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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.

— Paul Goodman Growing Up Absurd (1956)

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More quotes by Paul Goodman

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

Growing Up Absurd (1956)

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.

Growing Up Absurd (1956)

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.

Growing Up Absurd (1956)

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

Growing Up Absurd (1956)

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

Growing Up Absurd (1956)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Paul Goodman (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.