the role of the Do-Gooder is not what actors call a fat part.
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 person may be totally unimaginative and have the social vision of a mole, and we still call him a decent man.
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.
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.
In a business society, the emotional economy is an economy of scarcity.
In a business society, the role of sex can be summed up in five pitiful little words. There is money in it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Father's snoring grows to sound increasingly like a vacuum cleaner in heat.
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 you embark on a project as magnificent in concept as the brotherhood of man, it is foolish not to anticipate difficulties of proportionate magnificence.
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.
This year's blasphemy is next year's liberating truth.
I would have felt more comfortable on a girder fifty floors above the street, catching white-hot rivets in a pail.
Infants, I note with envy, are receptive to enjoyment in a degree not attained by adults this side of the new Jerusalem.
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