Quote

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.

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
Accepting
Relations
Much
Facts
Policy
Limitation
Undeviating
Long
Place
Single
Racism
Headway
Make
Cannot
Term
Relation
Transcend
World
Better
Race
Group
Gesture
Firsts
Fact
Accept
Limitations
First
Individual
Failure
Gestures
Must
Groups
Doomed
Thing
Often

More quotes by 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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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.
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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when I spoke of having a drink, it was a euphemism for having a whole flock of them.
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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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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.
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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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The important thing about human beings is not what they do, but why they do it.
Margaret Halsey
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Father's snoring grows to sound increasingly like a vacuum cleaner in heat.
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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Bulldogs have been known to fall on their swords when confronted by my superior tenacity.
Margaret Halsey
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It is possible to eat English piecrust, whatever you may think at first. The English eat it, and when they stand up and walk away, they are hardly bent over at all.
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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Infants, I note with envy, are receptive to enjoyment in a degree not attained by adults this side of the new Jerusalem.
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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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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the conversation whipped gaily around the table like rags in a high wind.
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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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