Paul Goodman Quotes (1911-1972)

“Oh, we Jews have a special kind of jokes. They consist in happy little anecdotes founded on absolute despair.”

“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 with.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Social scientists ... do not like to think that fighting and dissenting are proper social functions, nor that rebelling or initiating fundamental change is a social function. Rather, if something does not run smoothly, they say it has been improperly socialized; there has been a failure in communication. ... But perhaps there has not been a failure in communication. Perhaps the social message has been communicated clearly to the young men and is unacceptable. ... We must ask the question, “Is the harmonious organization to which the young are inadequately socialized perhaps against human nature, or not worthy of human nature, and therefore there is difficulty in growing up?””