Daily Inspiration Quote by Russell Lynes

Bad taste is loud, obvious, and socially self-incriminating; good taste is quiet, persuasive, and often mistaken for virtue. Russell Lynes, a midcentury American critic who anatomized status and style with a sociologist's eye, is warning that the more dangerous force in culture isn't the tacky lamp or the vulgar joke. It's the refined consensus that arrives wearing the soft power of "discernment."

The line works because it flips a moral hierarchy. Bad taste can be corrected, mocked, or simply ignored; it announces itself. Good taste, by contrast, polices boundaries while pretending not to. It tells you which books are "serious", which neighborhoods are "up-and-coming", which clothes are "timeless", and which people are "a bit much". In that sense, "good taste" becomes a credentialing system: a way to sort bodies, class, race, and aspiration without ever naming those categories. Its danger is camouflage.

Lynes was writing in a world where magazines, museums, and advertisers were busy manufacturing the ideal of the cultivated consumer. Postwar affluence didn't just expand choice; it professionalized taste. That made "good taste" a kind of cultural bureaucracy, capable of sterilizing art into acceptability and turning genuine weirdness into a faux-eclectic style package.

So the caution isn't anti-refinement; it's anti-complacency. Guard against good taste because it can smother risk, flatten dissent, and turn aesthetics into etiquette - the most effective censorship is the one that feels like manners.