“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.”
Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), pp. 36-37.
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Paul Goodman 47
American novelist, playwright, poet and psychotherapist 1911–1972Related quotes

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 5
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

2009, Nobel Prize acceptance speech (December 2009)
Context: We do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected. We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place. The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached — their fundamental faith in human progress — that must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.
For if we lose that faith — if we dismiss it as silly or naïve; if we divorce it from the decisions that we make on issues of war and peace — then we lose what's best about humanity. We lose our sense of possibility. We lose our moral compass.
Like generations have before us, we must reject that future. As Dr. King said at this occasion so many years ago, "I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the 'isness' of man's present condition makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal 'oughtness' that forever confronts him."
Let us reach for the world that ought to be — that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls.

Information Hazards: A Typology of Potential Harms From Knowledge https://nickbostrom.com/information-hazards.pdf (2011)

Quoted during statement at "The Society for Risk Analysis Policy Forum: Risk Governance for Key Enabling Technologies". Venice, Italy. March 2, 2017.

“Poor people have been voting for Democrats for the last fifty years… and they are still poor.”
Attributed to Charles Barkley in Walter W. Moore's Wise Sayings (2012), p. 89

Speech to the Headway lunch (3 December 1993) http://www.settelen.com/diana_time_and_space.htm