, almost everything about your old life becomes unfashionable at best or unhealthy at worst. — J.D. Vance

Some say that inside every scholar there is a romantic, trying to get out. That may not be entirely true, but there is much truth in it. It is to such scholars that we owe the preservation of ancient beliefs in magic and witchcraft in a materialistic twentieth century, and many of them more than half believe in these things, cloaking their unfashionable faith behind the impeccable bibliographical apparatus of names, dates and footnotes. — Leslie Shepard

I've been very lucky at what's happened in my career to date, but playing something as far from me as possible is an ambition of mine - anything from a mutated baddy in a comic book action thriller, to a detective. If anything, I'd like Gary Oldman's career: he's the perfect example of it. I've love to have a really broad sweep of characters - to be able to do something edgy, surprising and unfashionable. — Benedict Cumberbatch

Uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of — Douglas Adams

Being fat is the absolute nadir of the misfit. You're a misfit because nothing fits. You don't fit in. You're not fit. You're fat. Fat doesn't have the poetic cachet of alcohol, the whiff of danger in the drug of choice. You're just fat. Being fat is so un-American, so unattractive, unerotic, unfashionable, undisciplined, unthinkable, uncool. It makes you invisible. It makes you conspicuous. — Claudia Shear

[To a woman who claimed she'd rather be dead than unconfined and unfashionable:] My dear, if you continue to lace as tightly as you do now, you will not long have the privilege of choice. You will be both dead and out of fashion. — Dorothea Dix

I'm not sure whether that had to do with the humor, or with the unfashionable fairy-tale ending, which is very different from much of what I read in The New Yorker, where short stories seem to end with someone staring off at the white walls of a white room, and you think that something's happened but you're not quite sure what. — Jennifer Weiner

Be unfashionable. Take risks. — Paul Arden

Brains are still unfashionable for women to wear, and it has always been proof of women's superiority that the more intelligent a man is, the more women admire him, while the bigger fool a woman is, the more men run after her. — Dorothea Dix

Nathaniel Upchurch. Margaret couldn't believe it. Gone were the pale features, the thin frame, the hesitant posture, the spectacles. Now broad shoulders strained against his cutaway coat. Form-fitting leather breeches outlined muscular legs. The unfashionable dark beard emphasized his sharp cheekbones and long nose. His skin was golden brown. His hair unruly, some escaping its queue. Even his voice sounded different - lower, harsher, yet still familiar. — Julie Klassen

She was a tall woman with unfashionable hips and a long chestnut braid singing down her back. — Toni Morrison

The continuous disasters of man's history are mainly due to his excessive capacity and urge to become identified with a tribe, nation, church or cause, and to espouse its credo uncritically and enthusiastically, even if its tenets are contrary to reason, devoid of self-interest and detrimental to the claims of self-preservation.We are thus driven to the unfashionable conclusion that the trouble with our species is not an excess of aggression, but an excess capacity for fanatical devotion. — Arthur Koestler

But the problem with readers, the idea we're given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, "I should sit here and I should be entertained." And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don't know, who they probably couldn't comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That's the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It's an old moral, but it's completely true. — Zadie Smith

Diplomacy is unfashionable in the world of knee-jerk reaction and the dogmatic sound bite on television. — Douglas Hurd

Dresses that are truly beautiful are never unfashionable. — Elsa Schiaparelli

I have always thought foreigners with their unusual skin colours, mad languages and ignorant customs absolutely hilarious, and I think it's a shame that in recent years its become unfashionable to poke fun at them. I certainly don't think they themselves ever minded it. — Arthur Mathews

By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules. — Iain M. Banks

Ever since Freud made his famous, and in my view disastrous, volte-face in 1897, when he decided that the childhood seductions he had believed to be aetiologically important were nothing more than the products of his patients' imaginations, it has been extremely unfashionable to attribute psychopathology to real-life experiences. — John Bowlby

The chance is high that the truth lies in the fashionable direction. But, on the off chance that it is in another direction - a direction obvious from an unfashionable view of field theory - who will find it? Only someone who has sacrificed himself by teaching himself quantum electrodynamics from a peculiar and unfashionable point of view; one that he may have to invent for himself. — Richard P. Feynman

No matter that we could be beheaded for this," said Esa. "Heads are overrated."
"Yes, they are so unfashionable," said Miri, imitating an Aslandian accent. "This spring, ladies of style are wearing their feathers in their necks. — Shannon Hale

He'd made a name for himself out there in the world beyond not just in spite of the distinctly unfashionable persona he presented, but, perhaps, BECAUSE of it. — Chris Matthews

I studied in London in 1968. Our school had a separate department of tropical architecture. Of course it was totally unfashionable, partly because nobody wanted to think about colonialism, but basically what you learned there was that, OK, the sun is here, so you should create natural ventilation here - an unbelievable amount of really sound principles that have been completely abandoned, so now everything is air conditioned with big machines. — Rem Koolhaas

It's interesting that penny-pinching is an accepted defense for toxic food habits, when frugality so rarely rules other consumer domains. The majority of Americans buy bottled drinking water, for example, even though water runs from the faucets at home for a fraction of the cost, and government quality standards are stricter for tap water than for bottled. At any income level, we can be relied upon for categorically unnecessary purchases: portable-earplug music instead of the radio; extra-fast Internet for leisure use; heavy vehicles to transport light loads; name-brand clothing instead of plainer gear. "Economizing," as applied to clothing, generally means looking for discount name brands instead of wearing last year's clothes again. The dread of rearing unfashionable children is understandable. But as a priority, "makes me look cool" has passed up "keeps arteries functional" and left the kids huffing and puffing (fashionably) in the dust. — Barbara Kingsolver

If you try to write posthumously, however, fashion doesn't apply. You step off the catwalk, ignoring this season's trends and resigning yourself to being unfashionable and possibly unnoticed, at least for a while. As Kurt Woolf, Kafka's first publisher in Germany, wrote to him after Kafka's book tanked, "You and we know that it is generally just the best and most valuable things that do not find their echo immediately." Fashion is the attempt to evade that principle: to be the echo of someone else's success and, therefore, to create nothing that might create an echo of its own. — Jeffrey Eugenides

It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a story, a narrative of adventure and of vision, of character and of incident. It is also a portrait of the great general drama of the human spirit. — Peter Ackroyd

To creative people, the compendium of the white man's dialect are unfashionable, because their creations are more than what the tongue could say. — Michael Bassey Johnson

Notwithstanding the Marxist social workers, who like to maintain that it's so-called social deprivation rather than innate criminal tendencies which cause more unemployed black youths that Tory MPs to become muggers, I maintain an unfashionable belief in Original Sin. I make no apology for that. I'm sorry, but there it is.I see Distillers are up another 6p. — William Donaldson

Fashion becomes unfashionable. Style never. — Coco Chanel

I'm not concerned that my stuff isn't extreme. I don't want to be heavy. I can't think of another attitude to have toward an audience than a hopeful and a positive one. And if that includes such unfashionable things as sentimentality, well, I can afford it. — Robert Palmer

What initially attracted me to The Seventh Seal was that it had values and characteristics which I was familiar with in other art forms, most notably, the European novel and certain forms on English drama, and indeed, in relation to my rather academic interest in history
not "history" in the normal sense, but history as a form of entertainment . It might be a very unfashionable view but I believe that history is an amazing bank or reserve area of plots, characterisations, extraordinary events, etc. — Peter Greenaway

My college, Fitzwilliam, was pretty good but unfashionable and I lived in digs so I was not part of the cloistered 'old college' environment, which frankly was a bit intimidating. But I worked hard and settled in by exploring politics and girls. — Vince Cable

It's unfashionable to admit, but playing music makes us happy and makes us smile. — Chris Hesse

True modesty avoids everything that is criminal; false modesty everything that is unfashionable. — Joseph Addison

In England, at least, corruption only became unfashionable (and in fact only started to be called "corruption") when there started to be other, faster ways to get rich. — Paul Graham

The Supreme Arrogance of Religious Thinking:

That a carbon-based bag of mostly water on a speck of iron-silicate dust around a boring dwarf star in a minor galaxy in an underpopulated local group of galaxies in an unfashionable suburb of a supecluster would look up at the sky and declare "it was all made so I could exist — Peter Walker

I have friends who are still looking, friends who are married, and friends who are divorced. The difference, I've come to see, is largely due to chance, rather than character. Because after all those years of self-doubt, my late-marrying friends and I found men who love us even though we're still cranky and neurotic, even though we still haven't got our careers together, even though we sometimes talk too loud or drink too much or swear at the TV when the news is on. We have gray hairs and unfashionable clothes and bad attitudes. They love us anyway.

What's wrong with me? What's wrong with any of us? If we're honest, the answer probably is 'plenty.' But that's not the point. — Sara Eckel

I'm beginning to feel that the real endangered species on planet earth are not the whales and the elephants but those of us who can laugh at the world and ourselves ... I fear the dry turn of the American mind, this focus on the literal, as much as I fear our capacity for self-destruction. We've become hagridden by facts, obsessed with product instead of process. Where's the energetic wit, the looney outlook, the frivolity, the lightness of comforting laughter? It has become fashionable to know and unfashionable to feel, and you can't really laugh if you can't feel. — Rita Mae Brown

Until a few years ago, the topics in my Ph.D. were unfashionable, but they are very popular today. — Benoit Mandelbrot

I was fashionably late in my unfashionable clothes. — Jarod Kintz

Conventions vs. spontaneity. This is a dialectical choice, it depends on the assessment you make of your own times. If you judge that your own time is ridden with empty insincere formalities, you plump for spontaneity, for indecorous behavior even ... Much of morality is the task of compensating for one's age. One assumes unfashionable virtues, in an indecorous time. In a time hollowed out by decorum, one must school oneself in spontaneity. — Susan Sontag

For a long time I found the celebrities of modern painting and poetry ridiculous. I loved absurd pictures, fanlights, stage scenery, mountebanks backcloths, inn-signs, cheap colored prints; unfashionable literature, church Latin, pornographic books badly spelt, grandmothers novels, fairy stories, little books for children, old operas, empty refrains, simple rhythms. — Arthur Rimbaud

Mourning has become unfashionable in the United States. The bereaved are supposed to pull themselves together as quickly as possible and to reweave the torn fabric of life ... we do not allow ... for the weeks and months during which a loss is realized - a beautiful word that suggests the transmutation of the strange into something that is one's own. — Margaret Mead

When a minister or a clergyman takes seriously unfashionable Christian doctrines which condemn sex outside marriage, homosexuality, abortion, and feminism, and injects his views into the political debate, he is immediately denounced as a 'reactionary.' — Benjamin Hart

Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. "Falling in love," characteristically, combs the appearances of the word, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot. — A.S. Byatt

What makes people good communicators is, in essence, an ability not to be fazed by the more problematic or offbeat aspects of their own characters. They can contemplate their anger, their sexuality, and their unpopular, awkward, or unfashionable opinions without losing confidence or collapsing into self-disgust. They can speak clearly because they have managed to develop a priceless sense of their own acceptability. They like themselves well enough to believe that they are worthy of, and can win, the goodwill of others if only they have the wherewithal to present themselves with the right degree of patience and imagination. As children, these good communicators must have been blessed with caregivers who knew how to love their charges without demanding that every last thing about them be agreeable and perfect. Such parents would have been able to live with the idea that their offspring might sometimes - for a while, at least - be odd, violent, angry, mean, peculiar, — Alain De Botton

I passed through this stage years ago on Venus, where I was so unfashionable that eventually I almost convinced myself I no longer cared that nobody wanted me; but recent events have reawakened my need for intimacy. — Charles Stross

That [Chester Bowles's] ideas seemed to be a little unfashionable did not bother him. He simply did not take the Russian threat that seriously; he thought the real dangers in the world were those of poverty and hunger. To many liberals he was a comforting throwback to the Roosevelt era; he still stood for things that they believed in but which had recently come under considerable attack. — David Halberstam

As clear as it is important, the death of Detroit is still mostly ignored. Generally, the slow destruction of a major city would get a fair amount of attention, but the lack of coverage is hardly surprising. After all, the "bad guys" aren't the popular ones. In most circles, condemning taxation, regulation, unionization, welfarism and protectionism is unfashionable. It's necessary to check political correctness at the door and appreciate that the case of Detroit isn't an isolated tragedy. What happened in Detroit could be coming to a city near you. — Dan Greenup

Punishment is now unfashionable ... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility. — Thomas Szasz

In a moment when criticism shows a singular dearth of direction every man has to be a law unto himself in matters of theatre, writing, and painting. While the American Mercury and the new Ford continue to spread a thin varnish of Ritz over the whole United States there is a certain virtue in being unfashionable. — John Dos Passos

She looked at me like I was stupid, the same look the girls in JC used to give me when I hadn't heard of the latest boy band, or turned up at Zouk wearing unfashionable clothes. — Jeremy Tiang

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamped, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them,
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun. — William Shakespeare

It's unfashionable these days to talk about sin, and it's even less fashionable to talk about idolatry. The world likes to tell us that we're beyond that now. When we honestly discuss the sinful attitudes behind our actions, we are often shushed: "You're not that bad! Everyone does those things! You need to have better self esteem!" But the human heart is the same now as it was in biblical times. We don't have to bow down to a golden statue to worship idols. When we trust in anything other than God for peace and happiness we are essentially practicing idolatry. Only when we see the idols yet in our hearts can we truly "put off the old self" and "put on the new self" (Colossians 3:5-10). — Staci Eastin

My dear, I could hardly keep still in my chair. I wanted to dash out of the house and leap in a taxi and say, "Take me to Charles's unhealthy pictures." Well, I went, but the gallery after luncheon was so full of absurd women in the sort of hats they should be made to eat, that I rested a little
I rested here with Cyril and Tom and these saucy boys. Then I came back at the unfashionable time of five o'clock, all agog, my dear; and what did I find? I found, my dear, a very naughty and very successful practical joke. It reminded me of dear Sebastian when he liked so much to dress up in false whiskers. It was charm again, my dear, simple, creamy English charm, playing tigers. — Evelyn Waugh

Armand Gamache had always held unfashionable beliefs. He believed the light would banish the shadows. That kindness was more powerful than cruelty, and that goodness existed, even in the most desperate places. He believed that evil had its limits. — Louise Penny

By the late Nineties, we had become a more visual nation. Big-money taste moved to global standards - new architecture, design and show-off contemporary art. The Sloane domestic aesthetic - symmetry, class symbolism and brown furniture - became as unfashionable as it had been hot in the early Eighties. — Peter York

Where's the superficial? I was, and therefore am, dim, gloomy, a drag, unfashionable, unfanciable, and awkward. This doesn't seem like superficial to me. These aren't flesh wounds. These are life-threatening thrusts into the internal organs. — Nick Hornby

More cranks take up unfashionable errors than unfashionable truths. — Bertrand Russell

Uncle seemed to take pleasure from knowing things other people didn't. Silas did not like thinking this about the man who'd given them a place to live, but there was a sort of smirk hidden inside his uncle's words that made Silas feel like he was being laughed at. He knew that tone. He'd heard it often enough from kids at school, from the ones who'd look at you like you weren't worth talking to, from the ones who looked at your unfashionable clothes, or the shape of your face, and told everyone else that you were a freak. Silas was scared of those kids, because usually, those were the ones who didn't think that normal rules applied to them, the ones who thought they could get away with anything. — Ari Berk

That the hand of God was involved in the birth of the new nation he had no doubt. "It is the will of heaven that the two countries should be sundered forever." If the people now were to have "unbounded power," and as the people were quite capable of corruption as "the great," and thus high risks were involved, he would submit all his hopes and fears to an overruling providence, "in which unfashionable as the faith may be, I firmly believe. — David McCullough

The cold logic of mid-twentieth-century atheism has now given way to an era of renewed 'spirituality,' but it is an awakening more thrapeutic than pious, more attuned to self-expression than self-denial. It is now fashionable to talk about God, though it is still deeply unfashionable to believe in him. — J. Mark Bertrand

My point is, or should be, simple: history happened. The object is not to undo it, distort it, or to make it fit our present political attitudes. The object of history, which each generation properly interprets anew, is to understand what happened and why. A multicultural Canada can and should look at its past with fresh eyes. It should, for example, study how the Ukrainians came to Canada, how they were treated, how they lived, sometimes suffered, ultimately prospered, and became Canadians. What historians should not do is to recreate history to make it serve present purposes. They should not obscure or reshape events to make them fit political agendas. They should not declare whole areas of the past off-limits because they can only be presented in politically unfashionable terms any more than they should fail to draw object lessons from a past that was frequently less than pleasant and less than honourable. Because the past was not perfect, it must not be made perfect today. — J.L. Granatstein

Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing. — George Orwell

These books are all refreshingly clear-headed and unfashionable, free of cant and free of Kant; — Edward Feser

Freedom, privileges, options, must constantly be exercised, even at the risk of inconvenience. Otherwise they fall into desuetude and become unfashionable, unorthodox - finally irregulationary. — Jack Vance

The remoteness of my parents from the schools, so unfashionable today, was often painful for me, but I learned early to deal with an outside and sometimes hard world. — Martin Lewis Perl

With the advent of chivalry, the art of boxing waned. The evolution of feudal aristocracy, with other and widely different exercises, pastimes and weapons from those of the common people, made boxing unfashionable. — John Boyle O'Reilly

This truth may be unfashionable, unpalatable, no doubt unpopular, but, if it is the truth, the story of mankind shows that war was universal and unceasing for millions of years before armaments were invented or armies organized. Indeed, the lucid intervals of peace and order only occurred in human history after armaments in the hands of strong governments have come into being, and civilization in every age has been nursed only in cradles guarded by superior weapons and superior discipline. — Winston Churchill

Today it is very fashionable to talk about the poor. Unfortunately it is very unfashionable to talk with them. — Brandon Vogt

Fashion is made to become unfashionable. — Coco Chanel

Today, at Harvard, any student with the currently fashionable color of skin is given rights denied to students of the currently unfashionable color. — Al Capp

To work problems out for yourself, to find you own way out of ignorance, to know the pleasure of knowing - these things improve the quality of life. Unfashionable, even impractical, but true. — Jessica Zafra

Unmediated joy was nowadays unfashionable. — Gail Jones

Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there's formal and then there's casual; there's hip, there's cool, there's trendy, there's snobbish. Mix 'n' match. — Haruki Murakami

On solemn festivals, Julian, who felt and professed an unfashionable dislike to these frivolous amusements, condescended to appear in the Circus; and, after bestowing a careless glance on five or six of the races, he hastily withdrew with the impatience of a philosopher, who considered every moment as lost that was not devoted to the advantage of the public or the improvement of his own mind. — Edward Gibbon

Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear. — Oscar Wilde

Many people don't have relationships to their siblings in adulthood, or they have superficial ones. It's sort of unfashionable, particularly in America, to be close to your family. — Kiki Smith

Daniel Woodrell has made a name as a master of prose with personality - a densely descriptive, gamey form of storytelling, one might say traditional storytelling - of late rather an unfashionable mode. — Sarah Hall

Maybe, these ideas are pointing to something mystical and true. And perhaps i am judging hte idea, not by its merit, but by the fashionable or unfashionable delivery of the message. — Donald Miller

Making distinctions of this kind, however, is deeply unfashionable in intellectual circles. In my experience, people do not want to hear that Islam supports violence in a way that Jainism doesn't, or that Buddhism offers a truly sophisticated, empirical approach to understanding the human mind, whereas Christianity presents an almost perfect impediment to such understanding. In many circles, to make invidious comparisons of this kind is to stand convicted of bigotry. — Sam Harris