Quote

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

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Margaret Halsey
Age: 86 †
Born: 1910
Born: February 13
Died: 1997
Died: February 4
Writer
Yonkers
New York State
Come
Saying
Baffled
Men
Middle
Purse
Like
Looking
Purses
Lying
Breed
White
Male
Black
Males
Genus
Back
Couldn
Homo
Find
Somebody
Fetch

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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English life is seventh-eighths below the surface, like an iceberg, and living in England for a year constitutes merely an introduction to an introduction to an introduction to it.
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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.
Margaret Halsey
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Listening to Britons dining out is like watching people play first-class tennis with imaginary balls.
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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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In a business society, the emotional economy is an economy of scarcity.
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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.
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it is a waste of time to ask more of people than they have to give.
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Life itself, however, flows and is sequential and punishes those who try to compartmentalize it.
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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.
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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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Example is better than precept.
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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Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife.
Margaret Halsey
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The real nature of an ethic is that it does not become an ethic unless and until it goes into action.
Margaret Halsey
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This year's blasphemy is next year's liberating truth.
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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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.
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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