Top 50 Margaret Halsey Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Example is better than precept.”

— Margaret Halsey

2. “In a business society, the emotional economy is an economy of scarcity.”

— Margaret Halsey

3. “The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality.”

— Margaret Halsey

4. “Identity is not found, the way Pharaoh’s daughter found Moses in the bulrushes. Identity is built.”

— Margaret Halsey

5. “Reality is above all else a variable, and nobody is qualified to say that he or she knows exactly 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

6. “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

7. “Success does not implant bad characteristics in people. It merely steps up the growth rate of the bad characteristics they already had.”

— Margaret Halsey

8. “In practice, there is nothing especially dramatic in people getting along well together.”

— Margaret Halsey

9. “The important thing about human beings is not what they do, but why they do it.”

— Margaret Halsey

10. “What I know about money, I learned the hard way – by having had it.”

— Margaret Halsey

11. “Life itself, however, flows and is sequential and punishes those who try to compartmentalize it.”

— Margaret Halsey

12. “The great disadvantage of being in a rat race is that it is humiliating. The competitors in a rat race are by definition rodents.”

— Margaret Halsey

13. “Englishwomen’s shoes look as if they had been made by someone who had often heard shoes described, but had never seen any...”

— Margaret Halsey

14. “Not being one to calculate or look ahead, I had not stopped to think, when boys started paying attention to me, that the cup might be dashed from my lips, though experience should have taught me that dashing cups from lips was the way Victorian parents got most of their exercise.”

— Margaret Halsey

15. “I was well warned about English food, so it did not surprise me, but I do wonder sometimes, how they ever manage to prise it up long enough to get a plate under it.”

— Margaret Halsey

16. “Bulldogs have been known to fall on their swords when confronted by my superior tenacity.”

— Margaret Halsey

17. “Working with children is the easiest part of educating for democracy, because children are still undefeated and have no stake in being prejudiced.”

— Margaret Halsey

18. “He must have had a magnificent build before his stomach went in for a career of its own.”

— Margaret Halsey

19. “Equality is an unconscious assumption, and if you feel you are treating someone as an equal, then you are not doing it.”

— Margaret Halsey

20. “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

21. “It is impossible to betray another man’s child – for whatever reason – without also betraying one’s own. To do less than justice to another man’s child, no matter who that man is, is to impair by that much the chances one’s own children have for a life of meaning and purpose.”

— Margaret Halsey

22. “We know of our own knowledge that we are human beings, and, as such, imperfect. But we are bathed by the communications industry in a ceaseless tide of inhuman, impossible perfection.”

— Margaret Halsey

23. “The attitude of the English towards English history reminds one a good deal of the attitude of a Hollywood director towards love.”

— Margaret Halsey

24. “Some persons talk simply because they think sound is more manageable than silence.”

— Margaret Halsey

25. “English life is seventh-eighths below the surface, like an iceberg, and living in England for a year constitutes merely an introduction to an introduction to an introduction to it.”

— Margaret Halsey

26. “My knees could have been stirred with a spoon.”

— Margaret Halsey

27. “Folklore is a collection of ridiculous notions held by other people, but not by you and me.”

— Margaret Halsey

28. “From a purely tourist standpoint, Oxford is overpowering, being so replete with architecture and history and anecdote that the visitor’s mind feels dribbling and helpless, as with an over-large mouthful of nougat.”

— Margaret Halsey

29. “I was so embarrassed I could feel my nerves curling like bacon over a hot fire.”

— Margaret Halsey

30. “The soup, thin and dark and utterly savorless, tasted as if it had been drained out of the umbrella stand.”

— Margaret Halsey

31. “Passionately prejudiced people always turn out, under scrutiny, to be people who cannot get along on a footing of equality with anyone...”

— Margaret Halsey

32. “The English never smash in a face. They merely refrain from asking it to dinner.”

— Margaret Halsey

33. “If you embark on a project as magnificent in concept as the brotherhood of man, it is foolish not to anticipate difficulties of proportionate magnificence.”

— Margaret Halsey

34. “Whatever the rest of the world thinks of the English gentleman, the English lady regards him apprehensively as something between God and a goat and equally formidable on both scores.”

— Margaret Halsey

35. “I am living with a rising generation which talks like people coming out of ether.”

— Margaret Halsey

36. “The only men who can turn my blood stream into a condition resembling heavy surf are good-looking heels with characters as intricately unpleasant as the sewers of Paris. With decent and honorable gents, I come all over Platonic. Was ever a woman so perverse and wrongheaded?”

— Margaret Halsey

37. “The real nature of an ethic is that it does not become an ethic unless and until it goes into action.”

— Margaret Halsey

38. “I would have felt more comfortable on a girder fifty floors above the street, catching white-hot rivets in a pail.”

— Margaret Halsey

39. “Every time I think I’ve touched bottom as far as boredom is concerned, new vistas of ennui open up.”

— Margaret Halsey

40. “The business society is interested in training its citizens to make money, and, in this objective, it is often successful. Many of them do make money, and the ones who do not obligingly regard themselves as failures who have wasted the precious gift of life.”

— Margaret Halsey

41. “A lady getting a missing belt back from the cleaner couldn’t have been more surprised and pleased...”

— Margaret Halsey

42. “Listening to Britons dining out is like watching people play first-class tennis with imaginary balls.”

— Margaret Halsey

43. “Infants, I note with envy, are receptive to enjoyment in a degree not attained by adults this side of the new Jerusalem.”

— Margaret Halsey

44. “Employed as I had been employing it, liquor is a fixative of old patterns...”

— Margaret Halsey

45. “Humorists are not humorous twenty-four hours a day. In fact, when you get to know them well, they are often not humorous at all. They tend to be hypersensitive, taut, neurotic creatures driven by God know what obscure compulsion to earn their living the hard way.”

— Margaret Halsey

46. “In some circumstances, the refusal to be defeated is a refusal to be educated.”

— Margaret Halsey

47. “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

48. “How close beneath the surface, even in the happiest family, is the chronic grievance! I sometimes think that tinderboxes are inert and powder kegs mere talcum compared to the explosive possibilities in the most commoplace domestic situation.”

— Margaret Halsey

49. “The only way not to worry about the race problem is to be doing something about it yourself. When you are, natural human vanity makes you feel that now the thing is in good hands.”

— Margaret Halsey

50. “One of the less dismaying aspects of race relations in the United States is that their improvement is not a matter of a few people having a great deal of courage. It is a matter of a great many people having just a little courage.”

— Margaret Halsey