Quote

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

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
Space
Foreign
Lands
Society
Travel
Formation
Less
Speech
Breaks
Formations
Feelings
Habit
Reaction
Mores
Makes
Plans
Habits
Counteract
Important
Land
Village
Landscapes
Different
Break
Reactions
Tourism
Thing
Feeling
Landscape
Habitual

More quotes by 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 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
Few great men could pass personnel.
Paul Goodman
Image
Few great men would have got past personnel.
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
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
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
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
Not to teach the whole curriculum is to give up on the whole man.
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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