Best 88 quotes of Margaret Halsey on MyQuotes

Margaret Halsey

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    A 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.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    A lady getting a missing belt back from the cleaner couldn't have been more surprised and pleased.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    American 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.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    Americans (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.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    A person may be totally unimaginative and have the social vision of a mole, and we still call him a decent man.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    A 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.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    As 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.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    being in the middle class is a feeling as well as an income level.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    Bulldogs have been known to fall on their swords when confronted by my superior tenacity.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    children 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.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    Democracy makes many taxing demands on its practitioners, but suspension of the intelligence is not one of them.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    democracy produces both heroes and villains, but it differs from a fascist state in that it does not produce a hero who is a villain.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    Example is better than precept.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    Employed as I had been employing it, liquor is a fixative of old patterns.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    English 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.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    Englishwomen's shoes look as if they had been made by someone who had often heard shoes described, but had never seen any.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    Equality is an unconscious assumption, and if you feel you are treating someone as an equal, then you are not doing it.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    Every time I think I've touched bottom as far as boredom is concerned, new vistas of ennui open up.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    Folklore is a collection of ridiculous notions held by other people, but not by you and me.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    From 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.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    ... giving up alcohol or cigarettes is a lead-pipe cinch compared to the renunciation of complacence by a former (self-appointed) elite.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    He must have had a magnificent build before his stomach went in for a career of its own.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    How 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.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    I am living with a rising generation which talks like people coming out of ether.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    Identity is not found, the way Pharaoh's daughter found Moses in the bulrushes. Identity is built.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    If 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.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    If you embark on a project as magnificent in concept as the brotherhood of man, it is foolish not to anticipate difficulties of proportionate magnificence.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    In a business society, the emotional economy is an economy of scarcity.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    In a business society, the role of sex can be summed up in five pitiful little words. There is money in it.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    In practice, there is nothing especially dramatic in people getting along well together.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    in 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.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    In some circumstances, the refusal to be defeated is a refusal to be educated.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    in 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.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    it is a waste of time to ask more of people than they have to give.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    It 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.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    It 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.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    I was so embarrassed I could feel my nerves curling like bacon over a hot fire.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    I was well warned about English food, so it did not surprise me, but I do wonder sometimes, how they ever manage to prise it up long enough to get a plate under it.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    I would have felt more comfortable on a girder fifty floors above the street, catching white-hot rivets in a pail.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    Life 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.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    Listening to Britons dining out is like watching people play first-class tennis with imaginary balls.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    Money does not corrupt people. What corrupts people is lack of affection ... Money is simply the bandage which wounded people put over their wounds.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    My knees could have been stirred with a spoon.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    Not 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.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    One 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.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    Our 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.

  • By Anonym
    Margaret Halsey

    Passionately prejudiced people always turn out, under scrutiny, to be people who cannot get along on a footing of equality with anyone.