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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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Margaret Halsey
Age: 86 †
Born: 1910
Born: February 13
Died: 1997
Died: February 4
Writer
Yonkers
New York State
English
Merely
England
Eighths
Year
Iceberg
Living
Seventh
Years
Constitutes
Life
Introduction
Like
Surface

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My knees could have been stirred with a spoon.
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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.
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The important thing about human beings is not what they do, but why they do it.
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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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Passionately prejudiced people always turn out, under scrutiny, to be people who cannot get along on a footing of equality with anyone.
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it is a waste of time to ask more of people than they have to give.
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the role of the Do-Gooder is not what actors call a fat part.
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American business, while it does not frown on helping the human race, frowns on people who start right in helping the human race without first proving that they can sell things to it.
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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.
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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.
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Father's snoring grows to sound increasingly like a vacuum cleaner in heat.
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This year's blasphemy is next year's liberating truth.
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In a business society, the emotional economy is an economy of scarcity.
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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.
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Listening to Britons dining out is like watching people play first-class tennis with imaginary balls.
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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.
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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.
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Every time I think I've touched bottom as far as boredom is concerned, new vistas of ennui open up.
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