Paul Goodman Quotes & Sayings

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

It then becomes necessary to stop short and make a choice: Either/Or. Either one drifts with their absurd system of ideas, believing that this is the human community. Or one dissents totally from their system of ideas and stands as a lonely human being. (But luckily one notices that the others are in the same crisis and making the same choices.) — Paul Goodman

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

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

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

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. — Paul Goodman

In our truly remarkable an unexampled civil peace, where there are rarely fist fights; where no one is born, is gravely ill, or dies; where meat is eaten but no one sees an animal slaughtered; where scores of millions of cars, trains, elevators, and airplanes go their scheduled way and there is rarely a crash; where an immense production proceeds in orderly efficiency and the shelves are duly clears and nevertheless none of this come to joy or tragic grief or any other final good it is not surprising if there are explosions. — Paul Goodman

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. — Paul Goodman

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

Thwarted, or starved, in the important objects proper to young capacities, the boys and young men naturally find or invent deviant objects for themselves ... Their choices and inventions are rarely charming, usually stupid, and often disastrous; we cannot expect average kids to deviate with genius. But on the other hand, the young men who conform to the dominant society become for the most part apathetic, disappointed, cynical and wasted. — Paul Goodman

Comedy deflates the sense precisely so that the underlying lubricity and malice may bubble to the surface. — Paul Goodman

The ideal of having a real job that you risk your soul in and make good or be damned, belongs to the heroic age of capitalist enterprise, imbued with self-righteous beliefs about hard work, thrift, and public morals. Such an ideal might still have been mentioned in public fifty years ago; in our era of risk-insured semimonopolies and advertised vices it would be met with a ghastly stillness. — Paul Goodman

The Beat spokesman, surprisingly, seemed to be satisfied with the ethics that we have inherited. — Paul Goodman

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

I am describing again an interrupted revolution, the so-called Sexual Revolution. We see now the organized system of production and sales manages to profit by the confusion of the interruption, whereas a finished revolution would be a dead loss, since good sexual satisfaction costs nothing, it needs only health and affection. — Paul Goodman

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

Positively, the delinquent behavior seems to speak clearly enough. It asks for what we can't give, but it is in this direction we must go. It asks for manly opportunities to work, make a little money, and have self-esteem; to have some space to bang around in, that is not always somebody's property; to have better schools to open for them horizons of interest; to have more and better sex without fear or shame; to share somehow in the symbolic goods (like the cars) that are made so much of; to have a community and a country to be loyal to; to claim attention and have a voice. These are not outlandish demands. Certainly they cannot be satisfied directly in our present system; they are baffling. That is why the problem is baffling, and the final recourse is to a curfew, to ordinances against carrying knives, to threatening the parents, to reformatories with newfangled names, and to 1,100 more police on the street. — Paul Goodman

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

Low pay generally means harder work under worse conditions. — Paul Goodman

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

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

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

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

All men are creative but few are artists. — Paul Goodman

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

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

Be patient, do nothing, cease striving. We find this advice disheartening and therefore unfeasible because we forget it is our own inflexible activity that is structuring the reality. We think that if we do not hustle, nothing will happen and we will pine away. But the reality is probably in motion and after a while we might take part in that motion. But one can't know. — Paul Goodman

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

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

Few great men could pass personal. — Paul Goodman

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

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

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

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

Now shame is the only direct attack on conceit, the defensive image of oneself. Conceit is the common denominator of the Organization man, the hipster, and the juvenile delinquent-this is why I have been lumping them together. The conceited image of the self is usually not quite conscious, but it is instantly woundable; and people protect it with a conformity to their peers (oneself is superior). But the conceited groups differ in their methods of confirming and enhancing conceit: the juvenile delinquent by surly and mischievous destructiveness of the insulting privileged outgroup; the hipster by making fools of them with token performances; the Organization Man by status and salary. To his inner idol, they sacrifice the ingenuous exhibition and self-expression that could make them great, effective, or loved in the world; but that can also be shamed if it is mistaken, out of place, or disproportionate. — Paul Goodman

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

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

The family is the American fascism. — Paul Goodman

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

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

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

When the sciences are supreme, average people lose their feeling of causality. — Paul Goodman

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

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

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

People are forced by their better judgment to ask very basic questions: Is it possible, how is it possible, to have more meaning and honor in work? to put wealth to some real use? to have a high standard of living of whose quality we are not ashamed? to get social justice for those who have been shamefully left out? to have a use of leisure that is not a dismaying waste of a hundred million adults? — Paul Goodman

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

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

Few great men would have got past personnel. — Paul Goodman

Free action is to live in the present society as though it were a natural society. — Paul Goodman

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

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. — Paul Goodman

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

To learn theory by experimenting and doing.
To learn belonging by participating and self-rule.
Permissiveness in all animal behavior and interpersonal expression.
Emphasis on individual differences.
Unblocking and training feeling by plastic arts, eurythmics and dramatics.
Tolerance of races, classes, and cultures.
Group therapy as a means of solidarity, in the staff meeting and community meeting.
Taking youth seriously as an age in itself.
Community of youth and adults, minimizing 'authority.'
Educational use of the actual physical plant (buildings and farms) and the culture of the school community.
Emphasis in the curriculum on real problems and wider society, its geography and history, with actual participation in the neighboring community (village or city).
Trying for functional interrelation of activities. — Paul Goodman

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

An awkward consequence of heightening experience when one is inexperienced, of self-transcendence when one has not much world to lose, is that afterward one cannot be sure that one was somewhere or had newly experienced anything. If you aren't much in the world, how do you know you are "out of this world"? — Paul Goodman

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

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

An obstacle is something you see when you take your eyes off the goal Few great men could pass personnel — Paul Goodman

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

Few great men could pass personnel. — Paul Goodman

("Becoming cultured" and "being adjusted to the social group" are taken almost as synonymous.) Either way, it follows that you can teach people anything; you can adapt them to anything if you use the right techniques of "socializing" or "communicating." The essence of "human nature" is to be pretty indefinitely malleable. "Man," as C. Wright Mills suggests, is what suits a particular type of society in a particular historical stage. This — Paul Goodman

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

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

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

Enjoyment is not a goal, it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity. — Paul Goodman

A good teacher feels his way, looking for response. — Paul Goodman

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

Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, "This ... this ... "; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos. — Paul Goodman

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

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

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

To consider powerful souls as if they were a useful public resource is quite foreign to our customs. In a small sense it is undemocratic, for it assumes that some people really know better in a way that must seem arbitrary to most. In a large sense it is certainly democratic, in that it makes the great man serve as a man. — Paul Goodman

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. — Paul Goodman

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

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

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

Education is a natural community function and occurs inevitably, since the young grow up on
the old, towards their activities, and into (or against) their institutions; and the old foster, teach,
train, exploit and abuse the young. Even neglect of the young, except physical neglect, has an
educational effect -- not the worst possible. — Paul Goodman

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

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. — Paul Goodman

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

Finding a new ethics or esthetics, as Dr. Douglass asks, will not put us in a state of grace. Existence is not given meaning by importing it into a revelation from the outside. The meaning is - there, in more closely contacting the actual situation, the only situation that there is, whatever it is. As our situation is, closely contacting it would surely result in plenty of trouble and perhaps in terrible social conflicts, terrible opportunities and duties, during which we might learn something and at the end of which we might know something, even a new ethics; for it is in such conflicts that new ethics are discovered. But it is just these conflicts that we do not observe happening. Everybody talks nice. At most there is some unruliness and dumb protest, and some withdrawal.
So urging the juveniles to go to church is not serious, for how will the church give them faith? What opportunity will it open? — Paul Goodman

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

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

It is by losing himself in the objective, in inquiry, creation, and craft, that a man becomes something. — Paul Goodman

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

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

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