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Paul Goodman Quotes

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Famous Paul Goodman Quotes

“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.”

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Book:People or personnel: decentralizing and the mixed systems ; and, Like a conquered province : the moral ambiguity of America
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“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.”

MenImportantHandsKidsYoungChoicesBoysStupidObjectsGeniusCapacityAverageInventionYoung ManDisappointedCynicalCharmingDominantConformApatheticDeviateDeviants
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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“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.”

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Author:Paul Goodman
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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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