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

Categorized in : Thinking Men Race

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

inspiration dream talking

Low pay generally means harder work under worse conditions.

Paul Goodman

lows pay mean

Anarchism is grounded in a rather definite social-psychological hypothesis: that forceful, graceful and intelligent behaviour occurs only when there is an uncoerced and direct response to the physical and social environment; that in most human affairs, more harm than good results from compulsion, top-down direction, bureaucratic planning, pre-ordained curricula, jails, conscription, states.

Paul Goodman

top-down jail intelligent

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

issues grace people

A good teacher feels his way, looking for response.

Paul Goodman

teaching teacher way

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

Paul Goodman

curriculum giving-up men

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

Paul Goodman

humanity education class

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

self views sex

Freud pointed out, in his Problem of Lay Analysis, that it is extremely unlikely that a young man who would throw the best years of his life into the cloistered drudgery of getting an M.D. degree, could possibly make a good psychoanalyst; so he preferred to look for young analysts among the writers, the lawyers, the mothers of families, those who had chosen human contact. But in their economic wisdom, the Psychoanalytic Institute of Vienna (and New York) overruled him.

Paul Goodman

new-york mother men

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

Paul Goodman

political long america

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

roles tasks needs

The family is the American fascism.

Paul Goodman

family fascism

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

censorship speech serious

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

groups imagination men

Few great men could pass personnel.

Paul Goodman

great-men business men

Naturally, grown-up citizens are concerned about the beatniks and delinquents. ... The question is why the grownups do not, more soberly, draw the same conclusions as the youth. Or, since no doubt many people are quite clear about the connection that the structure of society that has becoming increasingly dominant in our country is disastrous to the growth of excellence and manliness, why don't more people speak up and say so?

Paul Goodman

excellence country people

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

discovery civilization art

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

done food people

Few great men would have got past personnel.

Paul Goodman

business funny past

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

community powerful people