Quote

I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference.

Ellen Goodman

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ellen Goodman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 11
Journalist
Newton
Massachusetts
People
Small
Goodman
History
Impressed
Inspirational
Convinced
Change
Especially
Make
Motivational
Never
Difference
Life
Differences
Heroics
World
Struggle
Awed

More quotes by Ellen Goodman

Image
There's a trick to the Graceful Exit. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship is over - and to let go. It means leaving what's over without denying its validity or its past importance in our lives.
Ellen Goodman
Image
Taboos are falling across our culture like dominoes. What was unspeakable yesterday dominates talk shows today.
Ellen Goodman
Image
I rewrite a great deal. I'm always fiddling, always changing something. I'll write a few words - then I'll change them. I add. I subtract. I work and fiddle and keep working and fiddling, and I only stop at the deadline.
Ellen Goodman
Image
[E]very time you think the entertainment moguls have hit rock bottom, they reach for the jackhammer and rat-a-tat-tat a little deeper.
Ellen Goodman
Image
I think most of us become self-critical as soon as we become self-conscious.
Ellen Goodman
Image
Ultimately, time is all you have and the idea isn't to save it, but to savour it.
Ellen Goodman
Image
We may never know why Joe Ellis fabricated a heroic past. But we know that the life he embellished has deeply diminished the life he'd earned.
Ellen Goodman
Image
we have made an extraordinary transition. From moral absolutes to moral relativism. ... Moral problems become medical ones and yesterday's sinners become today's patients.
Ellen Goodman
Image
Alternative Lifestyles, the emotional fly-drive packages of our times, come equipped with a set of clothes, a choice of authors, a limited menu of sports and a discount coupon book of clichés.
Ellen Goodman
Image
The things we hate about ourselves aren't more real than things we like about ourselves.
Ellen Goodman
Image
Once upon a time we were just plain people. But that was before we began having relationships with mechanical systems. Get involved with a machine and sooner or later you are reduced to a factor.
Ellen Goodman
Image
I wonder whether our adoption of Shrink-ese as a second language, the move from religious phrases of judgment to secular words of acceptance, hasn't also produced a moral lobotomy. In the reluctance, the aversion to being judgmental, are we disabled from making any judgments at all?
Ellen Goodman
Image
You can teach someone who cares to write columns, but you can’t teach someone who writes columns to care.
Ellen Goodman
Image
When you live alone, you can be sure that the person who squeezed the toothpaste tube in the middle wasn't committing a hostile act.
Ellen Goodman
Image
In the biotech revolution, it is the human body, not iron or steel or plastic, that's at the source. Are the biocapitalists going to be allowed to dig without consent into our genetic codes, then market them?
Ellen Goodman
Image
People have been writing premature obituaries on the women's movement since its beginning.
Ellen Goodman
Image
It has begun to occur to me that life is a stage I'm going through.
Ellen Goodman
Image
Without even knowing it, we are assaulted by a high note of urgency all the time. We end up pacing ourselves to the city rhythm whether or not it's our own. In time we even grow hard of hearing to the rest of the world. Like a violinist stuck next to the timpani, we may lose the ability to hear our own instrument.
Ellen Goodman
Image
I vote because it's what small-d democracy is about. Because there are places where people fight for generations and stand for hours to cast a ballot knowing what we ought to remember: that it makes a difference. Not always a big difference. Not always an immediate difference. But a difference.
Ellen Goodman
Image
We criticize mothers for closeness. We criticize fathers for distance. How many of us have expected less from our fathers and appreciated what they gave us more? How many of us always let them off the hook?
Ellen Goodman