Top 50 Paul Goodman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society that you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now!”

— Paul Goodman

2. “An obstacle is something you see when you take your eyes off the goal Few great men could pass personnel.”

— Paul Goodman

3. “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.”

— Paul Goodman

4. “A good teacher feels his way, looking for response.”

— Paul Goodman

5. “Low pay generally means harder work under worse conditions.”

— Paul Goodman

6. “Not to teach the whole curriculum is to give up on the whole man.”

— Paul Goodman

7. “Comedy is something that we can all share, no matter what language we speak or our background, it has the power to unite us all.”

— Paul Goodman

8. “Few great men would have got past personnel.”

— Paul Goodman

9. “The philosophic aim of education must be to get each one out of his isolated class and into the one humanity.”

— Paul Goodman

10. “It rarely adds anything to say, “In my opinion” – not even modesty. Naturally a sentence is only your opinion; and you are not the Pope.”

— Paul Goodman

11. “There is only one curriculum, no matter what the method of education: what is basic and universal in human experience and practice, the underlying structure of culture.”

— Paul Goodman

12. “When 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.”

— Paul Goodman

13. “All men are creative but few are artists.”

— Paul Goodman

14. “A successful revolution establishes a new community. A missed revolution makes irrelevant the community that persists. And a compromised revolution tends to shatter the community that was, without an adequate substitute.”

— Paul Goodman

15. “The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one’s own style and creatively adjust this to one’s author.”

— Paul Goodman

16. “In America you can say anything you want – as long as it doesn’t have any effect.”

— Paul Goodman

17. “It is hard to grow up in a society in which one’s important problems are treated as nonexistent. It is impossible to belong to it, it is hard to fight to change it.”

— Paul Goodman

18. “The importance of the Beats is twofold: first, they act out a critique of the organized system that everybody in some sense agrees with. But second-and more important in the long run-they are a kind of major pilot study of the use of leisure in an economy of abundance.”

— Paul Goodman

19. “When a village ceases to be a community, it becomes oppressive in its narrow conformity. So one becomes an individual and migrates to the city. There, finding others like-minded, one re-establishes a village community. Nowadays only New Yorkers are yokels.”

— Paul Goodman

20. “It takes application, a fine sense of value, and a powerful community-spirit for a people to have serious leisure, and this has not been the genius of the Americans.”

— Paul Goodman

21. “My own view, for what it’s worth, is that sexuality is lovely, there cannot be too much of it, it is self-limiting if it is satisfactory, and satisfaction diminishes tension and clears the mind for attention and learning.”

— Paul Goodman

22. “The family is the American fascism.”

— Paul Goodman

23. “God works in many ways His wonders to perform. But He’s not a skillful mechanic. A man drived over a cliff and “by a miracle” he only breaks his back. It would be more divine if he were a better driver and stayed on the road.”

— Paul Goodman

24. “Humankind is innocent, loving, and creative, you dig? It’s the bureaucracies that create the evil, that make Honor and Community impossible, and it’s the kids who really take it in the groin.”

— Paul Goodman

25. “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.”

— Paul Goodman

26. “The stultifying effect of the movies is not that the children see them but that their parents do, as if Hollywood provided a plausible adult recreation to grow up into.”

— Paul Goodman

27. “I move in a society so devoid of ordinary reality that I am continually stopping to teach good sense, to give support, to help out, as a young gangster might help an old lady across the street on his way to the stick-up.”

— Paul Goodman

28. “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.”

— Paul Goodman

29. “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.”

— Paul Goodman

30. “For mankind, speech with a capital S is especially meaningful and committing, more than the content communicated. The outcry of the newborn and the sound of the bells are fraught with mystery more than the baby’s woeful face or the venerable tower.”

— Paul Goodman

31. “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.”

— Paul Goodman

32. “The organization of American society is an interlocking system of semi-monopolies notoriously venal, an electorate notoriously unenlightened, misled by mass media notoriously phony.”

— Paul Goodman

33. “The issue is not whether people are ‘good enough’ for a particular type of society; rather it is a matter of developing the kind of social institutions that are most conducive to expanding the potentialities we have for intelligence, grace, sociability and freedom.”

— Paul Goodman

34. “It is by losing himself in the objective, in inquiry, creation, and craft, that a man becomes something.”

— Paul Goodman

35. “Comedy deflates the sense precisely so that the underlying lubricity and malice may bubble to the surface.”

— Paul Goodman

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

— Paul Goodman

37. “American society has tried so hard and so ably to defend the practice and theory of production for profit and not primarily for use that now it has succeeded in making its jobs and products profitable and useless.”

— Paul Goodman

38. “There is such a thing as food and such a thing as poison. But the damage done by those who pass off poison as food is far less than that done by those who generation after generation convince people that food is poison.”

— Paul Goodman

39. “We do not behave as if we believed that the affairs of our world were significant enough for the intervention of great men.”

— Paul Goodman

40. “To want a job that exercises a man’s capacities in an enterprise useful to society, is utopian anarcho-syndicalism; it is labor invading the domain of management. No labor leader has entertained such a thought in our generation. Management has the “sole prerogative” to determine the products.”

— Paul Goodman

41. “Then at once “human nature” is again invoked to prove the necessity of change, for “human nature” has been thwarted or insulted by the dominant system. “Man” can no longer be defined as what suits the dominant system, when the dominant system apparently does not suit men. I.”

— Paul Goodman

42. “The Beat spokesman, surprisingly, seemed to be satisfied with the ethics that we have inherited.”

— Paul Goodman

43. “Doing the forbidden is a normal function of growth.”

— Paul Goodman

44. “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.”

— Paul Goodman

45. “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.”

— Paul Goodman

46. “I am describing again an interrupted revolution, the so-called Sexual Revolution. We see now the organized system of production and sales manages to profit by the confusion of the interruption, whereas a finished revolution would be a dead loss, since good sexual satisfaction costs nothing, it needs only health and affection.”

— Paul Goodman

47. “Be patient, do nothing, cease striving. We find this advice disheartening and therefore unfeasible because we forget it is our own inflexible activity that is structuring the reality. We think that if we do not hustle, nothing will happen and we will pine away. But the reality is probably in motion and after a while we might take part in that motion. But one can’t know.”

— Paul Goodman

48. “In the modern world, we Americans are the old inhabitants. We first had political freedom, high industrial production, an economy of abundance.”

— Paul Goodman

49. “People are forced by their better judgment to ask very basic questions: Is it possible, how is it possible, to have more meaning and honor in work? to put wealth to some real use? to have a high standard of living of whose quality we are not ashamed? to get social justice for those who have been shamefully left out? to have a use of leisure that is not a dismaying waste of a hundred million adults?”

— Paul Goodman

50. “In brief,... the inevitability of centralism will be self-proving. A system destroys its competitors by preempting the means and channels, and then proves that it is the only conceivable mode of operating.”

— Paul Goodman