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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.

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
Nature
Become
Doe
Real
Ethic
Ethics
Unless
Goes
Action

More quotes by Margaret Halsey

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I'd like somebody to breed a male, genus homo, who could go and fetch a 12 x 8 black suède purse lying in the middle of a white bedspread and not come back looking baffled and saying he couldn't find it.
Margaret Halsey
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Life itself, however, flows and is sequential and punishes those who try to compartmentalize it.
Margaret Halsey
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in race relations, the single gesture and the single individual are more often than not doomed to failure. Only the group and the long-term, undeviating policy make much headway. ... if you want to make the world a better place, the first thing you must accept is the fact that you cannot transcend your limitations as an individual.
Margaret Halsey
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... it takes a great deal to produce ennui in an Englishman and if you do, he only takes it as convincing proof that you are well-bred.
Margaret Halsey
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The attitude of the English towards English history reminds one a good deal of the attitude of a Hollywood director towards love.
Margaret Halsey
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Some persons talk simply because they think sound is more manageable than silence.
Margaret Halsey
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Passionately prejudiced people always turn out, under scrutiny, to be people who cannot get along on a footing of equality with anyone.
Margaret Halsey
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Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife.
Margaret Halsey
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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.
Margaret Halsey
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it is a waste of time to ask more of people than they have to give.
Margaret Halsey
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The soup, thin and dark and utterly savorless, tasted as if it had been drained out of the umbrella stand.
Margaret Halsey
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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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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.
Margaret Halsey
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It is possible to eat English piecrust, whatever you may think at first. The English eat it, and when they stand up and walk away, they are hardly bent over at all.
Margaret Halsey
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From a purely tourist standpoint, Oxford is overpowering, being so replete with architecture and history and anecdote that the visitor's mind feels dribbling and helpless, as with an over-large mouthful of nougat.
Margaret Halsey
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the whole flavor and quality of the American representative government turns to ashes on the tongue, if one regards that government as simply an inferior and rather second-rate sort of corporation.
Margaret Halsey
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Humorists are not humorous twenty-four hours a day. In fact, when you get to know them well, they are often not humorous at all. They tend to be hypersensitive, taut, neurotic creatures driven by God know what obscure compulsion to earn their living the hard way.
Margaret Halsey
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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.
Margaret Halsey
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Example is better than precept.
Margaret Halsey
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the role of the Do-Gooder is not what actors call a fat part.
Margaret Halsey