Margaret Halsey Quotes

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

The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality

What I know about money, I learned the hard way – by having had it.

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

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.

The important thing about human beings is not what they do, but why they do it.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The English never smash in a face. They merely refrain from asking it to dinner.

The great disadvantage of being in a rat race is that it is humiliating. The competitors in a rat race are by definition rodents.

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.

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

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.

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.

Example is better than precept.

the role of the Do-Gooder is not what actors call a fat part.

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.

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.

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

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

the crucial disadvantage of aggression, competitiveness and skepticism as national characteristics is that these qualities cannot be turned off at five o'clock.

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

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.

Working with children is the easiest part of educating for democracy, because children are still undefeated and have no stake in being prejudiced.

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.

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

We know of our own knowledge that we are human beings, and, as such, imperfect. But we are bathed by the communications industry in a ceaseless tide of inhuman, impossible perfection.

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.

... the English think of an opinion as something which a decent person, if he has the misfortune to have one, does all he can to hide.

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

Life itself, however, flows and is sequential and punishes those who try to compartmentalize it.

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

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

the conversation whipped gaily around the table like rags in a high wind.

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.

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.

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.

prejudice will always exist. So will sickness and disease, but that scarcely seems sufficient reason for telling our medical scientists to put on their hats, close up their laboratories, and give the spirochetes, bacilli and viruses a free hand.

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.

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.

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.

Father's snoring grows to sound increasingly like a vacuum cleaner in heat.

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.

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

The real nature of an ethic is that it does not become an ethic unless and until it goes into action.

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.

The soup, thin and dark and utterly savorless, tasted as if it had been drained out of the umbrella stand.