Paul Goodman
Paul Goodman
Paul Goodmanwas an American novelist, playwright, poet, literary critic, and psychotherapist, although now best known as a social critic and anarchist philosopher. Though often thought of as a sociologist, he vehemently denied being one in a presentation in the Experimental College at San Francisco State in 1964, and in fact said he could not read sociology because it was too often lifeless. The author of dozens of books including Growing Up Absurd and The Community of Scholars, Goodman was an...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth9 September 1911
CountryUnited States of America
challenge face legal willing
I am willing to completely challenge and face the legal threat.
ask cases challenges chance discuss helpful housing individual involved key officers understanding visit
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.
jobs exercise men
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.
jobs real hard-work
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.
growing-up fighting important
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.
stupid kids boys
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.
education class humanity
The philosophic aim of education must be to get each one out of his isolated class and into the one humanity.
stupid communication mean
Nothing could be more stupid than for the communications commission to give to people who handle the means of broadcasting the inventing of what to broadcast, and then, disturbed at the poor quality, to worry about censorship.
country people doubt
Naturally, grown-up citizens are concerned about the beatniks and delinquents. ... The question is why the grownups do not, more soberly, draw the same conclusions as the youth. Or, since no doubt many people are quite clear about the connection that the structure of society that has becoming increasingly dominant in our country is disastrous to the growth of excellence and manliness, why don't more people speak up and say so?
men groups situation
We certainly have at present the dismal situation that the most imaginative men are directed by a group, the top managers, who are among the least.
power matter comedy
Comedy is something that we can all share, no matter what language we speak or our background, it has the power to unite us all.
men miracle would-be
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.
sex self views
My own view, for what it's worth, is that sexuality is lovely, there cannot be too much of it, it is self-limiting if it is satisfactory, and satisfaction diminishes tension and clears the mind for attention and learning.
successful community adequate
A successful revolution establishes a new community. A missed revolution makes irrelevant the community that persists. And a compromised revolution tends to shatter the community that was, without an adequate substitute.