Margaret Halsey Quotes

105 Sourced Quotes

Humility is not my forte, and whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually begin to seem mild, harmless, rather engaging little things, not at all like the staring defects in other people's characters.

Margaret Halsey
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.

Margaret Halsey
In some circumstances, the refusal to be defeated is a refusal to be educated.

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

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

Margaret Halsey
The business society is interested in training its citizens to make money, and, in this objective, it is often successful. Many of them do make money, and the ones who do not obligingly regard themselves as failures who have wasted the precious gift of life.

Margaret Halsey
Every time I think I've touched bottom as far as boredom is concerned, new vistas of ennui open up.

Margaret Halsey
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?

Margaret Halsey
Dr. Aspirin's face wore the expression of one who has a soufflé in the oven when they start blasting down the street.

Margaret Halsey
I suppose you can't have everything, though my instinctive response to this sentiment is always, 'Why not?'

Margaret Halsey
In practice, there is nothing especially dramatic in people getting along well together.

Margaret Halsey
You could, without arousing a storm of protest, have described us as rather a dull couple.

Margaret Halsey
Not being one to calculate or look ahead, I had not stopped to think, when boys started paying attention to me, that the cup might be dashed from my lips, though experience should have taught me that dashing cups from lips was the way Victorian parents got most of their exercise.

Margaret Halsey
Democracy produces both heroes and villains, but it differs from a fascist state in that it does not produce a hero who is a villain.

Margaret Halsey
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.

Margaret Halsey
Democracy makes many taxing demands on its practitioners, but suspension of the intelligence is not one of them.

Margaret Halsey
From a purely tourist standpoint, Oxford is overpowering, being so replete with architecture and history and anecdote that the visitor's mind feels dribbling and helpless, as with an over-large mouthful of nougat.

Margaret Halsey
Being in the middle class is a feeling as well as an income level.

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

Margaret Halsey
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.

Margaret Halsey
The false 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.

Margaret Halsey
The role of the Do-Gooder is not what actors call a fat part.

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

Margaret Halsey
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 commonplace domestic situation.

Margaret Halsey
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.

Margaret Halsey