Margaret Halsey - Society Quotes

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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
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
In a business society, the role of sex can be summed up in five pitiful little words. There is money in it.

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
A business society, therefore, always has in its children a large group of individuals who cannot make money and who do not understand (or want to understand) the profit motive. In short, they are subversives.

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

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
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
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
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
Our Republic is not a pastoral, not a military, not an agricultural, not a nomadic, not a clerical, but a business civilization. Nor is there anything random, casual or accidental about the United States as a business society. It is thoroughly well integrated - organized from top to bottom for the maximum efficiency of commerce and industry, for the maximum efficiency of making money.

Margaret Halsey
A society struggles to fulfill its best instincts, even as an individual does, and generally makes just as hard going of it. The fight against prejudice is an inevitable process. Man has been warring against his own lower nature ever since he found out he had one, and the battle against intolerance is part of the same old struggle between good and evil that has preoccupied us ever since we gave up swinging from trees.

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