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instant opinion is an oxymoron. You don't get real opinions in an instant. You get reactions.

Ellen Goodman

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Ellen Goodman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 11
Journalist
Newton
Massachusetts
Opinions
Instant
Opinion
Real
Oxymoron
Reactions

More quotes by Ellen Goodman

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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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In today's amphetamine world of news junkies, speed trumps thoughtfulness too often.
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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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Kerry asks Americans to look at the evidence. Bush asks people to believe.
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Women have gained access to the institutions, but not enough power to overhaul them.
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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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[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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Parents remain our touchstones, fellow travelers, even after death. They are both missing and present.
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She goes in with a prejudice and comes out with a statistic.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Ellen Goodman
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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.
Ellen Goodman
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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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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
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Ultimately, time is all you have and the idea isn't to save it, but to savour it.
Ellen Goodman
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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.
Ellen Goodman
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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?
Ellen Goodman
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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
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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.
Ellen Goodman