Paul Goodman Quotes

For mankind, speech with a capital S is especially meaningful and committing, more than the content communicated. The outcry of the newborn and the sound of the bells are fraught with mystery more than the baby's woeful face or the venerable tower.

When 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.

In America you can say anything you want - as long as it doesn't have any effect.

In the modern world, we Americans are the old inhabitants. We first had political freedom, high industrial production, an economy of abundance.

Because of their historical theory of the "alienation of labor" (that the worker must become less and less in control of the work of his hands) the Marxist parties never fought for the man-worthy job itself.

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.

A successful revolution establishes a new community. A missed revolution makes irrelevant the community that persists. And a compromised revolution tends to shatter the community that was, without an adequate substitute.

Naturally, grown-up citizens are concerned about the beatniks and delinquents. ... The question is why the grownups do not, more soberly, draw the same conclusions as the youth. Or, since no doubt many people are quite clear about the connection that the structure of society that has becoming increasingly dominant in our country is disastrous to the growth of excellence and manliness, why don't more people speak up and say so?

Few great men would have got past personnel.

Comedy deflates the sense precisely so that the underlying lubricity and malice may bubble to the surface.

Low pay generally means harder work under worse conditions.

To translate, one must have a style of his own, for the translation will have no rhythm or nuance, which come from the process of artistically thinking through and molding the sentences; they cannot be reconstituted by piecemeal imitation. The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one’s own style and creatively adjust this to one’s author.

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

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.

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

Comedy is something that we can all share, no matter what language we speak or our background, it has the power to unite us all.

The important thing about travel in foreign lands is that it breaks the speech habits and makes you blab less, and breaks the habitual space-feeling because of different village plans and different landscapes. It is less important that there are different mores, for you counteract these with your own reaction-formations.

An 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"?

Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now!

The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one's own style and creatively adjust this to one's author.

A good teacher feels his way, looking for response.