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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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Margaret Halsey
Age: 86 †
Born: 1910
Born: February 13
Died: 1997
Died: February 4
Writer
Yonkers
New York State
Right
Business
Proving
Things
Helping
Sell
People
Doe
Sells
Firsts
Charity
Human
Prove
Humans
Race
Without
Start
Frowns
First
American
Frown

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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.
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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.
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I am living with a rising generation which talks like people coming out of ether.
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when I spoke of having a drink, it was a euphemism for having a whole flock of them.
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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.
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My knees could have been stirred with a spoon.
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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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This year's blasphemy is next year's liberating truth.
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Equality is an unconscious assumption, and if you feel you are treating someone as an equal, then you are not doing it.
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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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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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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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I was so embarrassed I could feel my nerves curling like bacon over a hot fire.
Margaret Halsey
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A person may be totally unimaginative and have the social vision of a mole, and we still call him a decent man.
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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The important thing about human beings is not what they do, but why they do it.
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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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.
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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.
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