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Paul Goodman Quotes

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Famous Paul Goodman Quotes

“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.”

YearsHas BeensStillsRealSoulSelfHardMightWould BeAgeJobsBeliefMoralRiskHard WorkMetsIdealsYears AgoVicesErasYour SoulFiftyEnterpriseHeroicStillnessCapitalistRighteousThriftSelf RighteousGhastlyReal Jobs
Book:Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society
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“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.”

MenWantJobsLeaderGenerationsProductsExerciseCapacityLaborManagementDetermineEnterpriseSoleDomainUtopianOur GenerationPrerogativeInvading
Book:Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society
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“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.”

GivingHumansKindRealBeliefGoalHuman BeingsImpossibleShareSpeechTasksAimContactBelongingBeing RealWarrants
Book:Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society
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“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.”

KnowsChildrenLongMatterFeelingsMightCausesPercentAskingProfoundSymbolsDevicesSubstitutesLong AgoForbiddenBrightnessSmall ChildNagging
Author:Paul Goodman
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“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.”

MenShouldWellsAsksKnownCenturyStyleLettersFunctionMagazinesWell KnownPsychologist
Book:Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society
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“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.”

MenYearsHumansLooksProblemYoungMotherEconomicNew YorkDegreesLaysLawyerChosenContactAnalysisYoung ManUnlikelyInstituteAnalystsDrudgeryBest YearViennaPsychoanalytic
Author:Paul Goodman
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“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"?”

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Book:Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society
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“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.”

IfsWayJoyDiesFightingBornAnimalGriefMillionsCarTrainFinalsIllProductionsMeatScoreRemarkableTragicSurprisingAirplaneImmenseCrashEfficiencyNeverthelessShelvesFistsExplosionsOrderlyElevators
Book:Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society
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“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.)”

BelieveHumansIdeasChoicesCommunityHuman BeingsLonelyCrisisAbsurdDissentEither Or
Book:Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society
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“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.”

MenMayChildrenBookMovingYoungFatherWatchesTelevisionFineMonthsTrainingHollywoodClubsCeaseInnocentYoung ManDullPublishingIrrelevantSelectionGood BookAvenuesExcludedMadisonMadison Avenue
Book:Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society
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