Margaret Halsey Quotes

Father's snoring grows to sound increasingly like a vacuum cleaner in heat.

How close beneath the surface, even in the happiest family, is the chronic grievance! I sometimes think that tinderboxes are inert and powder kegs mere talcum compared to the explosive possibilities in the most commoplace domestic situation.

We know of our own knowledge that we are human beings, and, as such, imperfect. But we are bathed by the communications industry in a ceaseless tide of inhuman, impossible perfection.

People coming away from a session with Dr. S. usually looked as if they had had fifty minutes on the anvil with an apprentice blacksmith.

The great disadvantage of being in a rat race is that it is humiliating. The competitors in a rat race are by definition rodents.

Money does not corrupt people. What corrupts people is lack of affection ... Money is simply the bandage which wounded people put over their wounds.

A person may be totally unimaginative and have the social vision of a mole, and we still call him a decent man ...

Englishwomen's shoes look as if they had been made by someone who had often heard shoes described, but had never seen any ...

This year's blasphemy is next year's liberating truth ...

Folklore is a collection of ridiculous notions held by other people, but not by you and me.

The integration of the Negro into American society is one of the most exciting challenges to self-development and self-mastery that any nation of people ever faced.

A lady getting a missing belt back from the cleaner couldn't have been more surprised and pleased ...

In a business society, the role of sex can be summed up in five pitiful little words. There is money in it.

Equality is an unconscious assumption, and if you feel you are treating someone as an equal, then you are not doing it.

Example is better than precept.

The people who are unprejudiced, but who ... feel it is so hopeless there is no use trying ... probably do just as much damage to the emotional atmosphere in which we are facing the problem as the fanatical Negrophobes.

Employed as I had been employing it, liquor is a fixative of old patterns ...

Working with children is the easiest part of educating for democracy, because children are still undefeated and have no stake in being prejudiced.

A society struggles to fulfill its best instincts, even as an individual does, and generally makes just as hard going of it. The fight against prejudice is an inevitable process. Man has been warring against his own lower nature ever since he found out he had one, and the battle against intolerance is part of the same old struggle between good and evil that has preoccupied us ever since we gave up swinging from trees.

Passionately prejudiced people always turn out, under scrutiny, to be people who cannot get along on a footing of equality with anyone ...

The only men who can turn my blood stream into a condition resembling heavy surf are good-looking heels with characters as intricately unpleasant as the sewers of Paris. With decent and honorable gents, I come all over Platonic. Was ever a woman so perverse and wrongheaded?

The English never smash in a face. They merely refrain from asking it to dinner.

I was well warned about English food, so it did not surprise me, but I do wonder sometimes, how they ever manage to prise it up long enough to get a plate under it.

He must have had a magnificent build before his stomach went in for a career of its own.

The attitude of the English towards English history reminds one a good deal of the attitude of a Hollywood director towards love.

The modification of prejudice takes a long time, and occurs as the result of a thousand things that happen to the prejudiced person - things he sees and hears and reads, people he talks to, and places he visits. Any given reformer must be content to take a small and obscure place in a chain of cumulative pressures.

Success does not implant bad characteristics in people. It merely steps up the growth rate of the bad characteristics they already had.

In race relations, the single gesture and the single individual are more often than not doomed to failure. Only the group and the long-term, undeviating policy make much headway ... if you want to make the world a better place, the first thing you must accept is the fact that you cannot transcend your limitations as an individual.

Reality is above all else a variable, and nobody is qualified to say that he or she knows exactly what it is. As a matter of fact, with a firm enough commitment, you can sometimes create a reality which did not exist before.

It is possible to eat English piecrust, whatever you may think at first. The English eat it, and when they stand up and walk away, they are hardly bent over at all.

The idea is that inside every human being, however unprepossessing, there is a glorious, talented, and overwhelmingly attractive personality. Nonsense. Inside each of us is a mess of unruly, primitive impulses, and these can sometimes, under the strenuous self-discipline and dedication of art, result in notable creativity.

There are dozens of ways of failing to make money. It is one thing to fail to make money because your single talent happens to be a flair amounting to genius for translating the plays of Aristophanes. It is quite another thing to fail to make money because you are black, or a child, or a woman.

The stress laid on upward social mobility in the United States has tended to obscure the fact that there can be more than one kind of mobility and more than one direction in which it can go. There can be ethical mobility as well as financial, and it can go down as well as up.

Bulldogs have been known to fall on their swords when confronted by my superior tenacity.

I was so embarrassed I could feel my nerves curling like bacon over a hot fire.

The only way not to worry about the race problem is to be doing something about it yourself. When you are, natural human vanity makes you feel that now the thing is in good hands.

The important thing about human beings is not what they do, but why they do it.

Giving up alcohol or cigarettes is a lead-pipe cinch compared to the renunciation of complacence by a former (self-appointed) elite.

The psychological attitudes which are indispensable in the American market place are disastrous to family life. Family life ... requires yieldingness, generosity, sympathy, altruism, tenderness-all the qualities, in fact, which lead straight to bankruptcy ... the American family is tragically out of gear with the profit structure which has mushroomed up around it.

The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality

In a business society, the emotional economy is an economy of scarcity.

The American family is failing in its job of turning out stable human beings ... It is failing because Americans do not dare to cultivate in themselves those characteristics which would make family life creative and rewarding. To do so, would ruin them financially.

Some persons talk simply because they think sound is more manageable than silence.

Life itself, however, flows and is sequential and punishes those who try to compartmentalize it.

The real nature of an ethic is that it does not become an ethic unless and until it goes into action.

Infants, I note with envy, are receptive to enjoyment in a degree not attained by adults this side of the new Jerusalem.

If the factory people outside the colleges live under the discipline of narrow means, the people inside live under almost every other kind of discipline except that of narrow means
from the fruity austerities of learning, through the iron rations of English gentlemanhood, down to the modest disadvantages of occupying cold stone buildings without central heating and having to cross two or three quadrangles to take a bath.

The crucial disadvantage of aggression, competitiveness and skepticism as national characteristics is that these qualities cannot be turned off at five o'clock.

Humorists are not humorous twenty-four hours a day. In fact, when you get to know them well, they are often not humorous at all. They tend to be hypersensitive, taut, neurotic creatures driven by God know what obscure compulsion to earn their living the hard way.

American business, while it does not frown on helping the human race, frowns on people who start right in helping the human race without first proving that they can sell things to it.