Quote

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

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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
Thought
Although
Belonging
Give
Speech
Establish
Human
Beings
Precisely
Humans
Share
Aim
Giving
Impossible
Goals
Real
Belief
Contact
Warrant
Kind
Goal
Avoid
Warrants
Makes
Tasks
Calculated

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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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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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Few great men could pass personnel.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Not to teach the whole curriculum is to give up on the whole man.
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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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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 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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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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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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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.
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