Margaret Halsey Quotes

Bulldogs have been known to fall on their swords when confronted by my superior tenacity.

The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality

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

Identity is not found, the way Pharaoh's daughter found Moses in the bulrushes. Identity is built.

The important thing about human beings is not what they do, but why they do it.

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

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

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

The great disadvantage of being in a rat race is that it is humiliating. The competitors in a rat race are by definition rodents.

I was well warned about English food, so it did not surprise me, but I do wonder sometimes, how they ever manage to prise it up long enough to get a plate under it.

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

Example is better than precept.

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

Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife.

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

the crucial disadvantage of aggression, competitiveness and skepticism as national characteristics is that these qualities cannot be turned off at five o'clock.

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

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.

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.

Equality is an unconscious assumption, and if you feel you are treating someone as an equal, then you are not doing it.

Working with children is the easiest part of educating for democracy, because children are still undefeated and have no stake in being prejudiced.

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.

Listening to Britons dining out is like watching people play first-class tennis with imaginary balls.

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.

... giving up alcohol or cigarettes is a lead-pipe cinch compared to the renunciation of complacence by a former (self-appointed) elite.

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

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.

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

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

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

It is possible to eat English piecrust, whatever you may think at first. The English eat it, and when they stand up and walk away, they are hardly bent over at all.

Infants, I note with envy, are receptive to enjoyment in a degree not attained by adults this side of the new Jerusalem.

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

Father's snoring grows to sound increasingly like a vacuum cleaner in heat.

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

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

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.

A lady getting a missing belt back from the cleaner couldn't have been more surprised and pleased.

I am living with a rising generation which talks like people coming out of ether.

The only way not to worry about the race problem is to be doing something about it yourself. When you are, natural human vanity makes you feel that now the thing is in good hands.

Money does not corrupt people. What corrupts people is lack of affection ... Money is simply the bandage which wounded people put over their wounds.

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

Folklore is a collection of ridiculous notions held by other people, but not by you and me.

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.

... it takes a great deal to produce ennui in an Englishman and if you do, he only takes it as convincing proof that you are well-bred.

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

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

... 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.