Margaret Halsey - People Quotes

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Humility is not my forte, and whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually begin to seem mild, harmless, rather engaging little things, not at all like the staring defects in other people's characters.

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
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
The feelings, myths and prejudices about the Negro American which now seem so valid and real to some of our white contemporaries will take their place on the shelf along with the belief in witches and the notion that the earth is the center of the solar system. Nobody knows as yet whether the future [of the race situation] is hopeless. All we know is that it can be made hopeless, if enough people choose to consider it so.

Margaret Halsey
I am living with a rising generation which talks like people coming out of ether.

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

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 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
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
The integration of the Negro into American society is one of the most exciting challenges to self-development and self-mastery that any nation of people ever faced.

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

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

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
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
In the comparatively short time between my childhood and my daughter's, the business society has ceased urging people to produce and is now exerting its very considerable influence to get them to consume.

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
The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality. Reality is above all else a variable.... with a firm enough commitment, you can sometimes create a reality which did not exist before.

Margaret Halsey
The modification of prejudice takes a long time, and occurs as the result of a thousand things that happen to the prejudiced person — things he sees and hears and reads, people he talks to, and places he visits. Any given reformer must be content to take a small and obscure place in a chain of cumulative pressures.

Margaret Halsey
One of the less dismaying aspects of race relations in the United States is that their improvement is not a matter of a few people having a great deal of courage. It is a matter of a great many people having just a little courage.

Margaret Halsey