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 GoodmanWhen 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 GoodmanWhat the devil to do with the sentence "Who the devil does he think he's fooling?" You can't write "Whom the devil- ".
Paul GoodmanThe 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 GoodmanThere is such a thing as food and such a thing as poison. But the damage done by those who pass off poison as food is far less than that done by those who generation after generation convince people that food is poison.
Paul GoodmanFreud 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