Humorists are not humorous twenty-four hours a day. In fact, when you get to know them well, they are often not humorous at all. They tend to be hypersensitive, taut, neurotic creatures driven by God know what obscure compulsion to earn their living the hard way.
Margaret HalseyThere are dozens of ways of failing to make money. It is one thing to fail to make money because your single talent happens to be a flair amounting to genius for translating the plays of Aristophanes. It is quite another thing to fail to make money because you are black, or a child, or a woman.
Margaret Halseydemocracy produces both heroes and villains, but it differs from a fascist state in that it does not produce a hero who is a villain.
Margaret HalseyEnglish life is seventh-eighths below the surface, like an iceberg, and living in England for a year constitutes merely an introduction to an introduction to an introduction to it.
Margaret HalseyIf you embark on a project as magnificent in concept as the brotherhood of man, it is foolish not to anticipate difficulties of proportionate magnificence.
Margaret HalseyIf 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 Halseyin race relations, the single gesture and the single individual are more often than not doomed to failure. Only the group and the long-term, undeviating policy make much headway. ... if you want to make the world a better place, the first thing you must accept is the fact that you cannot transcend your limitations as an individual.
Margaret HalseyThe idea is that inside every human being, however unprepossessing, there is a glorious, talented, and overwhelmingly attractive personality. Nonsense. Inside each of us is a mess of unruly, primitive impulses, and these can sometimes, under the strenuous self-discipline and dedication of art, result in notable creativity.
Margaret HalseyThe stress laid on upward social mobility in the United States has tended to obscure the fact that there can be more than one kind of mobility and more than one direction in which it can go. There can be ethical mobility as well as financial, and it can go down as well as up.
Margaret HalseyAmericans (I, I'm afraid, among them) go around carelessly assuming they're tolerant the way they go around carelessly saying, 'You ought to be in pictures.' But in the clinches, they turn out to be tolerant about as often as they turn out to be Clark Gable.
Margaret HalseyA 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 HalseyThe 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 HalseyAmerican 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 Halseychildren 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 HalseyA person may be totally unimaginative and have the social vision of a mole, and we still call him a decent man.
Margaret HalseyThe people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality
Margaret HalseyHow close beneath the surface, even in the happiest family, is the chronic grievance! I sometimes think that tinderboxes are inert and powder kegs mere talcum compared to the explosive possibilities in the most commoplace domestic situation.
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 HalseyThe 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 HalseyIn practice, there is nothing especially dramatic in people getting along well together.
Margaret HalseyBulldogs have been known to fall on their swords when confronted by my superior tenacity.
Margaret HalseyA lady getting a missing belt back from the cleaner couldn't have been more surprised and pleased.
Margaret HalseyListening to Britons dining out is like watching people play first-class tennis with imaginary balls.
Margaret HalseyFolklore is a collection of ridiculous notions held by other people, but not by you and me.
Margaret Halsey... giving up alcohol or cigarettes is a lead-pipe cinch compared to the renunciation of complacence by a former (self-appointed) elite.
Margaret HalseyFrom a purely tourist standpoint, Oxford is overpowering, being so replete with architecture and history and anecdote that the visitor's mind feels dribbling and helpless, as with an over-large mouthful of nougat.
Margaret HalseyInfants, I note with envy, are receptive to enjoyment in a degree not attained by adults this side of the new Jerusalem.
Margaret Halseywhen I spoke of having a drink, it was a euphemism for having a whole flock of them.
Margaret HalseyWhenever 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 HalseyThe 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 HalseyEnglishwomen's shoes look as if they had been made by someone who had often heard shoes described, but had never seen any.
Margaret HalseyThe soup, thin and dark and utterly savorless, tasted as if it had been drained out of the umbrella stand.
Margaret Halseyyou have to realize the white-supremacy boys are spoiled children. 'I want my way,' they scream, and like all spoiled children, they advance no justification for it except that it is their way.
Margaret HalseyThe 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 HalseyWorking with children is the easiest part of educating for democracy, because children are still undefeated and have no stake in being prejudiced.
Margaret Halsey... it takes a great deal to produce ennui in an Englishman and if you do, he only takes it as convincing proof that you are well-bred.
Margaret HalseyPassionately prejudiced people always turn out, under scrutiny, to be people who cannot get along on a footing of equality with anyone.
Margaret HalseyThe 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