Paul Goodman quotes
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“Humankind is innocent, loving, and creative, you dig? It's the bureaucracies that create the evil, that make Honor and Community impossible, and it's the kids who really take it in the groin.”
-- Paul Goodman -
“It then becomes necessary to stop short and make a choice: Either/Or. Either one drifts with their absurd system of ideas, believing that this is the human community. Or one dissents totally from their system of ideas and stands as a lonely human being. (But luckily one notices that the others are in the same crisis and making the same choices.)”
-- Paul Goodman -
“Wrong' training can be a very innocent thing. Consider a father who allows his child to read good books. That child may soon cease to watch television or go to the movies, nor will he eventually read Book-of-the-Month Club selections, because they are ludicrous and dull. As a young man, then, he will effectually be excluded from all of Madison Avenue and Hollywood and most of publishing, because what moves him or what he creates is quite irrelevant to what is going on: it is too fine. His father has brought him up as a dodo.”
-- Paul Goodman -
“No good has ever come from feeling guilty, neither intelligence, policy, nor compassion. The guilty do not pay attention to the object but only to themselves, and not even to their own interests, which might make sense, but to their anxieties.”
-- Paul GoodmanSource : Paul Goodman (1977). “Nature Heals”
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“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!”
-- Paul GoodmanSource : "Commonist Tendencies: Mutual Aid Beyond Communism". Book by Jeff Shantz, July 23, 2013.
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“The philosophic aim of education must be to get each one out of his isolated class and into the one humanity.”
-- Paul Goodman -
“It is by losing himself in the objective, in inquiry, creation, and craft, that a man becomes something.”
-- Paul GoodmanSource : Paul Goodman (1962). “The Community of Scholars, 1962”
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“In America you can say anything you want - as long as it doesn't have any effect.”
-- Paul Goodman -
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“The 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 GoodmanSource : Growing Up Absurd" by Paul Goodman, (p. 144), 1956.
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“The issue is not whether people are 'good enough' for a particular type of society; rather it is a matter of developing the kind of social institutions that are most conducive to expanding the potentialities we have for intelligence, grace, sociability and freedom.”
-- Paul Goodman -
“Anarchism is grounded in a rather definite social-psychological hypothesis: that forceful, graceful and intelligent behaviour occurs only when there is an uncoerced and direct response to the physical and social environment; that in most human affairs, more harm than good results from compulsion, top-down direction, bureaucratic planning, pre-ordained curricula, jails, conscription, states.”
-- Paul GoodmanSource : Paul Goodman (1967). “Like a conquered province: the moral ambiguity of America”
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“We live increasingly in a system in which little direct attention is paid to the object, the function, the program, the task, the need; but immense attention to the role, the procedure, prestige, and profit.”
-- Paul GoodmanSource : Paul Goodman (2011). “Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society”, p.8, New York Review of Books
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“We certainly have at present the dismal situation that the most imaginative men are directed by a group, the top managers, who are among the least.”
-- Paul GoodmanSource : Paul Goodman (2011). “Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society”, p.89, New York Review of Books
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“Not to teach the whole curriculum is to give up on the whole man.”
-- Paul GoodmanSource : Paul Goodman (2011). “Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society”, p.80, New York Review of Books
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“A good teacher feels his way, looking for response.”
-- Paul GoodmanSource : Paul Goodman (2011). “Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society”, p.16, New York Review of Books
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“My own view, for what it's worth, is that sexuality is lovely, there cannot be too much of it, it is self-limiting if it is satisfactory, and satisfaction diminishes tension and clears the mind for attention and learning.”
-- Paul Goodman -
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“Freud 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 GoodmanSource : Growing Up Absurd" by Paul Goodman, (pp. 145-146), 1956.
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“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.”
-- Paul Goodman -
“Low pay generally means harder work under worse conditions.”
-- Paul GoodmanSource : Paul Goodman (2011). “Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society”, p.57, New York Review of Books
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“It is by losing ourselves in inquiry, creation & craft that we become something. Civilization is a continual gift of spirit: inventions, discoveries, insight, art. We are citizens, as Socrates would have said, & we have it available as our own.”
-- Paul Goodman -
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“The family is the American fascism.”
-- Paul GoodmanSource : "Family Fever" by Jeff Riggenbach, reason.com. June/July 1984.
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“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.”
-- Paul Goodman -
“Be patient, do nothing, cease striving. We find this advice disheartening and therefore unfeasible because we forget it is our own inflexible activity that is structuring the reality. We think that if we do not hustle, nothing will happen and we will pine away. But the reality is probably in motion and after a while we might take part in that motion. But one can't know.”
-- Paul GoodmanSource : Paul Goodman (1966). “Five years”
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“Few great men would have got past personnel.”
-- Paul Goodman -
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“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?”
-- Paul GoodmanSource : Growing Up Absurd" by Paul Goodman, (p. 10), 1956.
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“In the modern world, we Americans are the old inhabitants. We first had political freedom, high industrial production, an economy of abundance.”
-- Paul GoodmanSource : Paul Goodman (2011). “Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society”, p.127, New York Review of Books
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“There 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 Goodman
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