Camouflage is a game we all like to play, but our secrets are as surely revealed by what we want to seem to be as by what we want to conceal.

It is unlikely that there has ever been a nation more reckless with its past than ours, so quick to tear down its monuments for the sake of a better real-estate deal, so careless with the genius of its architects and artists if they happened to stand in the way of what we call progress when what we mean is profit.

Clutter is what happens to things when they become useless but friendly.

The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.

The true snob never rests; there is always a higher goal to attain, and there are, by the same token, always more and more people to look down upon.

The shaping of taste is essentially the science of merchandising, whether of detergents or cars or books or objects of fine and decorative art.

For all its flexibility, television is more a mirror of taste than a shaper of it.