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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.

Ellen Goodman

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Ellen Goodman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 11
Journalist
Newton
Massachusetts
Self
Parent
Towns
Worshipped
Children
Lines
Message
Betterment
Time
Education
Messages
Temple
Word
Generation
Temples
American
Line
Locals
Two
Generations
Local
School
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Passed
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Town

More quotes by Ellen Goodman

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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.
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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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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?
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instant opinion is an oxymoron. You don't get real opinions in an instant. You get reactions.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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Welfare is ... the victim of national compassion fatigue.
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It has begun to occur to me that life is a stage I'm going through.
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In today's amphetamine world of news junkies, speed trumps thoughtfulness too often.
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[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.
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Statistically speaking, the Cheerful Early Riser is rejected more completely than a member of any other subculture, save those with boot odor.
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People have been writing premature obituaries on the women's movement since its beginning.
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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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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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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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Saving time, it seems, has a primacy that's too rarely examined.
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