“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 1911–1972

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