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

About Margaret Halsey

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...

More quotations from 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

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

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

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

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

More quotations tagged with “class”

Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don't get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goat cheese… get up at dawn to run, break for a midmorning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.

—Barbara Ehrenreich

health class food cheese exercise running

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.

money poverty wealth class

I have long been of the opinion that if work were such a splendid thing the rich would have kept more of it for themselves.

—Bruce Grocott

work wealth class

A man's respect for law and order exists in precise relationship to the size of his paycheck.

—Adam Clayton Powell Jr.

politics law ethics money class

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

—Gustave Flaubert

politics democracy class stupidity bourgeois proletarian

History

23 Nov 2014 Added