Quote

Civility, it is said, means obeying the unenforceable.

Ellen Goodman

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ellen Goodman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 11
Journalist
Newton
Massachusetts
Mean
Obeying
Civility
Means

More quotes by Ellen Goodman

Image
She goes in with a prejudice and comes out with a statistic.
Ellen Goodman
Image
I think most of us become self-critical as soon as we become self-conscious.
Ellen Goodman
Image
Maybe this year, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives not looking for flaws, but looking for potential.
Ellen Goodman
Image
This packrat has learned that what the next generation will value most is not what we owned, but the evidence of who we were and the tales of how we loved. In the end, it's the family stories that are worth the storage.
Ellen Goodman
Image
We each have a litany of holiday rituals and everyday habits that we hold on to, and we often greet radical innovation with the enthusiasm of a baby meeting a new sitter. We defend against it and - not always, but often enough - reject it. Slowly we adjust, but only if we have to.
Ellen Goodman
Image
In today's amphetamine world of news junkies, speed trumps thoughtfulness too often.
Ellen Goodman
Image
In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.
Ellen Goodman
Image
Maybe at 20 you can write well, but I don't think you could do what I do. Some things have to happen to you first.
Ellen Goodman
Image
My father used to say that if a man fools you once, he's a jerk. If he fools you twice, you're a jerk. Only he didn't use the word jerk.
Ellen Goodman
Image
The truth is that we can overhaul our surroundings, renovate our environment, talk a new game, join a new club, far more easily than we can change the way we respond emotionally. It is easier to change behavior than feelings about that behavior.
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
The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.
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
If there's a single message passed down from each generation of American parents to their children, it is a two-word line: Better Yourself. And if there's a temple of self-betterment in each town, it is the local school. We have worshipped there for some time.
Ellen Goodman
Image
Welfare is ... the victim of national compassion fatigue.
Ellen Goodman
Image
The things we hate about ourselves aren't more real than things we like about ourselves.
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
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
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
You can teach someone who cares to write columns, but you can’t teach someone who writes columns to care.
Ellen Goodman