In the modern world, we Americans are the old inhabitants. We first had political freedom, high industrial production, an economy of abundance.
Paul GoodmanThe 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 GoodmanWe 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 GoodmanThe problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one's own style and creatively adjust this to one's author.
Paul GoodmanAn 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