Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Margaret Halsey

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Margaret Halsey
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I am living with a rising generation which talks like people coming out of ether.
Margaret Halsey
Image
... 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
Image
Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife.
Margaret Halsey
Image
My knees could have been stirred with a spoon.
Margaret Halsey
Image
... 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
Image
A person may be totally unimaginative and have the social vision of a mole, and we still call him a decent man.
Margaret Halsey
Image
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
Image
In a business society, the role of sex can be summed up in five pitiful little words. There is money in it.
Margaret Halsey
Image
Bulldogs have been known to fall on their swords when confronted by my superior tenacity.
Margaret Halsey
Image
The important thing about human beings is not what they do, but why they do it.
Margaret Halsey
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Passionately prejudiced people always turn out, under scrutiny, to be people who cannot get along on a footing of equality with anyone.
Margaret Halsey
Image
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