Quote

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

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
Bubbles
Precisely
Surface
Comedy
Sense
May
Underlying
Bubble
Malice

More quotes by Paul Goodman

Image
Few great men would have got past personnel.
Paul Goodman
Image
There is only one curriculum, no matter what the method of education: what is basic and universal in human experience and practice, the underlying structure of culture.
Paul Goodman
Image
It is by losing ourselves in inquiry, creation & craft that we become something. Civilization is a continual gift of spirit: inventions, discoveries, insight, art. We are citizens, as Socrates would have said, & we have it available as our own.
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
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
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
Image
Few great men could pass personnel.
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 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
We do not behave as if we believed that the affairs of our world were significant enough for the intervention of great men.
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 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
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
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.
Paul Goodman
Image
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.
Paul Goodman
Image
Not to teach the whole curriculum is to give up on the whole man.
Paul Goodman
Image
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.
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 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
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