Margaret Halsey Quotes - Page 2

Humorists are not humorous twenty-four hours a day. In fact, when you get to know them well, they are often not humorous at all. They tend to be hypersensitive, taut, neurotic creatures driven by God know what obscure compulsion to earn their living the hard way.

The stress laid on upward social mobility in the United States has tended to obscure the fact that there can be more than one kind of mobility and more than one direction in which it can go. There can be ethical mobility as well as financial, and it can go down as well as up.

Our Republic is not a pastoral, not a military, not an agricultural, not a nomadic, not a clerical, but a business civilization. Nor is there anything random, casual or accidental about the United States as a business society. It is thoroughly well integrated - organized from top to bottom for the maximum efficiency of commerce and industry, for the maximum efficiency of making money.

... the English think of an opinion as something which a decent person, if he has the misfortune to have one, does all he can to hide.

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.

He must have had a magnificent build before his stomach went in for a career of its own.

The only men who can turn my blood stream into a condition resembling heavy surf are good-looking heels with characters as intricately unpleasant as the sewers of Paris. With decent and honorable gents, I come all over Platonic. Was ever a woman so perverse and wrongheaded?

being in the middle class is a feeling as well as an income level.

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.

I was so embarrassed I could feel my nerves curling like bacon over a hot fire.

From a purely tourist standpoint, Oxford is overpowering, being so replete with architecture and history and anecdote that the visitor's mind feels dribbling and helpless, as with an over-large mouthful of nougat.

people coming away from a session with Dr. S. usually looked as if they had had fifty minutes on the anvil with an apprentice blacksmith.

Englishwomen's shoes look as if they had been made by someone who had often heard shoes described, but had never seen any.

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

democracy produces both heroes and villains, but it differs from a fascist state in that it does not produce a hero who is a villain.

the conversation whipped gaily around the table like rags in a high wind.

The soup, thin and dark and utterly savorless, tasted as if it had been drained out of the umbrella stand.

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.

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

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

Employed as I had been employing it, liquor is a fixative of old patterns.

when I spoke of having a drink, it was a euphemism for having a whole flock of them.

I would have felt more comfortable on a girder fifty floors above the street, catching white-hot rivets in a pail.

in the comparatively short time between my childhood and my daughter's, the business society has ceased urging people to produce and is now exerting its very considerable influence to get them to consume.

children are an embarrassment to a business civilization. A business society needs children for the same reason that a nomadic or a pastoral society needs them - to perpetuate itself. Unfortunately, however, children are of no use to a business society until they have almost reached physical maturity.