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Listening to Britons dining out is like watching people play first-class tennis with imaginary balls.

Margaret Halsey

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Margaret Halsey
Age: 86 †
Born: 1910
Born: February 13
Died: 1997
Died: February 4
Writer
Yonkers
New York State
Class
Firsts
Britons
Play
Dining
First
Imaginary
Like
Tennis
People
Balls
Watching
Listening

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My knees could have been stirred with a spoon.
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I am living with a rising generation which talks like people coming out of ether.
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The stress laid on upward social mobility in the United States has tended to obscure the fact that there can be more than one kind of mobility and more than one direction in which it can go. There can be ethical mobility as well as financial, and it can go down as well as up.
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Reality is above all else a variable, and nobody is qualified to say that he or she knows exactly what it is. As a matter of fact, with a firm enough commitment, you can sometimes create a reality which did not exist before.
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The real nature of an ethic is that it does not become an ethic unless and until it goes into action.
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In a business society, the emotional economy is an economy of scarcity.
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you have to realize the white-supremacy boys are spoiled children. 'I want my way,' they scream, and like all spoiled children, they advance no justification for it except that it is their way.
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The business society is interested in training its citizens to make money, and, in this objective, it is often successful. Many of them do make money, and the ones who do not obligingly regard themselves as failures who have wasted the precious gift of life.
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The soup, thin and dark and utterly savorless, tasted as if it had been drained out of the umbrella stand.
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Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife.
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I was so embarrassed I could feel my nerves curling like bacon over a hot fire.
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We know of our own knowledge that we are human beings, and, as such, imperfect. But we are bathed by the communications industry in a ceaseless tide of inhuman, impossible perfection.
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Americans (I, I'm afraid, among them) go around carelessly assuming they're tolerant the way they go around carelessly saying, 'You ought to be in pictures.' But in the clinches, they turn out to be tolerant about as often as they turn out to be Clark Gable.
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The idea is that inside every human being, however unprepossessing, there is a glorious, talented, and overwhelmingly attractive personality. Nonsense. Inside each of us is a mess of unruly, primitive impulses, and these can sometimes, under the strenuous self-discipline and dedication of art, result in notable creativity.
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A business society, therefore, always has in its children a large group of individuals who cannot make money and who do not understand (or want to understand) the profit motive. In short, they are subversives.
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The great disadvantage of being in a rat race is that it is humiliating. The competitors in a rat race are by definition rodents.
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it is a waste of time to ask more of people than they have to give.
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Infants, I note with envy, are receptive to enjoyment in a degree not attained by adults this side of the new Jerusalem.
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The integration of the Negro into American society is one of the most exciting challenges to self-development and self-mastery that any nation of people ever faced.
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This year's blasphemy is next year's liberating truth.
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