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Paul Goodman citations

Paul Goodman, né le 9 septembre 1911 à Greenwich Village et mort le 2 août 1972 dans le New Hampshire un mois avant ses 61 ans, est un écrivain et penseur américain, conseiller politique de la gauche américaine des années 1960. Ce chercheur universitaire, spécialiste de l'histoire de l'Amérique populaire, a été un poète, un romancier, un auteur de théâtre, un essayiste, un éducateur et un moraliste anarchiste. Féru de philosophie et d'études sociales, il est aussi passionné par les cultures étrangères, l'expression corporelle et le théâtre. Il est l'un des fondateurs de la Gestalt-thérapie. Wikipedia  

✵ 9. septembre 1911 – 2. août 1972
Paul Goodman: 47 citations0 J'aime

Paul Goodman: Citations en anglais

“Where there is official censorship it is a sign that speech is serious. Where there is none, it is pretty certain that the official spokesmen have all the loud-speakers.”

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Paul Goodman livre Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 40.

“The ancient dream of man to fly among the stars and go through the could and look down on the lands and seas has degenerated in its realization to the socialized and apathetic behavior of passengers who hardly look out the windows.”

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Paul Goodman livre Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 144.

“Perhaps the social message has been communicated clearly to the young men and is unacceptable.”

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Paul Goodman livre Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), pp. 10-11.
Contexte: Social scientists … have begun to think that “social animal” means “harmoniously belonging.” They 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?”

“No good has ever come from feeling guilty, neither intelligence, policy, nor compassion. The guilty do not pay attention to the object but only to themselves, and not even to their own interests, which might make sense, but to their anxieties.”

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Paul Goodman

“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.”

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Paul Goodman livre Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 176.

“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.”

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Paul Goodman livre Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 179.

“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?””

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Paul Goodman livre Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 183.

“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.”

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Paul Goodman livre Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 154.

“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”

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Paul Goodman livre Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 157.

“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.”

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Paul Goodman livre Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 13.

“To consider powerful souls as if they were a useful public resource is quite foreign to our customs. In a small sense it is undemocratic, for it assumes that some people really know better in a way that must seem arbitrary to most. In a large sense it is certainly democratic, in that it makes the great man serve as a man.”

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Paul Goodman livre Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), pp. 153-154.

“Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now! Whatever you would do then, do it now. When you run up against obstacles, people, or things that won't let you live that way, then begin to think about how to get over or around or under that obstacle, or how it push it out of the way, and your politics will be concrete and practical.”

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Paul Goodman

as quoted in Commonist Tendencies: Mutual Aid Beyond Communism

“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.”

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Paul Goodman livre Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 14.

“The paucity of its vocabulary and syntax is for the Beats essentially expressive of withdrawal from the standard civilization and its learning. On the other hand this paucity gives, instead of opportunities for thought and problem solving, considerable satisfaction in the act and energy of speaking itself, as is true of any simple adopted language, such as pig Latin. But this can have disadvantages. One learns to one’s frustration that they regard talk as an end in itself, as a means of self-expression, without subject matter. In a Beat group it is bad form to assert or deny a proposition as true or false, probable or improbable, or to want to explore its meaning.”

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Paul Goodman livre Growing Up Absurd

(describing the language of the “Beat” generation, p. 175.
Growing Up Absurd (1956)

“The aim is not to give human beings real goals that warrant belief, and tasks to share in, but to re-establish “belonging,” although this kind of speech and thought is precisely calculated to avoid contact and so makes belonging impossible.”

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Paul Goodman livre Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 38.

“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.”

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Paul Goodman livre Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), pp. 145-146.

“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.”

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Paul Goodman livre Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 214.

“We live increasingly in a system in which little direct attention is paid to the object, the function, the program, the task, the need; but immense attention to the role, the procedure, prestige, and profit.”

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Paul Goodman livre Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. xiii.

“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.”

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Paul Goodman livre Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), pp. 150-151.

“The irony is that in our decades, the combination of rationalism, asceticism, and individualism (the so-called Protestant Ethic) has produced precisely the system of boondoggling, luxury-consumption, and status.”

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Paul Goodman livre Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 143.

“Few great men could pass personnel.”

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Paul Goodman livre Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 153.

“When we choose a man to beautify our towns, we do not automatically call on the major artists of the world. … We now lavishly praise Frank Lloyd Wright, but we never made any community use of him, though he longed for the chance.”

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Paul Goodman livre Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 153.

“The chessboard was reflected in her eyes.
Eager to beat her, first I looked on her eyes.
I made a Spanish move, an ancient one,
and broken was the red rank of pawns in her light eyes.
Then I lowered my eyes from that chessboard
and Love said, "Oh not her; conquer the king if you can."”

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Paul Goodman livre Collected Poems

"A Chess Game" St. 1, Collected Poems, Random House, 1973, ISBN 0394483588.

“We define boredom as the pain a person feels when he’s doing nothing or something irrelevant, instead of something he wants to do but won’t, can’t, or doesn’t dare. Boredom is acute when he knows the other thing and inhibits his action, e. g., out of politeness, embarrassment, fear of punishment or shame. Boredom is chronic if he has repressed the thought of it and no longer is aware of it. A large part of stupidity is just the chronic boredom, for a person can’t learn, or be intelligent about, what he’s not interested in, when his repressed thoughts are elsewhere.”

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Paul Goodman livre Growing Up Absurd

Another large part of stupidity is stubbornness, unconsciously saying, “I won’t. You can’t make me.”
Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), pp. 71-72.

“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.”

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Paul Goodman livre Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), pp. 38-39.

“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 worth while, 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.”

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Paul Goodman livre Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), pp. 42-43.

“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.”

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Paul Goodman livre Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. xiii.

“When the sciences are supreme, average people lose their feeling of causality.”

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Paul Goodman livre Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 144.

“The way in which our society does do honor to its indubitably great men … is a study in immunizing people against their virus. … They are the menagerie of Very Important People who exist only for ceremonial occasions. … The effectually prevents the two practical uses that we could make of them. We neither take seriously the simple, direct, fearless souls that they invariably are, whether humble or arrogant, to model ourselves after them because they make more sense as human beings; nor do we have recourse the them to help us when we have need of exceptional purity, magnanimity, profundity, or imagination.”

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Paul Goodman livre Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 152.

“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.”

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Paul Goodman livre Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 94.

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