Elsie Clews Parsons famous quotes

A society's apprehensiveness about divorce is an expression of its fear of change and of its resulting desire that personality remain unvarying.
-- Elsie Clews Parsons

#Divorce #Expression #Personality

Fear of change is a part of the state of fear man has ever lived in but out of which he has begun to escape. Civilization might be defined indeed as the steps in his escape.
-- Elsie Clews Parsons

#Fear #Men #Civilization

Imitation both unconscious and conscious is par excellence the educational method of the family. It is plain that a considerable part of the adaptation of living beings to their environment, i.e., of beings that are born plastic, is passed on from generation to generation through imitation. Were this not so, much if not all of the road traversed by one generation would have to be travelled by the next generation from the very beginning and without short-cuts. Consequently there would be little chance for the novel adaptation, the propitious individual variation, that constitutes progress.
-- Elsie Clews Parsons

#Educational #Cutting #Excellence

In interviews, on the set, talking to people, I'll just start talking about my parents' divorce, and go on and on. My mom's always like, 'You don't have to be that honest. You have to be more fake.' You see some of these actors, they have a permanent smile on their face. How can they do that? It really fascinates me.

Love, marriage, divorce, infidelity... life was the same here as anywhere else, wasn't? She realized now wrong she'd been; the pali wasn't a headstone and Kalaupapa wasn't a grave. It was a community like any other, bound by ties deeper than most, and people here went to their deaths as people did anywhere: with great reluctance, dragging the messy jumble of their lives behind them.

Women would be better off when they no longer needed men more than they needed their own independent identities...How long a time it took me after my divorce to understand that being alone is not the same as being lonely.

Divorce: a resumption of diplomatic relations and rectification of boundaries.

My mum is an artist and very into creative expression and freedom.

If a group of people feels that it has been humiliated and that its honour has been trampled underfoot, it will want to express its identity and this expression of an identity will take different shapes and forms.

We must become expressions of, not consumers of, realization.

We should leave behind discrimination, because it is narrow-minded and ignorant, denies contact and warmth, and corrodes mankind’s belief that we can better ourselves. The only way to avoid misunderstanding, war, and bloodshed is to defend freedom of expression and to communicate with sincerity, concern, and good intentions.

The inspired moment may sometimes be described as a kind of hallucinatory state of mind: one half of the personality emotes and dictates while the other half listens and notates. The half that listens has better look the other way, had better simulate a half attention only, for the half that dictates is easily disgruntled and avenges itself for too close inspection by fading entirely away.

A team should be an extension of a coach's personality. My teams are arrogant and obnoxious.