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When I spoke of having a drink, it was a euphemism for having a whole flock of them.
Margaret Halsey
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The adjuration to 'Be realistic' merely means 'Agree with me, and think the way I think.'
Margaret Halsey
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Passionately prejudiced people always turn out, under scrutiny, to be people who cannot get along on a footing of equality with anyone.
Margaret Halsey
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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The important thing about human beings is not what they do, but why they do it.
Margaret Halsey
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Identity is not found, the way Pharaoh's daughter found Moses in the bulrushes. Identity is built.
Margaret Halsey
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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
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I suppose you can't have everything, though my instinctive response to this sentiment is always, 'Why not?'
Margaret Halsey
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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
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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
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Democracy makes many taxing demands on its practitioners, but suspension of the intelligence is not one of them.
Margaret Halsey
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In a business society, the emotional economy is an economy of scarcity.
Margaret Halsey
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I would have felt more comfortable on a girder fifty floors above the street, catching white-hot rivets in a pail.
Margaret Halsey
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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
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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
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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
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Infants, I note with envy, are receptive to enjoyment in a degree not attained by adults this side of the new Jerusalem.
Margaret Halsey
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Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Margaret Halsey
Born:
February 13, 1910
Died:
February 4, 1997
(aged 86)
Bio:
Margaret Halsey was an American writer who lived in the United Kingdom for a short time. Her first book With Malice Towards Some grew out of her experiences there. It was a witty and humorous bestseller, selling 600,000 copies.
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