Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Paul Goodman

American Writer, Social Critic, Educator, Psychoanalyst, Novelist, Playwright and Poet

"Our society cannot have it both ways: to maintain a conformist and ignoble system and to have skillful and spirited men to man that system."

"The philosophic aim of education must be to get one out of his isolated class and into one humanity."

"Enjoyment is not a goal, it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity."

"A good teacher feels his way, looking for response."

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

"All men are creative but few are artists."

"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."

"Few great men could pass personnel."

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

"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."

"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."

"The organization of American society is an interlocking system of semi-monopolies notoriously venal, an electorate notoriously unenlightened, misled by a mass media notoriously phony."

"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!"

"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."

"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??"

"As Frederic Thrasher says in The Gang, ?Other things being equal, the imaginative boy has an excellent chance to become the leader of the gang. He has the power to make things interesting for them? ... After a disastrous week when there were several juvenile murders, the Governor of New York made the following statement (New York Times, September 2, 1959): ?We have to constantly devise new ways to bring about a challenge to these young folks and to provide an outlet for their energies and give them a sense of belonging? ... The gist of it is that the Governor of New York is to play the role that Thrasher assigns to the teen-age gang leader. He is to think up new ?challenges?... But it is the word ?constantly? that is the clue. A challenge can hardly be worthwhile, meaningful, or therapeutic if another must constantly and obsessively be devised to siphon off a new threat of ?energy... Solidly meeting real needs does not have this character. My guess is that in playing games the Governor will not have so lively an imagination as the lad he wants to displace as leader; unlike the grownups, the gang will never select him. One of the objective factors that make it hard to grow up is that Governors are likely to be men of mediocre human gifts."

"A boy of ten or eleven has a few great sexual experiences?he thinks they?re great?but then he has the bad luck to get caught and get in trouble. They try to persuade him by punishment and other explanations that some different behavior is much better, but he knows by the evidence of his senses that nothing could be better... The basic trouble here is that they do not really believe he has had the sexual experience. That objective factor is inconvenient for them; therefore it cannot exist... The sensible course would be to accept it as a valuable part of further growth. But if this were done, they fear that the approved little hero would be a rotten apple to his peers, who now would suddenly all become precocious, abnormal, artificially stimulated, and prone to delinquency. The sexual plight of these children is officially not mentioned. The revolutionary attack on hypocrisy by Ibsen, Freud, Ellis, Dreiser, did not succeed this far... The question here is not whether the sexuality should be discouraged or encouraged. That is an important issue, but far more important is that it is hard to grow up when existing facts are treated as though they do not exist. For then there is no dialog, it is impossible to be taken seriously, to be understood, to make a bridge between oneself and society."

"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."

"Boys today hardly aspire to immortal honor, the honor of self-fulfilling achievement. It is highly disapproved of in the code of the organized system. Instead, they devote themselves to protecting their ?personal honor? against insults; and conversely they dream of the transient notoriety which will prove that they are ?somebody,? which they doubt. The personal honor that they protect does not include truthfulness, honesty, public usefulness, integrity, independence, or virtues like that. A reputation for these things does not win respect, it has no publicity value; it?s believed to be phony anyway, and if it?s true, the person is hard to get along with."

"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."

"Can they solve the problem of the nagging unanswerable question of justification and vocation? Their principle is the traditional one of classical mysticism: by ?experiences? (?kicks?) to transcend the nagged and nagging self altogether and get out of one?s skin, to where no questions are asked?nor is there any articulate speech to ask them in."

"Children, if we observe them, seem normally to be abounding in simple faith. They rush headlong and there is ground underfoot. They ask for information and are told. They cry for something and get it or are refused, but they are not disregarded. They go exploring and see something interesting. It is the evil genius of our society to blight, more or less disastrously; this faith of its young as they grow up; for our society does not, for most, continue to provide enough worth-while opportunities and relevant duties, and soon it ceases to take them seriously as existing."

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

"Desperate families have been waiting for government action on the CSA since its last chief executive was forced to resign."

"During childhood, they played games with fierce intensity, giving themselves as sacrifice to the game, for play was the chief business of growth, finding and making themselves in the world. Now when they are too old merely to play, to what shall they give themselves with fierce intensity? They cannot play for recreation, since they have not been used up... Since each activity is not interesting to begin with, its value does not deepen and it does not bear much repetition... In these circumstances, the inevitable tendency is to raise the ante of the compulsive useless activity."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I am often involved in individual housing cases when constituents ask for my help. This chance to visit officers and discuss key challenges has been very helpful in understanding more about what is involved for my constituents."

"I am willing to completely challenge and face the legal threat."

"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."

"I often ask, What do you want to work at? If you have the chance. When you get out of school, college, the service, etc. Some answer right off and tell their definite plans and projects, highly approved by Papa. I'm pleased for them* but it's a bit boring, because they are such squares. Quite a few will, with prompting, come out with astounding stereotyped, conceited fantasies, such as becoming a movie actor when they are discovered like Marlon Brando, but in my own way. Very rarely somebody will, maybe defiantly and defensively, maybe diffidently but proudly, make you know that he knows very well what he is going to do; it is something great; and he is indeed already doing it, which is the real test. The usual answer, perhaps the normal answer, is I don't know, meaning, I'm looking; I haven't found the right thing; it's discouraging but not hopeless. But the terrible answer is, Nothing. The young man doesn't want to do anything. I remember talking to half a dozen young fellows at Van Wagner's Beach outside of Hamilton, Ontario; and all of them had this one thing to say: Nothing. They didn't believe that what to work at was the kind of thing one wanted. They rather expected that two or three of them would work for the electric company in town, but they couldn't care less, I turned away from the conversation abruptly because of the uncontrollable burning tears in my eyes and constriction in my chest. Not feeling sorry for them, but tears of frank dismay for the waste of our humanity (they were nice kids). And it is out of that incident that many years later I am writing this book."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"In such an environment there operates an unfortunate natural selection. Since not only the rewards but also the means and opportunities of public activity belong to the organized system, a bright boy will try to get ahead in it. He will do well in school, keep out of trouble, and apply for the right jobs. It would follow from this that the organized system is sparked by a good proportion of the bright boys, and so it is. On the other hand, in sheer self-protection, smart boys who are sensitive, have strong animal spirits or great souls, cannot play that game. There are two alternative possibilities: (1) Either the advantages of the organized system cause them to inhibit their powers, and they turn into cynical pushers or obsessional specialists or timid hard workers that make up the middle status of the system. Or (2) their natural virtues and perhaps alternative training are too strong and they become independents; but as such they are hard put, not so much hard put for money as for means to act; and so they are likely to become bitter, eccentric, etc., and so much the less effective in changing the system they disapprove"

"It is a major defect of our present organized system and the economy of abundance that, without providing great goals, it has taken away some of the important real necessities, leaving people with nothing to do. The void is soon filled. Behavior like going into debt on the installment plan, gives an artificial but then real necessity, something to do, paying up. This is the Rat Race, but I doubt that it would be run if people did not need its justifying necessity, for the commodities themselves are not that attractive."

"It is desperately hard these days for an average child to grow up to be a man, for our present organized system does not want men. They are not safe."

"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."

"It is in the schools and from the mass media, that the mass of our citizens in all classes learn that life is inevitably routine, depersonalized, venally graded."

"It is said that if the owners of retail flower shops had to depend upon the shops to support their family financially, then half of them would close... It tends to be a second income source for people. It's pretty hard to make money at that small a volume."

"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."

"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."

"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.)"

"It was fun, I'd do it again. Although, I think I'd want to be something different."

"It's time for clarity - not more spin from Mr. Blair."

"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."

"Literary critics like Lionel Trilling... demand that our novels illuminate the manners and morals of prevailing society. Professor Trilling is right, because otherwise what use are they for us? But he is wrong-headed, because he does not see that the burden of proof is not on the artist but on our society. If such convenient criticism of prevalent life does not get to be written, it is likely that the prevailing society is not inspiring enough; its humanity is not great enough, it does not have enough future, to be worth the novelist?s trouble."

"Low pay generally means harder work under worse conditions."