Margaret Halsey

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

— Margaret Halsey

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

— Margaret Halsey

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

— Margaret Halsey

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

— Margaret Halsey

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

— Margaret Halsey

The role of a do-gooder is not what actors call a fat part.

— Margaret Halsey

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

— Margaret Halsey

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

— Margaret Halsey

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

— Margaret Halsey

It is possible to eat English piecrust, whatever you may think at first. The English eat it, and when they stand up…

— Margaret Halsey

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

— Margaret Halsey

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

— Margaret Halsey

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

— Margaret Halsey

democracy produces both heroes and villains, but it differs from a fascist state in that it does not produce a hero who…

— Margaret Halsey

The soup, thin and dark and utterly savorless, tasted as if it had been drained out of the umbrella stand.

— Margaret Halsey

The only way not to worry about the race problem is to be doing something about it yourself. When you are, natural…

— Margaret Halsey

The people who are unprejudiced, but who ... feel it is so hopeless there is no use trying ... probably do just…

— Margaret Halsey

How close beneath the surface, even in the happiest family, is the chronic grievance! I sometimes think that tinderboxes are inert and…

— Margaret Halsey

“The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality. Reality is…

— Margaret Halsey

There are ... other business societies - England, Holland, Belgium and France, for instance. But ours [the United States] is the only…

— Margaret Halsey

the psychological attitudes which are indispensable in the American market place are disastrous to family life. Family life ... requires yieldingness, generosity,…

— Margaret Halsey

I'd like somebody to breed a male, genus homo, who could go and fetch a 12" x 8" black suède purse lying…

— Margaret Halsey

The position of children as a group, in a commercial society, is not wholly advantageous. A commercial society urges its citizens to…

— Margaret Halsey

It is impossible to betray another man's child - for whatever reason - without also betraying one's own. To do less than…

— Margaret Halsey

As one might expect in a society with mass communications and mass markets, the pseudo-ethic says that whatever is popular, is right.…

— Margaret Halsey

If the factory people outside the colleges live under the discipline of narrow means, the people inside live under almost every other…

— Margaret Halsey

Our Republic is not a pastoral, not a military, not an agricultural, not a nomadic, not a clerical, but a business civilization.…

— Margaret Halsey

The feelings, myths and prejudices about the Negro American which now seem so valid and real to some of our white contemporaries…

— Margaret Halsey

Life itself, however, flows and is sequential and punishes those who try to compartmentalize it. Thus if, for any reason whatsoever, moral…

— Margaret Halsey

A society struggles to fulfill its best instincts, even as an individual does, and generally makes just as hard going of it.…

— Margaret Halsey

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

— Margaret Halsey

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

— Margaret Halsey

This year's blasphemy is next year's liberating truth.

— Margaret Halsey

My knees could have been stirred with a spoon.

— Margaret Halsey

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

— Margaret Halsey

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

— Margaret Halsey

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

— Margaret Halsey

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

— Margaret Halsey

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

— Margaret Halsey

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

— Margaret Halsey