Margaret Halsey Quotes

105 Sourced Quotes

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
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.

Margaret Halsey
It is possible to eat English pie crust, 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.

Margaret Halsey
Identity is not found, the way Pharaoh's daughter found Moses in the bulrushes. Identity is built.

Margaret Halsey
Prejudice will always exist. So will sickness and disease, but that scarcely seems sufficient reason for telling our medical scientists to put on their hats, close up their laboratories, and give the spirochetes, bacilli and viruses a free hand.

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

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

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

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

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

Margaret Halsey
The position of children as a group, in a commercial society, is not wholly advantageous. A commercial society urges its citizens to be responsible for things, but not for people. It is the unquestioned assumption of a mercantile culture that things need and deserve attention, but that people can take care of themselves.

Margaret Halsey
Tom, who always seems to be cheerful in the wrong places, says gaily that we're going down fighting. That, however, is one of those trick remarks men make to whip themselves up to a pitch of unwarranted optimism. Women, being more practical, do not fail to note that though it may be true that we're fighting, it's equally true that we're going down.

Margaret Halsey
The little entourage of friends and relatives whom she completely dominated was fond of saying, 'Becky would give you the shirt off her back.' And it was true. The only trouble was that she neglected to take it off first, and what you found on your back was not only Becky's shirt but Becky too.

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

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
Harry is walking with a cane these days.... What necessitated the cane was the fact of Young Cat scampering among Harry's ankles at a moment when Harry happened to be walking among them himself.

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

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

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
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
He went to work on my character with the unstoppable fury of Oliver Cromwell putting dents in the church plate.

Margaret Halsey
Children are an embarrassment to a business civilization. A business society needs children for the same reason that a nomadic or a pastoral society needs them — to perpetuate itself. Unfortunately, however, children are of no use to a business society until they have almost reached physical maturity.

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
It is a waste of time to ask more of people than they have to give.

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

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

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

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