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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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Margaret Halsey
Age: 86 †
Born: 1910
Born: February 13
Died: 1997
Died: February 4
Writer
Yonkers
New York State
Turns
Assuming
Often
Pictures
Around
Americans
Way
Among
Gable
Afraid
Carelessly
Ought
Clark
Turn
Tolerant
Saying
Tolerance

More quotes by Margaret Halsey

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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.
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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.
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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.
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Bulldogs have been known to fall on their swords when confronted by my superior tenacity.
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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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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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the conversation whipped gaily around the table like rags in a high wind.
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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
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Example is better than precept.
Margaret Halsey
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Some persons talk simply because they think sound is more manageable than silence.
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
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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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when I spoke of having a drink, it was a euphemism for having a whole flock of them.
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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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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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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the role of the Do-Gooder is not what actors call a fat part.
Margaret Halsey
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I was so embarrassed I could feel my nerves curling like bacon over a hot fire.
Margaret Halsey
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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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Every time I think I've touched bottom as far as boredom is concerned, new vistas of ennui open up.
Margaret Halsey