List of Paul Goodman Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The "brightness" Of The 15 Percent Might Or Might Not Indicate A Profound Feeling For The Causes Of Things; It Is Largely Verbal And Symbol-manipulating, And Is Almost Certainly Partly An Obsessional Device Not To Know And Touch Risky Matter, Just As Freud Long Ago Pointed Out That The Nagging Questions Of Small Children Are A Substitute For Asking The Forbidden Questions.

The Organization Of American Society Is An Interlocking System Of Semi-monopolies Notoriously Venal, An Electorate Notoriously Unenlightened, Misled By Mass Media Notoriously Phony.

We Define Boredom As The Pain A Person Feels When He's Doing Nothing Or Something Irrelevant, Instead Of Something He Wants To Do But Won't, Can't, Or Doesn't Dare. Boredom Is Acute When He Knows The Other Thing And Inhibits His Action, E.g., Out Of Politeness, Embarrassment, Fear Of Punishment Or Shame. Boredom Is Chronic If He Has Repressed The Thought Of It And No Longer Is Aware Of It. A Large Part Of Stupidity Is Just The Chronic Boredom, For A Person Can't Learn, Or Be Intelligent About, What He's Not Interested In, When His Repressed Thoughts Are Elsewhere.

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.

What The Devil To Do With The Sentence "who The Devil Does He Think He's Fooling?" You Can't Write "whom The Devil- ".

Wrong' Training Can Be A Very Innocent Thing. Consider A Father Who Allows His Child To Read Good Books. That Child May Soon Cease To Watch Television Or Go To The Movies, Nor Will He Eventually Read Book-of-the-month Club Selections, Because They Are Ludicrous And Dull. As A Young Man, Then, He Will Effectually Be Excluded From All Of Madison Avenue And Hollywood And Most Of Publishing, Because What Moves Him Or What He Creates Is Quite Irrelevant To What Is Going On: It Is Too Fine. His Father Has Brought Him Up As A Dodo.

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.