Paul Goodman Quotes

59 Sourced Quotes

God works in many ways His wonders to perform. But He's not a skillful mechanic. A man drived over a cliff and "by a miracle" he only breaks his back. It would be more divine if he were a better driver and stayed on the road.

Paul Goodman
Because of their historical theory of the alienation of labor (that the worker must become less and less in control of the work of his hands) the Marxist parties never fought for the man-worthy job itself.

Paul Goodman
Where there is official censorship it is a sign that speech is serious. Where there is none, it is pretty certain that the official spokesmen have all the loud-speakers.

Paul Goodman
Naturally, grown-up citizens are concerned about the beatniks and delinquents. … The question is why the grownups do not, more soberly, draw the same conclusions as the youth. Or, since no doubt many people are quite clear about the connection that the structure of society that has becoming increasingly dominant in our country is disastrous to the growth of excellence and manliness, why don't more people speak up and say so?

Paul Goodman
The irony is that in our decades, the combination of rationalism, asceticism, and individualism (the so-called Protestant Ethic) has produced precisely the system of boondoggling, luxury-consumption, and status.

Paul Goodman
Children, if we observe them, seem normally to be abounding in simple faith. They rush headlong and there is ground underfoot. They ask for information and are told. They cry for something and get it or are refused, but they are not disregarded. They go exploring and see something interesting. It is the evil genius of our society to blight, more or less disastrously, this faith of its young as they grow up; for our society does not, for most, continue to provide enough worth-while opportunities and relevant duties, and soon it ceases to take them seriously as existing.

Paul Goodman
When a village ceases to be a community, it becomes oppressive in its narrow conformity. So one becomes an individual and migrates to the city. There, finding others likeminded, one re-establishes a village community. Nowadays only New Yorkers are yokels.

Paul Goodman
When we choose a man to beautify our towns, we do not automatically call on the major artists of the world. … We now lavishly praise Frank Lloyd Wright, but we never made any community use of him, though he longed for the chance.

Paul Goodman
During childhood, they played games with fierce intensity, giving themselves as sacrifice to the game, for play was the chief business of growth, finding and making themselves in the world. Now when they are too old merely to play, to what shall they give themselves with fierce intensity? They cannot play for recreation, since they have not been used up. … Since each activity is not interesting to begin with, its value does not deepen and it does not bear much repetition. … In these circumstances, the inevitable tendency is to raise the ante of the compulsive useless activity.

Paul Goodman
Let me formulate the artistic disposition as follows: it is reacting with one's ideal to the flaw in oneself and in the world, and somehow making that reaction formation solid enough in the medium so that it indeed becomes an improved bit of real world for others.

Paul Goodman
It is desperately hard these days for an average child to grow up to be a man, for our present organized system does not want men. They are not safe.

Paul Goodman
We live increasingly in a system in which little direct attention is paid to the object, the function, the program, the task, the need; but immense attention to the role, the procedure, prestige, and profit.

Paul Goodman
An awkward consequence of heightening experience when one is inexperienced, of self-transcendence when one has not much world to lose, is that afterward one cannot be sure that one was somewhere or had newly experienced anything. If you aren't much in the world, how do you know you are out of this world?

Paul Goodman
The aim is not to give human beings real goals that warrant belief, and tasks to share in, but to re-establish belonging, although this kind of speech and thought is precisely calculated to avoid contact and so makes belonging impossible.

Paul Goodman
The way in which our society does do honor to its indubitably great men … is a study in immunizing people against their virus. … They are the menagerie of Very Important People who exist only for ceremonial occasions. … The effectually prevents the two practical uses that we could make of them. We neither take seriously the simple, direct, fearless souls that they invariably are, whether humble or arrogant, to model ourselves after them because they make more sense as human beings; nor do we have recourse the them to help us when we have need of exceptional purity, magnanimity, profundity, or imagination.

Paul Goodman
It takes application, a fine sense of value, and a powerful community spirit for a people to have serious leisure, and this has not been the genius of the Americans.

Paul Goodman
A successful revolution establishes a new community. A missed revolution makes irrelevant the community that persists. And a compromised revolution tends to shatter the community that was, without an adequate substitute.

Paul Goodman
There is only one curriculum, no matter what the method of education: what is basic and universal in human experience and practice, the underlying structure of culture.

Paul Goodman
I move in a society so devoid of ordinary reality that I am continually stopping to teach good sense, to give support, to help out, as a young gangster might help an old lady across the street on his way to the stick-up.

Paul Goodman
The stultifying effect of the movies is not that the children see them but that their parents do, as if Hollywood provided a plausible adult recreation to grow up into.

Paul Goodman
For mankind, speech with a capital S is especially meaningful and committing, more than the content communicated. The outcry of the newborn and the sound of the bells are fraught with mystery more than the baby's woeful face or the venerable tower.

Paul Goodman
Be patient, do nothing, cease striving. We find this advice disheartening and therefore unfeasible because we forget it is our own inflexible activity that is structuring the reality. We think that if we do not hustle, nothing will happen and we will pine away. But the reality is probably in motion and after a while we might take part in that motion. But one can't know.

Paul Goodman
It is by losing himself in the objective, in inquiry, creation, and craft, that a man becomes something.

Paul Goodman
Comedy deflates the sense precisely so that the underlying lubricity and malice may bubble to the surface.

Paul Goodman
Anarchism is grounded in a rather definite social-psychological hypothesis: that forceful, graceful and intelligent behaviour occurs only when there is an uncoerced and direct response to the physical and social environment; that in most human affairs, more harm than good results from compulsion, top-down direction, bureaucratic planning, pre-ordained curricula, jails, conscription, states.

Paul Goodman
The organization of American society is an interlocking system of semi-monopolies notoriously venal, an electorate notoriously unenlightened, misled by mass media notoriously phony.

Paul Goodman
It rarely adds anything to say, "In my opinion" - not even modesty. Naturally a sentence is only your opinion; and you are not the Pope.

Paul Goodman
The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one's own style and creatively adjust this to one's author.

Paul Goodman
There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy... the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul... the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.

Paul Goodman
The important thing about travel in foreign lands is that it breaks the speech habits and makes you blab less, and breaks the habitual space-feeling because of different village plans and different landscapes. It is less important that there are different mores, for you counteract these with your own reaction-formations.

Paul Goodman