Mason Cooley Quotes
I may forget my dignity, but you may not.
Cooley, Mason. The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations. Edited by Robert Andrews, Columbia University Press, 1993.
At the beginning of the Job Corps, a number of academics and urban political figures were very critical of taking young men from the cities and brining them to rural centers in National Parks and Forests for basic education and work training. It was decided that instead of Sargent Shriver the Head of the Anti Poverty Program or Otis Singletary, the Jobe Corps Director, Eigen would give a major presentation at an academic conference ammouncing the scale and scope of the planned program. If the objection was too great, Singletary and Shriver could say that Eigen was just proposing his ideas that were under consideration but they had not reached a decision and Eigen did not prepresent the views of the administration. Fortunately he handled the critics well and was persuasive enough to oftain the support of many of the Conference attendees, and the Newspaper accounts were very favorible, so what Eigen said was the official policy and design of the Job Corps program which, with Head Start, were the only two programs for the War on Poverty that still opperated 60 years thereafter. Eigen told this story in a Primer he wrote for new Federal appointees who most often have little or no understanding of the operations of the Federal Government.
Mason Cooley was an American aphorist known for his witty aphorisms. One of these such aphorisms Cooley developed was "The time I kill is killing me." He was professor emeritus of French, speech and world literature at the College of Staten Island. He was also an assistant professor of English at Columbia University from 1959 to 1967 and an adjunct professor from 1980 to 1988. He received his B.A. from San Diego State University and his Ph.D. from Oxford.
