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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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Margaret Halsey
Age: 86 †
Born: 1910
Born: February 13
Died: 1997
Died: February 4
Writer
Yonkers
New York State
Waste
Asks
Ability
Give
Giving
Time
People

More quotes by Margaret Halsey

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This year's blasphemy is next year's liberating truth.
Margaret Halsey
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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.
Margaret Halsey
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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.
Margaret Halsey
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Not being one to calculate or look ahead, I had not stopped to think, when boys started paying attention to me, that the cup might be dashed from my lips, though experience should have taught me that dashing cups from lips was the way Victorian parents got most of their exercise.
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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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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... the English think of an opinion as something which a decent person, if he has the misfortune to have one, does all he can to hide.
Margaret Halsey
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the role of the Do-Gooder is not what actors call a fat part.
Margaret Halsey
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American business, while it does not frown on helping the human race, frowns on people who start right in helping the human race without first proving that they can sell things to it.
Margaret Halsey
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Bulldogs have been known to fall on their swords when confronted by my superior tenacity.
Margaret Halsey
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In a business society, the role of sex can be summed up in five pitiful little words. There is money in it.
Margaret Halsey
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The only way not to worry about the race problem is to be doing something about it yourself. When you are, natural human vanity makes you feel that now the thing is in good hands.
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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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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the conversation whipped gaily around the table like rags in a high wind.
Margaret Halsey
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The important thing about human beings is not what they do, but why they do it.
Margaret Halsey
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Father's snoring grows to sound increasingly like a vacuum cleaner in heat.
Margaret Halsey
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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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Life itself, however, flows and is sequential and punishes those who try to compartmentalize it.
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