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Example is better than precept.

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
Learning
Better
Precept
Teaching
Example

More quotes by 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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My knees could have been stirred with a spoon.
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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Whatever the rest of the world thinks of the English gentleman, the English lady regards him apprehensively as something between God and a goat and equally formidable on both scores.
Margaret Halsey
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Reality is above all else a variable, and nobody is qualified to say that he or she knows exactly what it is. As a matter of fact, with a firm enough commitment, you can sometimes create a reality which did not exist before.
Margaret Halsey
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This year's blasphemy is next year's liberating truth.
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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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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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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Equality is an unconscious assumption, and if you feel you are treating someone as an equal, then you are not doing it.
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 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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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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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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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.
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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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
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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.
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 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