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I think most of us become self-critical as soon as we become self-conscious.

Ellen Goodman

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Ellen Goodman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: April 11
Journalist
Newton
Massachusetts
Thinking
Critical
Soon
Conscious
Become
Self
Think

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In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.
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Welfare is ... the victim of national compassion fatigue.
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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 regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box.
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In today's amphetamine world of news junkies, speed trumps thoughtfulness too often.
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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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Kerry asks Americans to look at the evidence. Bush asks people to believe.
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The things we hate about ourselves aren't more real than things we like about ourselves.
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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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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 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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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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Maybe this year, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives not looking for flaws, but looking for potential.
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I rewrite a great deal. I'm always fiddling, always changing something. I'll write a few words - then I'll change them. I add. I subtract. I work and fiddle and keep working and fiddling, and I only stop at the deadline.
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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.
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?
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Taboos are falling across our culture like dominoes. What was unspeakable yesterday dominates talk shows today.
Ellen Goodman
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You can believe in women's rights without believing that every woman is right.
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The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.
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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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