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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
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Ellen Goodman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 11
Journalist
Newton
Massachusetts
Fool
Word
Use
Father
Didn
Jerk
Used
Foolishness
Men
Fools
Twice
More quotes by Ellen Goodman
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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She goes in with a prejudice and comes out with a statistic.
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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.
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In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.
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I think most of us become self-critical as soon as we become self-conscious.
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Welfare is ... the victim of national compassion fatigue.
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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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The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.
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My generation is the first in my species to have put fitness next to godliness on the scale of things. Keeping in shape has become the imperative of our middle age. The heaviest burden of guilt we carry into our forties is flab. Our sense of failure is measured by the grade on a stress test.
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It has begun to occur to me that life is a stage I'm going through.
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Forty is ... an age at which people have histories and options. At thirty, they had perhaps less history. At fifty, perhaps fewer options.
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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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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.
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The great myth of our work-intense era is 'quality time.' We believe we can make up for the loss of days or hours, especially with each other, by concentrated minutes. But ultimately there is no way to do one-minute mothering. There is no way to pay attention in a hurry.
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Traditions are the guideposts driven deep in our subconscious minds. The most powerful ones are those we can't even describe and aren't even aware of.
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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.
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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.
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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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Taboos are falling across our culture like dominoes. What was unspeakable yesterday dominates talk shows today.
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On television, journalists now routinely appear on talk-shows-with-an-attitude where they are encouraged to say what they think about something they may not have finished thinking about.
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