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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
People
Waste
Asks
Ability
Give
Giving
Time

More quotes by Margaret Halsey

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people coming away from a session with Dr. S. usually looked as if they had had fifty minutes on the anvil with an apprentice blacksmith.
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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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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Listening to Britons dining out is like watching people play first-class tennis with imaginary balls.
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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The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality
Margaret Halsey
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I was so embarrassed I could feel my nerves curling like bacon over a hot fire.
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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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.
Margaret Halsey
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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.
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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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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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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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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Some persons talk simply because they think sound is more manageable than silence.
Margaret Halsey
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This year's blasphemy is next year's liberating truth.
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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Infants, I note with envy, are receptive to enjoyment in a degree not attained by adults this side of the new Jerusalem.
Margaret Halsey
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In practice, there is nothing especially dramatic in people getting along well together.
Margaret Halsey
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My knees could have been stirred with a spoon.
Margaret Halsey