Margaret Halsey Quotes

105 Sourced Quotes

I would have felt more comfortable on a girder fifty floors above the street, catching white-hot rivets in a pail.

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

Margaret Halsey
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.

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

Margaret Halsey
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.

Margaret Halsey
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.

Margaret Halsey
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.

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

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

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

Margaret Halsey
It takes a great deal to produce ennui in an Englishman and if you do, he only takes it as convincing proof that you are well-bred.

Margaret Halsey
The boneless quality of English conversation, which, so far as I have heard it, is all form and no content. Listening to Britons dining out is like watching people play first-class tennis with imaginary balls.

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
There's nothing you can do about the race problem, Tom says, that's safe. We've let it go too long for that. The only choice we have left is between perilous courses that are democratic and perilous courses that aren't democratic.

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

Margaret Halsey
Life itself, however, flows and is sequential and punishes those who try to compartmentalize it. Thus if, for any reason whatsoever, moral standards are conspicuously and unprecedentedly breached in one area of society, such as the political, it will follow as the night the day that those standards will start collapsing all down the line-in sports, entertainment, education, the armed forces, business and government.

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
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
That's the trouble with hitching your wagon to a star — nothing happens when you say, 'Giddyap!'

Margaret Halsey
He works so hard, Jeff, and I wish I could persuade him to take things a little more easily; but it would be like inducing a sledge hammer to loiter on the downward arc.

Margaret Halsey
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.

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

Margaret Halsey
An omelet so light we had to lay our knives across it and even then it struggled.

Margaret Halsey