Quote

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?

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
Loses
Afterward
Sure
Transcendence
Experience
Awkward
Cannot
Experienced
Anything
Consequence
Self
Somewhere
Heightening
Much
Aren
Inexperienced
World
Lose
Newly

More quotes by 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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
It is by losing himself in the objective, in inquiry, creation, and craft, that a man becomes something.
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
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
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
Not to teach the whole curriculum is to give up on the whole man.
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
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
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
Few great men could pass personnel.
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
Image
Few great men would have got past personnel.
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
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