Ellen Goodman Quotes

Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers.

I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference.

Most people do not consider dawn to be an attractive experience - unless they are still up.

Maybe this year, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives not looking for flaws, but looking for potential.

The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.

I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box.

What he labels sexual, she labels harassment.

Today, much of journalism and politics are in a kind of collusion to oversimplify and personalize issues. No room for ambivalence. Plenty of room for the personal attack.

Ultimately, time is all you have and the idea isn't to save it, but to savour it.

Our 'mistakes' become our crucial parts, sometimes our best parts, of the lives we have made.

Forty is ... an age at which people have histories and options. At thirty, they had perhaps less history. At fifty, perhaps fewer options.

In today's amphetamine world of news junkies, speed trumps thoughtfulness too often.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.

How come pleasure never makes it on to... a dutiful list of do's and don'ts? Doesn't joy also get soft and flabby if you neglect to exercise it?

When speech is divorced from speaker and word from meaning, what is left is just ritual, language as ritual.

The things we hate about ourselves aren't more real than things we like about ourselves.

Slowly we adjust, but only if we have to.

When we describe what the other person is really like, I suppose we often picture what we want. We look through the prism of our need.

Values are not trendy items that are casually traded in.

We continually want to unmask our heroes as if there were more to be learned from their nakedness than from their choice of clothing.

Welfare is ... the victim of national compassion fatigue.

The same people who tell us that smoking doesn't cause cancer are now telling us that advertising cigarettes doesn't cause smoking.

Once upon a time we were just plain people. But that was before we began having relationships with mechanical systems. Get involved with a machine and sooner or later you are reduced to a factor.

Traditions are the guideposts driven deep in our subconscious minds. The most powerful ones are those we can't even describe and aren't even aware of.

We owned what we learned back there; the experience and the growth are grafted into our lives.

Age is an accumulation of life and loss. Adulthood is a series of lines crossed.

instant opinion is an oxymoron. You don't get real opinions in an instant. You get reactions.

women who once aspired to the image of superwoman now worry about becoming superdrudge. Those who wanted to have it all now ask whether they have to do it all.

If women can sleep their way to the top, how come they aren't there?

Women have gained access to the institutions, but not enough power to overhaul them.

When you live alone, you can be sure that the person who squeezed the toothpaste tube in the middle wasn't committing a hostile act.

Pro-choice supporters are often heard using the cool language of the courts and the vocabulary of rights. Americans who are deeply ambivalent about abortion often miss the sound of caring.

Statistically speaking, the Cheerful Early Riser is rejected more completely than a member of any other subculture, save those with boot odor.

Maybe at 20 you can write well, but I don't think you could do what I do. Some things have to happen to you first.

You can teach someone who cares to write columns, but you can’t teach someone who writes columns to care.

It is, I suppose, the business of grandparents to create memories and the relative of memories: traditions. We want to lodge moments, like snapshots, in the fleeting video of time.

We may never know why Joe Ellis fabricated a heroic past. But we know that the life he embellished has deeply diminished the life he'd earned.

[E]very time you think the entertainment moguls have hit rock bottom, they reach for the jackhammer and rat-a-tat-tat a little deeper.

I don't know exactly why the notion of homeownership has such a grasp on the American imagination. Perhaps as descendants of landless immigrants we turn our plots into symbols of stability.

On television, journalists now routinely appear on talk-shows-with-an-attitude where they are encouraged to say what they think about something they may not have finished thinking about.

Parents remain our touchstones, fellow travelers, even after death. They are both missing and present.

I suppose we make kids the repository of our highest ideals because children are powerless. In that way we can have ideals and ignore them at the same time.

Kerry asks Americans to look at the evidence. Bush asks people to believe.

She goes in with a prejudice and comes out with a statistic.

We want our children to fit in and to stand out. We rarely address the conflict between these goals.

Civility, it is said, means obeying the unenforceable.

What advertisers call brand loyalty is merely the consumer's defense against the need to waste energy differentiating among things that barely differ.

You can believe in women's rights without believing that every woman is right.

People have been writing premature obituaries on the women's movement since its beginning.