Margaret Halsey - Quodid

About

Margaret Halsey (February 13, 1910 – February 4, 1997) was an American writer who lived in the United Kingdom for a short time. Her first book With Malice Toward Some (1938) grew out of her experiences there. It was a witty and humorous bestseller, selling 600,000 copies. It won one of the early National Book Awards: the Most Original Book of 1938, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association.

Quotes from Margaret Halsey

Money does not corrupt people. What corrupts people is lack of affection. … Money is simply the bandage which wounded people put over their wounds.

—Margaret Halsey

money corruption affection healing wounds

The stress laid on upward social mobility in the United States has tended to obscure the fact that there can be more than one kind of mobility and more than one direction in which it can go. There can be ethical mobility as well as financial, and it can go down as well as up.

—Margaret Halsey

ethics USA finance class social mobility

The crucial disadvantage of aggression, competitiveness, and skepticism as national characteristics is that these qualities cannot be turned off at five o'clock.

—Margaret Halsey

aggression skepticism competion

Reality is above all else a variable, and nobody is qualified to say that he or she knows what it is. As a matter of fact, with a firm enough commitment, you can sometimes create a reality which did not exist before.

—Margaret Halsey

reality power change creation commitment

American business, while it does not frown on helping the human race, frowns on people who start right in helping the human race without first proving that they can sell things to it.

—Margaret Halsey

morality business selling selflessness

Whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually begin to seem mild, harmless, rather engaging little things, not at all like the staring defects in other people's characters.

—Margaret Halsey

People coming away from a session with Dr. S. usually looked as if they had had fifty minutes on the anvil with an apprentice blacksmith.

—Margaret Halsey

Life . . . punishes those who try to compartmentalize it. Thus if, for any reason whatsoever, moral standards are conspicuously and unprecedentedly breached in one area of society, such as the political, it will follow as the night the day that those standards will start collapsing all down the line — in sports, entertainment, education, the armed forces, business, and government.

—Margaret Halsey