Margaret Halsey Quotes

105 Sourced Quotes

There are... other business societies — England, Holland, Belgium and France, for instance. But ours [the United States] is the only culture now extant in which business so completely dominates the national scene that sports, crime, sex, death, philanthropy and Easter Sunday are money-making propositions.

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

Margaret Halsey
If, as I suspected at the time, I was a one-book writer, I wanted to be the kind of one-book writer who writes only one book.

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

Margaret Halsey
What I know about money, I learned the hard way — by having had it.

Margaret Halsey
English life is seventh-eighths below the surface, like an iceberg, and living in England for a year constitutes merely an introduction to an introduction to an introduction to it.

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

Margaret Halsey
The soup, thin and dark and utterly savorless, tasted as if it had been drained out of the umbrella stand.

Margaret Halsey
Americans (I, I'm afraid, among them) go around carelessly assuming they're tolerant the way they go around carelessly saying, 'You ought to be in pictures.' But in the clinches, they turn out to be tolerant about as often as they turn out to be Clark Gable.

Margaret Halsey
The whole flavor and quality of the American representative government turns to ashes on the tongue, if one regards that government as simply an inferior and rather second-rate sort of corporation.

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
When she gets excited, her voice rises to a pitch generally considered suitable only for hog-calling.

Margaret Halsey
Organized religion, in a dominating business society, can do only one of two things. It can either assure the communicant with uneasy bluster that God Himself likes money — a theory which convinces nobody — or it can give him an apologetic, halfhearted invitation to go out and get himself crucified.

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

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

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

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

Margaret Halsey
Mr Richards was a tall man with what must have been a magnificent build before his stomach went in for a career of its own.

Margaret Halsey
A business society, therefore, always has in its children a large group of individuals who cannot make money and who do not understand (or want to understand) the profit motive. In short, they are subversives.

Margaret Halsey
When I spoke of having a drink, it was a euphemism for having a whole flock of them.

Margaret Halsey
The adjuration to 'Be realistic' merely means 'Agree with me, and think the way I think.'

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

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
The attitude of the English, as a matter of fact, toward English history, reminds one a good deal of the attitude of a Hollywood director toward love.

Margaret Halsey
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.

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

Margaret Halsey
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.

Margaret Halsey