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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!

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
Would
Talking
Dreaming
Society
Personally
Living
Suppose
Dream
Revolution
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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.
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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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The philosophic aim of education must be to get each one out of his isolated class and into the one humanity.
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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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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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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?
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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.)
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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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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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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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Comedy deflates the sense precisely so that the underlying lubricity and malice may bubble to the surface.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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What the devil to do with the sentence Who the devil does he think he's fooling? You can't write Whom the devil- .
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