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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.

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
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Political Scientist
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the Village
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More quotes by Paul Goodman

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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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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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It is by losing himself in the objective, in inquiry, creation, and craft, that a man becomes something.
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Few great men could pass personnel.
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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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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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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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Not to teach the whole curriculum is to give up on the whole man.
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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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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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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
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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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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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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
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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
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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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The family is the American fascism.
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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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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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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