Ellen Goodman

I suppose we make kids the repository of our highest ideals because children are powerless. In that way we can have ideals…

— Ellen Goodman

Forty is ... an age at which people have histories and options. At thirty, they had perhaps less history. At fifty, perhaps…

— Ellen Goodman

In today's amphetamine world of news junkies, speed trumps thoughtfulness too often.

— Ellen Goodman

It's self-deceptive to think we're in a post-feminist world when we never tried a feminist world.

— Ellen Goodman

When we describe what the other person is really like, I suppose we often picture what we want. We look through the…

— Ellen Goodman

What advertisers call brand loyalty is merely the consumer's defense against the need to waste energy differentiating among things that barely differ.

— Ellen Goodman

Parents remain our touchstones, fellow travelers, even after death. They are both missing and present.

— Ellen Goodman

Maybe at 20 you can write well, but I don't think you could do what I do. Some things have to happen…

— Ellen Goodman

This packrat has learned that what the next generation will value most is not what we owned, but the evidence of who…

— Ellen Goodman

Those inevitable dreams where you can't get your column in, you know, and at first they were the Xerox telecopy, and then…

— Ellen Goodman

Pro-choice supporters are often heard using the cool language of the courts and the vocabulary of rights. Americans who are deeply ambivalent…

— Ellen Goodman

Alternative Lifestyles, the emotional fly-drive packages of our times, come equipped with a set of clothes, a choice of authors, a limited…

— Ellen Goodman

When I was at 'Newsweek' magazine - which, you know, this really sounds like I walked four miles in the snow to…

— Ellen Goodman

It is not that fathers are better or worse, not that they are more loved or criticized, but rather that they are…

— Ellen Goodman

I wonder whether our adoption of Shrink-ese as a second language, the move from religious phrases of judgment to secular words of…

— Ellen Goodman

The central paradox of motherhood is that while our children become the absolute center of our lives, they must also push us…

— Ellen Goodman

We owned what we learned back there; the experience and the growth are grafted into our lives.

— Ellen Goodman

Maybe this year, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives not looking for flaws, but looking for potential.

— Ellen Goodman

women who once aspired to the image of superwoman now worry about becoming superdrudge. Those who wanted to have it all now…

— Ellen Goodman

Taboos are falling across our culture like dominoes. What was unspeakable yesterday dominates talk shows today.

— Ellen Goodman

I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box.

— Ellen Goodman

We may never know why Joe Ellis fabricated a heroic past. But we know that the life he embellished has deeply diminished…

— Ellen Goodman

[E]very time you think the entertainment moguls have hit rock bottom, they reach for the jackhammer and rat-a-tat-tat a little deeper.

— Ellen Goodman

Call me a cockeyed pessimist, but I'm having trouble finding any good news in the trashing of Harriet Miers.

— Ellen Goodman

Statistically speaking, the Cheerful Early Riser is rejected more completely than a member of any other subculture, save those with boot odor.

— Ellen Goodman

You can teach someone who cares to write columns, but you can’t teach someone who writes columns to care.

— Ellen Goodman

Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers.

— Ellen Goodman

Our 'mistakes' become our crucial parts, sometimes our best parts, of the lives we have made.

— Ellen Goodman

The same people who tell us that smoking doesn't cause cancer are now telling us that advertising cigarettes doesn't cause smoking.

— Ellen Goodman

How come pleasure never makes it on to... a dutiful list of do's and don'ts? Doesn't joy also get soft and flabby…

— Ellen Goodman

instant opinion is an oxymoron. You don't get real opinions in an instant. You get reactions.

— Ellen Goodman

The things we hate about ourselves aren't more real than things we like about ourselves.

— Ellen Goodman

In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.

— Ellen Goodman

In the biotech revolution, it is the human body, not iron or steel or plastic, that's at the source. Are the biocapitalists…

— Ellen Goodman

Once upon a time we were just plain people. But that was before we began having relationships with mechanical systems. Get involved…

— Ellen Goodman

If there's a single message passed down from each generation of American parents to their children, it is a two-word line: Better…

— Ellen Goodman

My generation is the first in my species to have put fitness next to godliness on the scale of things. Keeping in…

— Ellen Goodman

We spend January 1st walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to…

— Ellen Goodman

There's a trick to the Graceful Exit. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship…

— Ellen Goodman

Even if every program were educational and every advertisement bore the seal of approval of the American Dental Association, we would still…

— Ellen Goodman