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Comedy deflates the sense precisely so that the underlying lubricity and malice may bubble to the surface.

Paul Goodman

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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
Bubbles
Precisely
Surface
Comedy
Sense
May
Underlying
Bubble
Malice

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The family is the American fascism.
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It rarely adds anything to say, In my opinion - not even modesty. Naturally a sentence is only your opinion and you are not the Pope.
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We certainly have at present the dismal situation that the most imaginative men are directed by a group, the top managers, who are among the least.
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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!
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It is by losing himself in the objective, in inquiry, creation, and craft, that a man becomes something.
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We do not behave as if we believed that the affairs of our world were significant enough for the intervention of great men.
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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.
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Few great men could pass personnel.
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The organization of American society is an interlocking system of semi-monopolies notoriously venal, an electorate notoriously unenlightened, misled by mass media notoriously phony.
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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.
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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.
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Nothing could be more stupid than for the communications commission to give to people who handle the means of broadcasting the inventing of what to broadcast, and then, disturbed at the poor quality, to worry about censorship.
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The issue is not whether people are 'good enough' for a particular type of society rather it is a matter of developing the kind of social institutions that are most conducive to expanding the potentialities we have for intelligence, grace, sociability and freedom.
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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.
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For mankind, speech with a capital S is especially meaningful and committing, more than the content communicated. The outcry of the newborn and the sound of the bells are fraught with mystery more than the baby's woeful face or the venerable tower.
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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.
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Few great men would have got past personnel.
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Because of their historical theory of the alienation of labor (that the worker must become less and less in control of the work of his hands) the Marxist parties never fought for the man-worthy job itself.
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The important thing about travel in foreign lands is that it breaks the speech habits and makes you blab less, and breaks the habitual space-feeling because of different village plans and different landscapes. It is less important that there are different mores, for you counteract these with your own reaction-formations.
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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.
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