Michael Harrington Quotes

As Michael Harrington put it sixty years ago: “It is much easier in the United States to be decently dressed than it is to be decently housed, fed, or doctored.”6

Managers receiving hundreds of thousands a year—and setting their compensation for themselves—are not being paid wages, they are appropriating surplus value in the guise of wages.

... most people since the dawn of human time have been simply programmed by their birth to a short and brutish life that is not shaped by them or anyone else.

Socialism is still beginning, a task to be accomplished, not a destiny to be awaited.

JOHN HARRINGTON HAD SPENT two decades coaching in the public schools and was about to begin his first year at Briarcrest. When Big Tony walked into his office, unannounced, Harrington knew he couldn’t do anything for him. The problem presented by Big Tony was too large for the new guy. They chatted for a few minutes and then Harrington sent him over to see the senior coach at Briarcrest, Hugh Freeze. Freeze was only thirty-three, and with his white-blond hair and unlined face might have passed for even younger than he was—if he weren’t so shrewd. His shrewdness was right on the surface, so it had an innocent quality to it, but it was there just the same. Slow to speak and quick to notice, Hugh Freeze had the gifts of a machine politician.

As an outsider looking in, an x-ray of the Michaels family would look something like this: Cassidy Michaels-Harrington: Oldest child, snob, interior designer, mother of two hellions I loved dearly, and married to an attorney who, if possible, was an even bigger snob. Tyson Michaels: The baby, snob, finishing the last year of his plastic surgery residency and apparently re-engaged to an orthopedic surgeon who was not a snob, but in a lot of ways, he was by association because he put up with, and often encouraged, my brother’s behavior. And then there was me, Bowen Michaels: blissfully normal accountant, stuck in the middle, wondering how in the hell my cool-ass parents had given birth to me and the co-mayors of Snobville.

As Michael Harrington put it sixty years ago: “It is much easier in the United States to be decently dressed than it is to be decently housed, fed, or doctored.

wasn’t an awakening. Like many a middle-class kid before me, I found radicalism through books. My local library had heaps of socialist literature, most of them donated by red diaper babies and Jewish cultural associations. By chance, I picked up Leon Trotsky’s My Life the summer after seventh grade, didn’t particularly like it (still don’t), but was sufficiently intrigued to read the Isaac Deutscher biographies of Trotsky, the works of democratic socialist thinkers including Michael Harrington and Ralph Miliband, and eventually the mysterious Karl

Also, remember, temptations of the heart are the most dangerous but, if we want to truly live, it’s a danger we must embrace.

I will reveal one secret,” said the maestro. “The depth will be even more enhanced when I build up many more layers of transparent glaze. The effect one gets is of three dimensions instead of two.

The more you gaze into her eyes, the more you will see what you want, what is actually inside your heart. And then she will suddenly vanish and you will wonder how you lost her. So you must close the door on your emotions. Eros is not a painter and he often spoils our work.