Paul Goodman Quotes

#1. Comedy deflates the sense precisely so that the underlying lubricity and malice may bubble to the surface.

Paul Goodman

#2. 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

#3. There is such a thing as food and such a thing as poison. But the damage done by those who pass off poison as food is far less than that done by those who generation after generation convince people that food is poison.

Paul Goodman

#4. The Civil War won formal rights for Negroes, but failed to win social justice and factual democracy. The actual result has been segregation, and fear and ignorance for both whites and blacks.

Paul Goodman

#5. But the self is precisely the integrator; it is the synthetic unity, as Kant said. It is the artist of life. It is only a small factor in the total organism/environment interaction, but it plays the crucial role of finding and making the meanings that we grow by.

Paul Goodman

#6. 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.

Paul Goodman

#7. An obstacle is something you see when you take your eyes off the goal Few great men could pass personnel

Paul Goodman

#8. In his school, Bertrand Russell thought it was better if they had the sex, so they could give their undivided attention to mathematics, which was the main thing.

Paul Goodman

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. When a village ceases to be a community, it becomes oppressive in its narrow conformity. So one becomes an individual and migrates to the city. There, finding others like-minded, one re-establishes a village community. Nowadays only New Yorkers are yokels.

Paul Goodman

#13. Few great men would have got past personnel.

Paul Goodman

#14. 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

#15. Enjoyment is not a goal, it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity.

Paul Goodman

#16. 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

#17. We do not need to be able to say what "human nature" is in order to be able to say that some training is "against human nature.

Paul Goodman

#18. When the sciences are supreme, average people lose their feeling of causality.

Paul Goodman

#19. It takes application, a fine sense of value, and a powerful community-spirit for a people to have serious leisure, and this has not been the genius of the Americans.

Paul Goodman

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. One sees many pretty young Beat couples. (I think they are pretty; some people think they are hideous.) Since conceit and "proving" are not major factors, there is affection. Homosexuality and bisexuality are not regarded as a big deal.

Paul Goodman

#23. Let me formulate the artistic disposition as follows: it is reacting with one's ideal to the flaw in oneself and in the world, and somehow making that reaction formation solid enough in the medium so that it indeed becomes an improved bit of real world for others.

Paul Goodman

#24. The importance of the Beats is twofold: first, they act out a critique of the organized system that everybody in some sense agrees with. But second-and more important in the long run-they are a kind of major pilot study of the use of leisure in an economy of abundance.

Paul Goodman

#25. Few great men could pass personnel.

Paul Goodman

#26. The irony is that in our decades, the combination of rationalism, asceticism, and individualism (the so-called Protestant Ethic) has produced precisely the system of boondoggling, luxury-consumption, and status.

Paul Goodman

#27. My thought is that the average adjusted boy is, if anything, more humanly wasted than the disaffected. So let us go on to discuss his stupidity, his lack of patriotism, his sexual confusion, and his lack of faith.

Paul Goodman

#28. No good has ever come from feeling guilty, neither intelligence, policy, nor compassion. The guilty do not pay attention to the object but only to themselves, and not even to their own interests, which might make sense, but to their anxieties.

Paul Goodman

#29. It is by losing himself in the objective, in inquiry, creation, and craft, that a man becomes something.

Paul Goodman

#30. All men are creative but few are artists.

Paul Goodman

#31. I have learned to have very modest goals for society and myself; things like clean air, green grass, children with bright eyes, not being pushed around, useful work that suits one's abilities, plain tasty food, and occasional satisfying nookie.

Paul Goodman

#32. Low pay generally means harder work under worse conditions.

Paul Goodman

#33. Few great men could pass personal.

Paul Goodman

#34. A good teacher feels his way, looking for response.

Paul Goodman

#35. The family is the American fascism.

Paul Goodman

#36. 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

#37. Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society that you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now!

Paul Goodman

#38. Penology ... has become torture and foolishness, a waste of money and a cause of crime ... a blotting out of sight and heightening of social anxiety.

Paul Goodman

#39. 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

#40. 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.

Paul Goodman

#41. Free action is to live in the present society as though it were a natural society.

Paul Goodman

#42. 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

#43. Then at once "human nature" is again invoked to prove the necessity of change, for "human nature" has been thwarted or insulted by the dominant system. "Man" can no longer be defined as what suits the dominant system, when the dominant system apparently does not suit men. I

Paul Goodman

#44. The classical anthropological question, What is man? - "how like an angel, this quintessence of dust!" - is not now asked by anthropologists. Instead, they commence with a chapter on Physical Anthropology and then forget the whole topic and go on to Culture.

Paul Goodman

#45. In the modern world, we Americans are the old inhabitants. We first had political freedom, high industrial production, an economy of abundance.

Paul Goodman

#46. 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

#47. The ancient dream of man to fly among the stars and go through the could and look down on the lands and seas has degenerated in its realization to the socialized and apathetic behavior of passengers who hardly look out the windows.

Paul Goodman

#48. The Beat spokesman, surprisingly, seemed to be satisfied with the ethics that we have inherited.

Paul Goodman

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. When we choose a man to beautify our towns, we do not automatically call on the major artists of the world ... We now lavishly praise Frank Lloyd Wright, but we never made any community use of him, though he longed for the chance.

Paul Goodman

#53. 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

#54. God works in many ways His wonders to perform. But He's not a skillful mechanic. A man drived over a cliff and "by a miracle" he only breaks his back. It would be more divine if he were a better driver and stayed on the road.

Paul Goodman

#55. 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

#56. The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one's own style and creatively adjust this to one's author.

Paul Goodman

#57. I move in a society so devoid of ordinary reality that I am continually stopping to teach good sense, to give support, to help out, as a young gangster might help an old lady across the street on his way to the stick-up.

Paul Goodman

#58. 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

#59. Not to teach the whole curriculum is to give up on the whole man.

Paul Goodman

#60. 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

#61. In America you can say anything you want - as long as it doesn't have any effect.

Paul Goodman

#62. The philosophic aim of education must be to get each one out of his isolated class and into the one humanity.

Paul Goodman

#63. 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

#64. My own view, for what it's worth, is that sexuality is lovely, there cannot be too much of it, it is self-limiting if it is satisfactory, and satisfaction diminishes tension and clears the mind for attention and learning.

Paul Goodman