If you wish at once to do nothing and be respectable nowadays, the best pretext is to be at work on some profound study.
Leslie Stephen

In order to be respected, authority has got to be respectable.
Tom Robbins

In the bosom of her respectable family resided Camilla.
Fanny Burney

In the mass of mankind, I fear, there is too great a majority of fools and knaves; who, singly from their number, must to a certain degree be respected, though they are by no means respectable.
Philip Stanhope

It is a strange enterprise to make respectable people laugh.
Moliere

It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.
Samuel Butler

It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.
Joseph Conrad

My father knew the charming side of my mother, and my mother thought that he was attentive and pleasant and was an architect, which was a respectable profession, but I don't think that they actually got to know one another deeply.
Christopher Durang

Of course I'm respectable. I'm old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.
Robert Towne

One, I have a wonderful publisher, Black Sparrow Press; as long as they exist, they will keep me in print. And they claim they sell very respectable numbers of my books, so I guess, and it's true, every place I go, my books are in libraries and on bookshelves.
Diane Wakoski

Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
George Orwell

Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.
Thomas Mann

Respectable people do not write music or make love as a career.
Alexander Borodin

Since when was genius found respectable?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Sometimes I want to clean up my desk and go out and say, respect me, I'm a respectable grown-up, and other times I just want to jump into a paper bag and shake and bake myself to death.
Wendy Wasserstein

The best part? Probably being able to portray such a respectable, ethical, intelligent, strong woman. That's still pretty rare in our business, unfortunately.
Catherine Bell

The long-established and noble rule of Law, one of the greatest products of the character and tradition of British history, has suffered a deadly blow. Blackmail has become respectable.
Robert G. Menzies

The major obstacle to a religious renewal is the intellectual classes, who are highly influential and tend to view religion as primitive superstition. They believe that science has left atheism as the only respectable intellectual stance.
Robert Bork

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
John Kenneth Galbraith

The whole force of the respectable circles to which I belonged, that respectable circle which knew as I did not the value of security won, the slender chance of replacing it if lost or abandoned, was against me.
Ida Tarbell