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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
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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
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The real nature of an ethic is that it does not become an ethic unless and until it goes into action.
Margaret Halsey
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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
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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
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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
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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
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He went to work on my character with the unstoppable fury of Oliver Cromwell putting dents in the church plate.
Margaret Halsey
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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
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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
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It is a waste of time to ask more of people than they have to give.
Margaret Halsey
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Equality is an unconscious assumption, and if you feel you are treating someone as an equal, then you are not doing it.
Margaret Halsey
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Father's snoring grows to sound increasingly like a vacuum cleaner in heat.
Margaret Halsey
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You could, without arousing a storm of protest, have described us as rather a dull couple.
Margaret Halsey
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A person may be totally unimaginative and have the social vision of a mole, and we still call him a decent man.
Margaret Halsey
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Employed as I had been employing it, liquor is a fixative of old patterns.
Margaret Halsey
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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
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Being in the middle class is a feeling as well as an income level.
Margaret Halsey
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That's the trouble with hitching your wagon to a star — nothing happens when you say, 'Giddyap!'
Margaret Halsey
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I'd like somebody to breed a male, genus homo, who could go and fetch a 12" x 8" black suède purse lying in the middle of a white bedspread and not come back looking baffled and saying he couldn't find it.
Margaret Halsey
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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
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I am living with a rising generation which talks like people coming out of ether.
Margaret Halsey
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They... talk simply because they think sound is more manageable than silence.
Margaret Halsey
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It is impossible to betray another man's child — for whatever reason — without also betraying one's own. To do less than justice to another man's child, no matter who that man is, is to impair by that much the chances one's own children have for a life of meaning and purpose.
Margaret Halsey
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As one might expect in a society with mass communications and mass markets, the pseudo-ethic says that whatever is popular, is right. Where the traditional ethic derives its sanction from the superiority of a few, the pseudo-ethic derives its sanction from the inferiority of a great many. The pseudo-ethic is keyed, not to the spiritually gifted, but to the spiritually ungifted.
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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society
business
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english
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human
family
american
time
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life
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