Identity is not found, the way Pharaoh's daughter found Moses in the bulrushes. Identity is built.
Margaret HalseyIt is possible to eat English piecrust, whatever you may think at first. The English eat it, and when they stand up and walk away, they are hardly bent over at all.
Margaret Halseythe American family is failing in its job of turning out stable human beings. ... It is failing because Americans do not dare to cultivate in themselves those characteristics which would make family life creative and rewarding. To do so, would ruin them financially.
Margaret HalseyI'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 Halseythe crucial disadvantage of aggression, competitiveness and skepticism as national characteristics is that these qualities cannot be turned off at five o'clock.
Margaret HalseyEquality is an unconscious assumption, and if you feel you are treating someone as an equal, then you are not doing it.
Margaret HalseyOur 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 HalseyHe must have had a magnificent build before his stomach went in for a career of its own.
Margaret HalseyThere are ... other business societies - England, Holland, Belgium and France, for instance. But ours [the United States] is the only culture now extant in which business so completely dominates the national scene that sports, crime, sex, death, philanthropy and Easter Sunday are money-making propositions.
Margaret HalseyThe attitude of the English towards English history reminds one a good deal of the attitude of a Hollywood director towards love.
Margaret HalseyIt 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 HalseySuccess does not implant bad characteristics in people. It merely steps up the growth rate of the bad characteristics they already had.
Margaret HalseyA 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 HalseyI would have felt more comfortable on a girder fifty floors above the street, catching white-hot rivets in a pail.
Margaret HalseyLiving in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife.
Margaret Halseyin 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 HalseyNot being one to calculate or look ahead, I had not stopped to think, when boys started paying attention to me, that the cup might be dashed from my lips, though experience should have taught me that dashing cups from lips was the way Victorian parents got most of their exercise.
Margaret HalseyOne 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... the English think of an opinion as something which a decent person, if he has the misfortune to have one, does all he can to hide.
Margaret HalseyThe great disadvantage of being in a rat race is that it is humiliating. The competitors in a rat race are by definition rodents.
Margaret HalseyThe real nature of an ethic is that it does not become an ethic unless and until it goes into action.
Margaret HalseyThe only way not to worry about the race problem is to be doing something about it yourself. When you are, natural human vanity makes you feel that now the thing is in good hands.
Margaret HalseyAs 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 HalseyWe know of our own knowledge that we are human beings, and, as such, imperfect. But we are bathed by the communications industry in a ceaseless tide of inhuman, impossible perfection.
Margaret HalseyDemocracy makes many taxing demands on its practitioners, but suspension of the intelligence is not one of them.
Margaret HalseyIn a business society, the role of sex can be summed up in five pitiful little words. There is money in it.
Margaret HalseyReality is above all else a variable, and nobody is qualified to say that he or she knows exactly what it is. As a matter of fact, with a firm enough commitment, you can sometimes create a reality which did not exist before.
Margaret HalseyLife 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 Halseythe 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 Halseyprejudice will always exist. So will sickness and disease, but that scarcely seems sufficient reason for telling our medical scientists to put on their hats, close up their laboratories, and give the spirochetes, bacilli and viruses a free hand.
Margaret HalseyLife itself, however, flows and is sequential and punishes those who try to compartmentalize it.
Margaret HalseyThe 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 HalseyThe only men who can turn my blood stream into a condition resembling heavy surf are good-looking heels with characters as intricately unpleasant as the sewers of Paris. With decent and honorable gents, I come all over Platonic. Was ever a woman so perverse and wrongheaded?
Margaret Halsey