Quote

Example is better than precept.

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
Better
Precept
Teaching
Example
Learning

More quotes by 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
it is a waste of time to ask more of people than they have to give.
Margaret Halsey
Image
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
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
Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife.
Margaret Halsey
Image
the conversation whipped gaily around the table like rags in a high wind.
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
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
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
Father's snoring grows to sound increasingly like a vacuum cleaner in heat.
Margaret Halsey
Image
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
Image
Some persons talk simply because they think sound is more manageable than silence.
Margaret Halsey
Image
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
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
the role of the Do-Gooder is not what actors call a fat part.
Margaret Halsey
Image
This year's blasphemy is next year's liberating truth.
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
I was so embarrassed I could feel my nerves curling like bacon over a hot fire.
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
The great disadvantage of being in a rat race is that it is humiliating. The competitors in a rat race are by definition rodents.
Margaret Halsey