Paul Goodman Quotes

59 Sourced Quotes

To consider powerful souls as if they were a useful public resource is quite foreign to our customs. In a small sense it is undemocratic, for it assumes that some people really know better in a way that must seem arbitrary to most. In a large sense it is certainly democratic, in that it makes the great man serve as a man.

Paul Goodman
When the sciences are supreme, average people lose their feeling of causality.

Paul Goodman
It is a major defect of our present organized system and the economy of abundance that, without providing great goals, it has taken away some of the important real necessities, leaving people with nothing to do.
The void is soon filled. Behavior like going into debt on the installment plan, gives an artificial but then real necessity, something to do, paying up. This is the Rat Race, but I doubt that it would be run if people did not need its justifying necessity, for the commodities themselves are not that attractive.

Paul Goodman
It then becomes necessary to stop short and make a choice: Either/Or. Either one drifts with their absurd system of ideas, believing that this is the human community. Or one dissents totally from their system of ideas and stands as a lonely human being. (But luckily one notices that the others are in the same crisis and making the same choices.)

Paul Goodman
Nothing could be more stupid than for the communications commission to give to people who handle the means of broadcasting the inventing of what to broadcast, and then, disturbed at the poor quality, to worry about censorship.

Paul Goodman
We certainly have at present the dismal situation that the most imaginative men are directed by a group, the top managers, who are among the least.

Paul Goodman
Literary critics like Lionel Trilling … demand that our novels illuminate the manners and morals of prevailing society. Professor Trilling is right, because otherwise what use are they for us? But he is wrong-headed, because he does not see that the burden of proof is not on the artist but on our society. If such convenient criticism of prevalent life does not get to be written, it is likely that the prevailing society is not inspiring enough; its humanity is not great enough, it does not have enough future, to be worth the novelist's trouble.

Paul Goodman
In our truly remarkable an unexampled civil peace, where there are rarely fist fights; where no one is born, is gravely ill, or dies; where meat is eaten but no one sees an animal slaughtered; where scores of millions of cars, trains, elevators, and airplanes go their scheduled way and there is rarely a crash; where an immense production proceeds in orderly efficiency and the shelves are duly clears—and nevertheless none of this come to joy or tragic grief or any other final good—it is not surprising if there are explosions.

Paul Goodman
Can they solve the problem of the nagging unanswerable question of justification and vocation? Their principle is the traditional one of classical mysticism: by experiences (kicks) to transcend the nagged and nagging self altogether and get out of one's skin, to where no questions are asked—nor is there any articulate speech to ask them in.

Paul Goodman
Boys today hardly aspire to immortal honor, the honor of self-fulfilling achievement. It is highly disapproved of in the code of the organized system. Instead, they devote themselves to protecting their personal honor against insults; and conversely they dream of the transient notoriety which will prove that they are somebody, which they doubt. The personal honor that they protect does not include truthfulness, honesty, public usefulness, integrity, independence, or virtues like that. A reputation for these things does not win respect, it has no publicity value; it's believed to be phony anyway, and if it's true, the person is hard to get along with.

Paul Goodman
Their religion is unfeasible, for one cannot richly meet the glancing present … without long discipleship and secure sustenance.

Paul Goodman
We define boredom as the pain a person feels when he's doing nothing or something irrelevant, instead of something he wants to do but won't, can't, or doesn't dare. Boredom is acute when he knows the other thing and inhibits his action, e. g., out of politeness, embarrassment, fear of punishment or shame. Boredom is chronic if he has repressed the thought of it and no longer is aware of it. A large part of stupidity is just the chronic boredom, for a person can't learn, or be intelligent about, what he's not interested in, when his repressed thoughts are elsewhere. (Another large part of stupidity is stubbornness, unconsciously saying, I won't. You can't make me.)

Paul Goodman
The brightness of the 15 percent might or might not indicate a profound feeling for the causes of things; it is largely verbal and symbol-manipulating, and is almost certainly partly an obsessional device not to know and touch risky matter, just as Freud long ago pointed out that the nagging questions of small children are a substitute for asking the forbidden questions.

Paul Goodman
The ideal of having a real job that you risk your soul in and make good or be damned, belongs to the heroic age of capitalist enterprise, imbued with self-righteous beliefs about hard work, thrift, and public morals. Such an ideal might still have been mentioned in public fifty years ago; in our era of risk-insured semimonopolies and advertised vices it would be met with a ghastly stillness.

Paul Goodman
American society has tried so hard and so ably to defend the practice and theory of production for profit and not primarily for use that now it has succeeded in making its jobs and products profitable and useless.

Paul Goodman
Freud pointed out, in his Problem of Lay Analysis, that it is extremely unlikely that a young man who would throw the best years of his life into the cloistered drudgery of getting an M. D. degree, could possibly make a good psychoanalyst; so he preferred to look for young analysts among the writers, the lawyers, the mothers of families, those who had chosen human contact. But in their economic wisdom, the Psychoanalytic Institute of Vienna (and New York) overruled him.

Paul Goodman
When the Devil quotes Scriptures, it's not, really, to deceive, but simply that the masses are so ignorant of theology that somebody has to teach them the elementary texts before he can seduce them.

Paul Goodman
We do not behave as if we believed that the affairs of our world were significant enough for the intervention of great men.

Paul Goodman
Not to teach the whole curriculum is to give up on the whole man.

Paul Goodman
Thwarted, or starved, in the important objects proper to young capacities, the boys and young men naturally find or invent deviant objects for themselves. … Their choices and inventions are rarely charming, usually stupid, and often disastrous; we cannot expect average kids to deviate with genius. But on the other hand, the young men who conform to the dominant society become for the most part apathetic, disappointed, cynical and wasted.

Paul Goodman
The philosophical aim of education must be to get each one out of his isolated class and into the one humanity.

Paul Goodman
The ancient dream of man to fly among the stars and go through the could and look down on the lands and seas has degenerated in its realization to the socialized and apathetic behavior of passengers who hardly look out the windows.

Paul Goodman
To want a job that exercises a man's capacities in an enterprise useful to society, is utopian anarcho-syndicalism; it is labor invading the domain of management. No labor leader has entertained such a thought in our generation. Management has the sole prerogative to determine the products.

Paul Goodman
In a milieu of resignation, where the young men think of society as a closed room in which there are no values but the rejected rat race, … it is extremely hard to aim at objective truth or world culture. One's own products are likely to be personal or parochial.

Paul Goodman
The chessboard was reflected in her eyes.
Eager to beat her, first I looked on her eyes.
I made a Spanish move, an ancient one,
and broken was the red rank of pawns in her light eyes.
Then I lowered my eyes from that chessboard
and Love said, "Oh not her; conquer the king if you can."

Paul Goodman
A well-known magazine asks a man how they should refer to him, as Psychologist X, as Author X? He suggests man of letters, for that is what he is, in the eighteenth-century meaning. But they can't buy that because the word doesn't exist in Time-style; he cannot be that, and presumably the old function of letters cannot exist.

Paul Goodman
It is hard to grow up in a society in which one's important problems are treated as nonexistent. It is impossible to belong to it, it is hard to fight to change it.

Paul Goodman
We do not need to be able to say what human nature is in order to be able to say that some training is against human nature.

Paul Goodman
The paucity of its vocabulary and syntax is for the Beats essentially expressive of withdrawal from the standard civilization and its learning. On the other hand this paucity gives, instead of opportunities for thought and problem solving, considerable satisfaction in the act and energy of speaking itself, as is true of any simple adopted language, such as pig Latin. But this can have disadvantages. One learns to one's frustration that they regard talk as an end in itself, as a means of self-expression, without subject matter. In a Beat group it is bad form to assert or deny a proposition as true or false, probable or improbable, or to want to explore its meaning.

Paul Goodman