Quotes from Margaret Halsey

A person may be totally unimaginative and have the social vision of a mole, and we still call him a decent man.

If you embark on a project as magnificent in concept as the brotherhood of man, it is foolish not to anticipate difficulties of proportionate magnificence.

What I know about money, I learned the hard way – by having had it.

Whatever the rest of the world thinks of the English gentleman, the English lady regards him apprehensively as something between God and a goat and equally formidable on both scores.

Democracy makes many taxing demands on its practitioners, but suspension of the intelligence is not one of them.

the role of the Do-Gooder is not what actors call a fat part.

We know of our own knowledge that we are human beings, and, as such, imperfect. But we are bathed by the communications industry in a ceaseless tide of inhuman, impossible perfection.

Example is better than precept.

Humility is not my forte, and whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually begin to seem mild, harmless, rather engaging little things, not at all like the staring defects in other people's characters.

In a business society, the emotional economy is an economy of scarcity.

The integration of the Negro into American society is one of the most exciting challenges to self-development and self-mastery that any nation of people ever faced.

The role of a do-gooder is not what actors call a fat part.

Success does not implant bad characteristics in people. It merely steps up the growth rate of the bad characteristics they already had.

English life is seventh-eighths below the surface, like an iceberg, and living in England for a year constitutes merely an introduction to an introduction to an introduction to it.

Life itself, however, flows and is sequential and punishes those who try to compartmentalize it.

Every time I think I've touched bottom as far as boredom is concerned, new vistas of ennui open up.

it is a waste of time to ask more of people than they have to give.

In some circumstances, the refusal to be defeated is a refusal to be educated.

In practice, there is nothing especially dramatic in people getting along well together.

This year's blasphemy is next year's liberating truth.

The English never smash in a face. They merely refrain from asking it to dinner.

you have to realize the white-supremacy boys are spoiled children. 'I want my way,' they scream, and like all spoiled children, they advance no justification for it except that it is their way.

Some persons talk simply because they think sound is more manageable than silence.

The real nature of an ethic is that it does not become an ethic unless and until it goes into action.