Margaret Halsey
What I know about money, I learned the hard way – by having had it.Collection: Way
The important thing about human beings is not what they do, but why they do it.Collection: Motivation
Reality is above all else a variable, and nobody is qualified to say that he or she knows exactly what it is. As a matter of fact, with a firm enough commitment, you can sometimes create a reality which did not exist before.Collection: Commitment
The 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.Collection: Art
Equality is an unconscious assumption, and if you feel you are treating someone as an equal, then you are not doing it.Collection: Equality
Democracy makes many taxing demands on its practitioners, but suspension of the intelligence is not one of them.Collection: Democracy
I'd like somebody to breed a male, genus homo, who could go and fetch a 12" x 8" black suède purse lying in the middle of a white bedspread and not come back looking baffled and saying he couldn't find it.Collection: Lying
Folklore is a collection of ridiculous notions held by other people, but not by you and me.Collection: People
Success does not implant bad characteristics in people. It merely steps up the growth rate of the bad characteristics they already had.Collection: People
There 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.Collection: Children
The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of realityCollection: Mean
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.Collection: Tolerance
Every time I think I've touched bottom as far as boredom is concerned, new vistas of ennui open up.Collection: Thinking
Whenever 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.Collection: Character
... 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.Collection: Proof
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.Collection: Race
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.Collection: Race
the crucial disadvantage of aggression, competitiveness and skepticism as national characteristics is that these qualities cannot be turned off at five o'clock.Collection: Competition
Identity is not found, the way Pharaoh's daughter found Moses in the bulrushes. Identity is built.Collection: Daughter
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.Collection: Communication
The 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.Collection: Business
The 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.Collection: Children
In practice, there is nothing especially dramatic in people getting along well together.Collection: Peace
Money does not corrupt people. What corrupts people is lack of affection ... Money is simply the bandage which wounded people put over their wounds.Collection: People
The only men who can turn my blood stream into a condition resembling heavy surf are good-looking heels with characters as intricately unpleasant as the sewers of Paris. With decent and honorable gents, I come all over Platonic. Was ever a woman so perverse and wrongheaded?Collection: Character
... 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.Collection: Two
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.Collection: Exercise
... giving up alcohol or cigarettes is a lead-pipe cinch compared to the renunciation of complacence by a former (self-appointed) elite.Collection: Giving Up
Life itself, however, flows and is sequential and punishes those who try to compartmentalize it.Collection: Trying
Working with children is the easiest part of educating for democracy, because children are still undefeated and have no stake in being prejudiced.Collection: Children
Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife.Collection: Funny
There are ... other business societies - England, Holland, Belgium and France, for instance. But ours [the United States] is the only culture now extant in which business so completely dominates the national scene that sports, crime, sex, death, philanthropy and Easter Sunday are money-making propositions.Collection: Sports
In a business society, the emotional economy is an economy of scarcity.Collection: Business
In a business society, the role of sex can be summed up in five pitiful little words. There is money in it.Collection: Sex
The modification of prejudice takes a long time, and occurs as the result of a thousand things that happen to the prejudiced person - things he sees and hears and reads, people he talks to, and places he visits. Any given reformer must be content to take a small and obscure place in a chain of cumulative pressures.Collection: Long
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.Collection: Long
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.Collection: Education
Bulldogs have been known to fall on their swords when confronted by my superior tenacity.Collection: Funny
The only way not to worry about the race problem is to be doing something about it yourself. When you are, natural human vanity makes you feel that now the thing is in good hands.Collection: Vanity
you 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.Collection: Children
Father's snoring grows to sound increasingly like a vacuum cleaner in heat.Collection: Father
I am living with a rising generation which talks like people coming out of ether.Collection: People
Listening to Britons dining out is like watching people play first-class tennis with imaginary balls.Collection: Class
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.Collection: Men
I would have felt more comfortable on a girder fifty floors above the street, catching white-hot rivets in a pail.Collection: White
when I spoke of having a drink, it was a euphemism for having a whole flock of them.Collection: Drinking
Employed as I had been employing it, liquor is a fixative of old patterns.Collection: Patterns
it is a waste of time to ask more of people than they have to give.Collection: People
The real nature of an ethic is that it does not become an ethic unless and until it goes into action.Collection: Real
Whatever the rest of the world thinks of the English gentleman, the English lady regards him apprehensively as something between God and a goat and equally formidable on both scores.Collection: Thinking