Quote

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

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
Wanted
Side
Live
Inspiration
Kind
Sides
Way
Start
Would
Talking
Dreaming
Society
Personally
Living
Suppose
Dream
Revolution

More quotes by 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
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
The family is the American fascism.
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
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
Not to teach the whole curriculum is to give up on the whole man.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Paul Goodman
Image
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.
Paul Goodman
Image
Comedy deflates the sense precisely so that the underlying lubricity and malice may bubble to the surface.
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
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
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
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
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.
Paul Goodman
Image
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.
Paul Goodman