Quote

The organization of American society is an interlocking system of semi-monopolies notoriously venal, an electorate notoriously unenlightened, misled by mass media notoriously phony.

Paul Goodman

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Paul Goodman
Age: 60 †
Born: 1911
Born: September 9
Died: 1972
Died: August 2
Lgbtiq+ Rights Activist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Political Scientist
Psychotherapist
Sociologist
Writer
the Village
Society
Electorate
American
Semi
Phony
Unenlightened
Monopoly
Venal
Organization
Interlocking
Mass
Monopolies
Media
Notoriously
System
Misled

More quotes by Paul Goodman

Image
The aim is not to give human beings real goals that warrant belief, and tasks to share in, but to re-establish belonging, although this kind of speech and thought is precisely calculated to avoid contact and so makes belonging impossible.
Paul Goodman
Image
Humankind is innocent, loving, and creative, you dig? It's the bureaucracies that create the evil, that make Honor and Community impossible, and it's the kids who really take it in the groin.
Paul Goodman
Image
We live increasingly in a system in which little direct attention is paid to the object, the function, the program, the task, the need but immense attention to the role, the procedure, prestige, and profit.
Paul Goodman
Image
The philosophic aim of education must be to get each one out of his isolated class and into the one humanity.
Paul Goodman
Image
An awkward consequence of heightening experience when one is inexperienced, of self-transcendence when one has not much world to lose, is that afterward one cannot be sure that one was somewhere or had newly experienced anything. If you aren't much in the world, how do you know you are out of this world?
Paul Goodman
Image
A successful revolution establishes a new community. A missed revolution makes irrelevant the community that persists. And a compromised revolution tends to shatter the community that was, without an adequate substitute.
Paul Goodman
Image
What the devil to do with the sentence Who the devil does he think he's fooling? You can't write Whom the devil- .
Paul Goodman
Image
It then becomes necessary to stop short and make a choice: Either/Or. Either one drifts with their absurd system of ideas, believing that this is the human community. Or one dissents totally from their system of ideas and stands as a lonely human being. (But luckily one notices that the others are in the same crisis and making the same choices.)
Paul Goodman
Image
The family is the American fascism.
Paul Goodman
Image
A well-known magazine asks a man how they should refer to him, as Psychologist X, as Author X? He suggests man of letters, for that is what he is, in the eighteenth-century meaning. But they can't buy that because the word doesn't exist in Time-style he cannot be that, and presumably the old function of letters cannot exist.
Paul Goodman
Image
Comedy deflates the sense precisely so that the underlying lubricity and malice may bubble to the surface.
Paul Goodman
Image
Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now!
Paul Goodman
Image
It is hard to grow up in a society in which one's important problems are treated as nonexistent. It is impossible to belong to it, it is hard to fight to change it.
Paul Goodman
Image
To want a job that exercises a man's capacities in an enterprise useful to society, is utopian anarcho-syndicalism it is labor invading the domain of management. No labor leader has entertained such a thought in our generation. Management has the sole prerogative to determine the products.
Paul Goodman
Image
Comedy is something that we can all share, no matter what language we speak or our background, it has the power to unite us all.
Paul Goodman
Image
In a milieu of resignation, where the young men think of society as a closed room in which there are no values but the rejected rat race, ... it is extremely hard to aim at objective truth or world culture. One's own products are likely to be personal or parochial.
Paul Goodman
Image
Few great men could pass personnel.
Paul Goodman
Image
The stultifying effect of the movies is not that the children see them but that their parents do, as if Hollywood provided a plausible adult recreation to grow up into.
Paul Goodman
Image
American society has tried so hard and so ably to defend the practice and theory of production for profit and not primarily for use that now it has succeeded in making its jobs and products profitable and useless.
Paul Goodman
Image
When there is official censorship it is a sign that speech is serious. Where there is none, it is pretty certain that the official spokesmen have all the loud-speakers.
Paul Goodman