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Civility, it is said, means obeying the unenforceable.

Ellen Goodman

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

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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.
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You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.
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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.
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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.
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I think most of us become self-critical as soon as we become self-conscious.
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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.
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She goes in with a prejudice and comes out with a statistic.
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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.
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People have been writing premature obituaries on the women's movement since its beginning.
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What he labels sexual, she labels harassment.
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Ultimately, time is all you have and the idea isn't to save it, but to savour it.
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You can teach someone who cares to write columns, but you can’t teach someone who writes columns to care.
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I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box.
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The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.
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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?
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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?
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